All bids to buy or lease the historic Hurt Home on R St. across from Montrose Park are due this Friday. GM reported this last month. His best guess for what will take over that space is high end condos. Although given Wormley Row’s slow sales, maybe condos aren’t the best choice.
A list of potential suitors after the jump:
Filed under Real Estate, Uncategorized
JFK’s first house in Georgetown is currently for sale. From 1947 to 1949, then Congressman John Kennedy lived at 1528 31st. St. with his sister Eunice Kennedy.
Most recently it has been the home of Republican Whip Roy Blunt. He has announced that he’s running for Senate in Missouri next year, so perhaps this sale is part of that effort. It is listed for $1.595 million by neighbor Nancy Taylor Bubes of Washington Fine Properties.
Update: It looks like the house is under contract and has been pulled from Redfin. It’s still here on WFP’s website though. Behold the power of the Georgetown Metropolitan to move real estate.
After the jump, some pictures from inside:
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Photo by Flickr user Alison Hillard used under Creative Commons.
The historic Georgetown Theater property on Wisconsin Ave. has been put up for sale. Currently it houses the National Jewel Center, but before that it was a working theater that was infamous in the 1970s for showing the x-rated film “Caligula” over and over again until the film broke. Prior to the 1950’s, the theater was called the Dumbarton Theater and looked like this:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
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Last week GM explored the question of whether Georgetown’s real estate market thawed out in the spring only to crash again this summer. Yesterday the New York Times published an article claiming that homes in DC had actually risen 1.3 percent from April to May of this year. Here’s the chart of how the DC home prices have changed from the year earlier since 2001:
Courtesy of the New York Times
From this chart, it would appear that the DC market has been pulling back from the brink steadily since the beginning of the year. Home prices are still down 14% from a year earlier, but in December it was almost 20% down.
Do you think this chart reflects Georgetown? GM still thinks home prices are at 2004ish levels, but perhaps they’re starting to turn back around. Will we see 2005 numbers by 2010?
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First the good news: this spring, Georgetown had a mini real estate bubble. Now the bad news: like all bubbles, it popped. Hard. And it wasn’t a widely experienced bubble anyway. Check out the chart of average price per square foot over the last 12 months (in red) with the listing prices (in blue):
Courtesy of Redfin.Com
There appears to have been a run up in listing prices over the winter, which in turn drove up the average price of the sales. However, in spring the listing prices plummeted about 16%, and the sales prices fell even harder at 21% down, and dropping fast.
But did that uptick even represent a boom, or did it just mean only the expensive homes were being listed and sold? The overall volume numbers seem to indicate that that may have been the case:
Courtesy of Redfin.com
So it appears that after a brief thaw in the sales of more expensive homes, the Georgetown market has continued its downward march in volume and price. GM has noticed that homes on his block have been selling at 2003 prices. Have you noticed the same?
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GM touched on this briefly last week, but it deserves a little closer look. The District has decided to rid itself of the large property at 3050 R St. (pictured). This could portend a big change for the neighborhood so GM will keep a close eye on it.
The history of the property and the District’s RFP after the jump: Continue reading
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As mentioned a little while back, Halcyon House cut its offering price 37% from $30 million down to $19 million. At the time, GM wondered whether this would pressure Evermay to follow. Well, it took less than a month:Â Evermay is slashing its price too. It dropped its offering price 19% from $49 million to $39.5 million.
Barring the arrival on some Spanish royalty, it seems to GM that notwithstanding the price cuts, these houses will remain on the market for a while longer. The only Georgetown house sale above $10 million dollars in the last year was Evermay’s neighbor at 1607 28th St., which sold for $11.5 million last July. The last ridiculously large purchase that GM can remember is when Herb Miller set the still existing record of $25 million when he sold the Bowie-Sevier house in 2007. 2007 was a much different time than today.
So is there really someone out there with $39.5 million dollars who wants to buy the premiere privately owned property in Georgetown? How about organizing a few down-on-their-luck mere-multi-millionaires interested in a time-share? Hey, that sounds like a decent idea…
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There’s a bumper crop of historic Georgetown mansions for sale right now. GM’s talked about Evermay before, but hasn’t discussed the other landmark property on the market: Halcyon House (once you’re a landmark property you get silly names like that). It went on the market around the same time as Evermay, but for $30 million to Evermay’s $49 million.
Well that difference just got even bigger. On March 26, the asking price of Halcyon House was cut all the way “down” to $19 million. That’s a 37% drop.Â
It’s not clear how many potential buyers that will entice. Are there really that many people out there that won’t spend $30 million on a house, but would spend $19 million? Maybe there’s some wealthy magnate that got out when the time was right and knows a steal when he sees one.
The next question: will Evermay follow?
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Notwithstanding GM’s ideas on easements and such, he still believes a better outcome for Scheele’s is for ownership of the building to pass to an individual or group dedicated to preserving the market. Along those lines, NBC 4 recently stopped by the market and put together a feature on those dedicated to preserving the market as is. Check it out:
Vodpod videos no longer available.Filed under Real Estate, Retail
GM came across a real estate website today that allows you to review real estate news by neighborhood. Georgetown’s is here. While this website has done an amazing job gathering public information, at some point it just gets a little creepy. Find out why after the jump:
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The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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