The D.C. metro ranks No. 17 among the Top 50 metros for median price of a luxury home sale and No. 10 among metros with a population of one million or more people.
A luxury home sale is defined as a home whose list price is in the top 5% by value in each market. The median luxury home sale price in the D.C. region in the third quarter was $1.662 million, up 5.1% from a year earlier, according to data from Redfin.
Homes in the luxury tier sold in the third quarter in an average of 36 days, which is fairly quickly considering the limited pool of buyers in the luxury price range. Nearly half those sales were all cash sales.
“Wealthy homebuyers have more tools to weather the storm of high mortgage rates,” said Jason Aleem, senior vice president of real estate operations for Redfin. “Many of them can afford to pay cash, meaning they’re escaping high mortgage rates altogether. Others are choosing to take on a higher rate and refinance later — an expensive option that isn’t feasible for a lot of lower-income consumers.
There are also fewer of those homes for sale, with luxury listings in the D.C. metro down 1.9% from a year ago.
Redfin said one of the reasons luxury listings are holding up relatively well is that “high-end homeowners are less likely to feel locked into their low mortgage rate, either because they don’t have a mortgage at all, or because they have the means to move and take a higher rate,” adding that “newly built homes tend to be more expensive as well, meaning they often fall into the luxury tier.”
For the first time ever, the share of newly-built homes that sold in September was more than 30%, compared to a historical average of just 10%, largely because there are so few existing homes for sale.
Nationwide, 42.5% of luxury home sales in the third quarter were all-cash sales compared to 28% of all sales.
Tampa, Florida, tops all metros for luxury home sales, surging 35.8% in the third quarter, compared to a year ago.
“It’s an opportune time to be a cash buyer, and there are a lot of cash buyers in Florida,” said Redfin Tampa sales manager Eric Auciello. “We’re still seeing many affluent house hunters move from the Northeast and West Coast. Tampa also has a ton of new construction, a lot of which is high-end condos.”
Other top markets that saw a surge in luxury home sales in the third quarter were Las Vegas, Austin, Sacramento and San Francisco.
When it comes to the median price of a luxury home that sold in the third quarter, San Francisco is by far the leader, at $4.94 million, followed by $4.6 million in San Jose, $3.9 million in Anaheim, $3.4 million in Los Angeles and $3.39 million in New York.
The most expensive residential real estate sale in the third quarter was a seven-bedroom, 21,500-square foot home in Aspen, Colorado, with ski out access and five minutes from downtown Aspen on a half an acre, which sold for $76 million. Five of the 10 most expensive sales last quarter were in Florida.
