- Some posts on social media fueled panic that Washington’s housing market was rapidly weakening.
- Agents and an economist said the president’s efficiency efforts haven’t yet affected the DC market.
- While return-to-office mandates and layoffs have sowed uncertainty, their impact is still unclear.
A federal worker renting outside Washington, DC, is house-hunting for a property to buy — in Baltimore.
According to the worker’s real-estate agent, Shanna Moinizand, they’ve been summoned back to the office and extended their house hunt to Baltimore, about 40 miles outside the nation’s capital, because properties are less expensive and the commute is reasonable.
“They can’t afford to be in DC proper,” Moinizand told Business Insider. “They reached out to me about the possibility of buying in Baltimore near Penn Station so they can afford their house, be a little bit closer, and feel like they can get a cheap house — and feel stable and commute to DC.”
As thousands of workers await news of layoffs or firings as a result of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal government’s size, the Washington, DC, housing market is in limbo.
Some residents fear that newly jobless federal workers will leave the city en masse, causing for-sale and rental inventory to skyrocket and prices to fall dramatically. Others believe that return-to-office mandates might prompt people to flood into the city, heightening demand as they look to move closer to work.
Multiple videos posted to TikTok in February saying that nearly thousands of homes had been listed for sale in recent weeks stirred anxiety that inventory had already started to pile up.
Listing data, however, shows that the number of homes currently on the market is typical for this time of year. Local brokers told BI that any conclusions about the Washington market so far are premature.
While high-end real-estate in Washington, DC, has experienced a “Trump bump” as a few of the president’s appointees buy up luxury mansions and power players try to sidle up to the White House, brokers said they are waiting to see if the rest of the housing market follows suit or falters.
The DC market has not crashed since Trump took office
Washington- and Maryland-based Compass agent Jaime Willis said that while some federal workers she’s heard from feel uncertain about their job security, that uneasiness has yet to affect the market meaningfully.
“There was some histrionics happening on social media about how the price of homes in DC has gone down $150,000, and there are a million more listings than normal — and that is not true,” she said. “Neither one of those is true.”
New listings data from Bright MLS, which operates a major multiple listing service in the Mid-Atlantic region, show that the return-to-office and reduction in the federal workforce have had little impact so far on the number of homes for sale in Washington, DC.
During the first half of February 2024, 423 listings hit the market. In 2025, during the same time span, a total of 452 were on the market — about a 7% increase. In the greater Washington, DC, region, which Bright MLS defined as 18 surrounding counties and cities in Maryland and Virginia, there was no significant change in new listings.
Factors outside DOGE’s reforms, like interest rates and cold weather, contribute to any fluctuation in listings, Bright MLS Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant told BI. It’s also unlikely that the tumult across federal agencies over the last month would affect the sales market immediately, she added.
“Walking through the exercise of how a household or family might respond to a job cut, the first thing you’d do is not list your home for sale,” Sturtevant said. “We wouldn’t have expected an onslaught of new listings as a result of federal cuts.”
Part of an explanation for the relatively steady listing volume might be that while Washington, DC, has a large number of federal employees, they do not completely dictate what happens to its housing market.
Office of Personnel Management data from September 2024 showed over 162,000 federal civilian employees assigned to offices in Washington, DC.
To put that number in perspective, Washington’s population is 702,250, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2024 estimates. If every federal worker assigned to a DC office actually lived within city limits, they would make up only about 23% of the population.
DC’s luxury market is humming along
What anxiety? Washington’s luxury market is doing just fine.
Washington, DC, Sotheby’s agent Daniel Heider told BI that the market for homes priced $5 million and up is going “absolutely gangbusters” with record-setting purchases. One is the $25 million sale of a French Château-style property with five bedrooms across about 16,000 square feet to commerce secretary appointee Howard Lutnick, a transaction that Heider confirmed he brokered in December.
Heider also said that his brokerage had its best fourth quarter ever in 2024 and is carrying the momentum into the first quarter, with over $130 million in deals in 2025 so far. BI was unable to independently verify that sales figure.
According to the New York Post, Trump’s nominee for Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, Jacob Helberg, spent $7 million in February on a home in Kalorama, the same Washington, DC, neighborhood where Ivanka and Jared Trump used to live.
Even though the luxury sector is having a moment, Heider said he thinks people could soon start vacating the suburbs in favor of areas closer to offices in the city center.
“As those return-to-work mandates come into effect — and not just for the federal government, but for private business — I would expect that more in-town markets are going to see a reaction from that,” he added.
Willis, the other agent in DC, said she hasn’t received calls from clients trying to offload their farther-away homes or find new ones near work. She has, however, heard from people trying to figure out what to do who haven’t taken action — yet.
“Yeah, people are nervous,” she said. “People have lost their jobs. People haven’t lost their jobs, but they’re just worried about what’s happening. The market doesn’t like people afraid.”
Read the full article here
