Reports of NoVa housing market’s demise are greatly exaggerated, experts say

“See the rats run,” a Facebook post put up Saturday reads.

It’s illustrated with a map purportedly of Arlington County — a map covered with dozens of ovals indicating where houses are on the market. Many of the ovals are labeled “coming soon” or “new.”

In the wake of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to fire hundreds of federal employees via Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has the Northern Virginia housing market imploded?

“There are hoax postings going around the internet,” Terry Clower, professor of public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, wrote in an email Monday. “There is no evidence of a large-scale housing market impact related to federal workers.”

Looking at the period between Feb. 3 and Feb. 16, 2,829 new listings came onto the Washington, D.C., market, according to Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist for Bright MLS, a real estate data firm headquartered in Maryland. During the same period in 2024, the same area saw 2,820 new listings.

The region Sturtevant looked at includes Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Fredericksburg, Manassas, Manassas Park and the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Spotsylvania and Stafford, as well as Washington, D.C., and five Maryland localities.

“There’s no surge,” Sturtevant said. “We can’t see any surge in new listing activity.”

Northern Virginia Association of Realtors CEO Ryan T. McLaughlin also urged homeowners and buyers to take a breath when reading any social media posts about the collapse of the region’s real estate market.

“Like anything else on the internet, you can’t believe everything you read,” he said.

Virginia has more than 140,000 residents who work for the federal government, according to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, the state’s junior senator. So far, the Trump administration has moved to lay off some 200,000 of the nation’s 2.3 million civilian federal workers, while issuing return-to-office mandates across all agencies.

NVAR is keeping an eye on how the market responds to both reductions in workforce and federal mandates to return to the office. McLaughlin noted about 30% of the federal workforce is eligible for retirement.

“Some may opt out of the workforce entirely rather than face long commutes if they are mandated to return to the office,” he said. “Some may decide that they do want to commute. Some may decide they’re going to buy a home closer in D.C. … There’s so many variables.”

Even though inventory is up across the United States and in the Washington, D.C., region, according to Sturtevant, the supply of housing inventory is still below pre-pandemic levels in most markets. The state’s housing market was stagnant in 2024, with 102,509 home sales, just 4,000 more than the previous year, according to Virginia Realtors.

Some markets in the Washington, D.C., region do show an uptick in new listings. “But nothing about the geographic pattern of listing activity suggests that it is related to homeowners who are or were federal government employees,” Sturtevant said in a statement.

For instance, new listings were 27% higher in Spotsylvania, but 30% lower in nearby Stafford.

Chris Colgan, a Realtor who helps buyers and sellers in Northern Virginia, said he had clients who made offers on properties this weekend. “Every single house had multiple offers,” he said.

The data also doesn’t support a picture of panicked sellers slashing home prices. In the Washington, D.C., region last week, Sturtevant saw 6.9% of active listings had a price cut. “That is almost exactly the same as last year and almost exactly the same as a week earlier,” she said.

Sturtevant did note Monday that she was working on a report that shows the number of potential buyers requesting home tours is “dipping a little more sharply in the D.C. metro [region] than in other markets, meaning that buyers are not as interested in D.C. as they might have been last year at this time,” she said.

While there may be “some pullback in the market,” she said, “it’s certainly not this over-the-top big change in market conditions.”