Social media posts making their rounds across platforms are implying thousands of D.C.-area homes are being listed for sale amid the recent firings of federal employees. Licensed real estate agents said that’s just not true.
Ayana Brickhouse, of Compass Real Estate, said people should not believe the claims being disseminated.
“That’s not at all what the current housing market looks like,” Brickhouse told WTOP, noting the current inventory of homes for sale is pretty consistent with this time of year.
The social media posts that have been circulating suggest more than 4,200 homes listed on Zillow in the last two weeks were a sign of people leaving the area in droves.
False maps shared online and appearing to be from popular real estate websites Zillow and Redfin show home listings across D.C., Maryland and Virginia with descriptor tags alternating between “coming soon,” “new” and “open.”
Brickhouse said the maps being shared to unsuspecting individuals are false and full of misinformation.
As for the attached listing prices, they range from hundreds of thousands to millions — prices that may seem typical for the region. However, eagle-eyed netizens will catch the odd listing that just doesn’t add up.
“I’ve never seen a house for $85,000 in Arlington,” Brickhouse said, highlighting one Virginia-based listing that set off a red flag for her. “I even tried to look up to see where they’re getting this data from, but when I do my search, some of those numbers don’t come up.”
Christina Mai, a licensed real estate agent and founding member of Compass Real Estate, told WTOP that one Zillow map that’s getting a lot of attention is actually based on data of properties that were sold “over months, if not years.”
When comparing the maps to data recorded in Bright MLS, the real estate industry’s official database of property sales for the mid-Atlantic region, Mai said the “facts simply do not support these reports.”
“Based on our listing data, we’re not seeing any evidence of a surge of listing activity in the Washington, D.C., region. In the broader D.C. region, defined by the counties and cities below, there were 2,829 new listings that came onto the market in the two-week period between February 3 and February 16, 2025. This is virtually unchanged from the same two weeks last year when there were 2,820 new listings on the market,” Bright MLS said in a news release.
One map that claimed to show home listings over a two-week period was shot down online by a real estate insider who pointed out that residential properties simply “don’t move this fast.”
Mai said the misinformation was more than likely done as clickbait.
With the warm weather right around the corner, so too is the “spring real estate market madness,” which runs from March through June, according to Mai.
“It is when many sellers start listing their homes for sale to get top dollar and best terms of sale,” Mai said.
While the “for sale” numbers were drastically off on the maps shared on social media, Mai said an “early spring market” was triggered within the region’s real estate industry.
But, she said, it’s all to do with “the years of pent up demand for homes and more stable interest rates.”
WTOP has reached out to Zillow for comment.
Gaby Arancibia contributed to this report.
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