Is now a good time or a bad time to be a realtor in DC?
It's a good time for the next few weeks, then the region is going to enter the long suck.
Those houses will not all sell. In fact, most of them won't. Realtors helping people buy will be telling them left and right: Do NOT buy right now. Wait 6 months, a year, and they'll be begging you to take them off their hands.
And they will, too. The first people who sell might get close to what they're asking. Those sales are already done. If you were one of those homeowners who got out clean you started selling back in November, to an NGO buying housing to rent/loan to staff, or one of the idiots posting on reddit. The smart people saw this coming.
Everyone else is going to lose out hard on this firesale.
Those houses are posted for $600/sqft. The sane value I've always heard quoted is $125/sqft. That means the sane asking price should be around 1/5th what they're posted for. That won't cover the mortgage. People who cash out will STILL owe massive amounts of money on a mortgage for a house they don't even own anymore.
Oh, and Blackrock won't bail them out like they did during the Biden era. For one, I bet the USAID funding for Blackrock's mortgage buyback program is dead in the water. For two, Blackrock has already said they want out of that market. For three, it's better to leave the housing market to fail, a little, on Trump's watch vs making damn sure it didn't on Biden's.
In short, the real estate market, at least in the DC area, is going to crash. Hard. Those houses will eventually either be defaulted on, or sold at a pretty big loss. If it was a democrat admin they could beg Biden for help and they'd find a USAID grant to bail them out. Not so with Trump.
Where do things go from here? Well, remember that they want Return to Office, too. All those people will need to live in the area or commute 2, 3 hours to work each day. Or move to where the office actually is.
And if all these swamp critters, these ivory citadel email caste beautiful ones have to break containment and flee to other regions? They're going to fuck the housing markets up there, too, but in the opposite way -- massive demand, absurd prices, et cetera.
So. Yeah. The long suck.
