The DOGE Downturn - Kensington
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Anonymous
I think it’s also the county tax. Now that so many more houses are so expensive, you need to make a lot more $$ (vs relying on the trust fund cohort of which prev gravitated to moco vs nova). So if you need to make $500K to buy that $2M Bethesda house, you’re gonna pay $20Kish to the county alone - each year - in county tax. Yeah nova has the car tax but it isn’t $20K/year. |
Anonymous
You must not read much. NYTimes has tracked 150,000 federal job cuts nationwide. But they don't track the disproportionately large impact to the DMV area including Maryland, which has a huge number of federal contractors, Johns Hopkins which got hammered by the Trump cuts, EPA, Dept of Ed, FDA, NIH, USAID, among others. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/us/politics/trump-doge-federal-job-cuts.html |
Anonymous
This. There is a lot of overpriced inventory still there. And this is true every year. Every single year, including the “hot” years for RE there were homes that were pushing the ceiling of what area supports and they were sitting and sitting until prices were brought up towards reality. |
Anonymous
You realize “median prices” are based on what’s sold, not what’s sitting on the market unsold and is dependent on housing mix? Both inventory and median prices being up supports the theory that only the premium houses are selling. |
Anonymous
One caveat is that many people are technically DC employees because that is their home office…however, they don’t live in DC because of remote work or they work at a satellite office, but are still considered DC. |
Anonymous
Where do you see an upward trend in inventory? The link above shows a clear downward trend in inventory. I'm not trying to say everything is perfect. I think there probably will be major impacts, but they are not here yet. |
Anonymous
However RIFs are still continuing. 90 percent of a total office at DOL was just RIF’d last week. And with the centralization of functions at NIH specially, I expect more for us. |
Anonymous
This has been happening with DC condos for awhile now. The main problem is that with current high interest rates and high HOA fees, the monthly cost for a condo bought now is often significantly more than renting an identical unit from an existing owner in the same building. The math The other issue I see - and it’s evident in the example you gave - is many people buy DC condos and then sell ~2, 3 or 4 years later. You can get lucky with timing, but in general condos don’t appreciate enough to make it a smart decision to buy&sell so rapidly. I think people get into condos thinking they’ll live there for awhile, but then they often don’t. |
Anonymous
They haven’t even started with NIH IT, for instance. And there are sneaky firings that don’t make the headlines, like the 250 NIH employees that were dismissed with no warning on May 1 because RFK screwed up and fired people that had to be reinstated. |
Anonymous
+1 when interest rates were lower your monthly payment including condo fee could be similar to a rental and you'd be building equity even if there wasn't much appreciation. Of course, for a long time there have been some buildings that are in a death spiral with deferred maintenance costs that made the condo fees way to high to make buying worthwhile |
Anonymous
Inventory is up. So far, there is still demand, but what happens when supply increases is that the best houses absorb the demand and the less perfect houses sit. Agree that the full impact of the layoffs hadn’t been felt yet, so what happens then? The point is that houses aren’t a commodity — there is no single market clearing price, even for houses in the same neighborhood. How your house will be affected depends on a bunch of factors that tend to less important/get overlooked when inventory is tight. https://www.redfin.com/news/washington-dc-housing-inventory-government-layoffs/#:~:text=Four%20metros%20saw%20a%20larger,on%20a%20more%20granular%20level. Active listings of homes for sale in Washington, D.C. jumped 25.1% year over year to the highest level since 2022 during the four weeks ending April 27—the largest gain on record. By comparison, active listings nationwide rose 14.2%—the smallest increase since March 2024. |
Anonymous
In Montgomery County, for example, about 11% of employees are feds. Even if you assume 30% of those are laid off (which is a huge overstatement), that is a small percentage of total MC employees. Now assume that some of those can get private sector jobs, and some don't need to work because the spouse earns enough to keep living here, and I don't see a huge impact on local real estate. There are also contractors and fed adjacent employees, but those layoffs are concentrated in a few industries, and there is already an expansion in place for lots of contractors involved in homeland security, defense, intelligence, and other industries. I would actually like to see housing prices come down a good bit, but I don't see a huge decline on the horizon. Certainly, the numbers of the PPs above don't tell that story. |
Anonymous
Overpricing correction. Imagine paying some of these high amounts to live in SS or Rockville. |
Anonymous
This is a thread about Kensington, MD, which is not in Washington, DC. |
Anonymous
1M in Rockville is not crazy. It is upper middle class suburbia, pretty much no crime. Bethesda’s entry level homes sell for 1.2-1.3M, and Rockville is just next up in commute distance. It’s the price to pay to not get shot in DC proper |