WASHINGTON — Are we finally seeing a cooling of the D.C. metro real estate market?
Since 2021, home sales in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia made the area one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. New numbers show that run might be slowing down.
Earlier in the spring WUSA9 talked to the chief economist for National Association of Realtors: Lawrence Yun. We asked him about the state of the D.C. metro housing market.
“It has been quite exceptional a past couple of years during the COVID environment,” Yun said. “Maybe it was the low interest rate, maybe it was the work from home phenomenon that people want to have larger space.”
Yun pointed out with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates this year, the run the D.C. metro real estate market has been on can’t go on forever.
“I see home sales coming down maybe 10% this year compared to last year," he predicted.
So far, he has been right.
WUSA9 crunched the numbers from Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors and the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors.
Both groups showed a drop in home sales for every month of 2022 compared to the same months in 2021.
The latest numbers from April of 2022 show housing sales in D.C. dropped by 10.9% from April of last year.
But Yun said don’t expect that to make homes cheaper.
“The home prices will still rise because we are still in the midst of a housing shortage,” he explained. “It's going to take multiple years to balance the market.”
Those same numbers do show that home sales have risen month to month during 2022. However, they still are behind 2021’s sales.