From The Condo Report — your weekly Washington, D.C. condo and co-op briefing
June 3, 2026
Reader Question:
“My HOA fees are close to $1,000 a month, I bought in 2020, and I’m seeing units similar to mine listed nearby at prices that honestly surprised me — in a bad way. The building is about sixteen years old and so are most of the systems and appliances, which has me thinking about what’s coming down the road. I’m not sure I’m ready to buy something else with rates where they are, but I’m also wondering if I’m just burning money every month. Should I sell now, or hold on and rent it out and wait for the market to come back?”
— A one-bedroom owner in DC
James:
This is the conversation I’m having more than any other right now, and I want to give you a real answer — not a cheerful one, but a useful one.
Let’s start with where the market actually is, because I suspect the number you saw nearby surprised you for a reason.
If you bought in 2020, you bought near the peak.
The DC condo market peaked hard in 2021, roughly a year after you closed. If you bought in early 2020 you may have gotten in just before the run-up; if you bought mid-to-late 2020 you were already riding the wave. Either way, values have been flat to slightly down since that peak, with active inventory up over 20% year-over-year and absorption — the rate at which the market is actually moving units — declining for sixteen consecutive quarters. Four straight years. One-bedroom condos have taken the worst of it.
So when you see a comparable unit listed nearby at a number that raised your eyebrows, the honest read is that the list price probably isn’t the sale price, and neither number is 2021. The highest closed sales in most DC condo buildings right now are still running below the peak. When someone lists at an aggressive price-per-square-foot in this market, my instinct is the same every time: that’s not where it’s going to close.
What this likely means for you: your realistic sale price today is probably close to what you paid in 2020 — maybe a touch above, maybe a touch below, depending on your building and what makes your unit stand out. That’s not catastrophic, but it’s also not what anyone buying in 2020 was picturing six years later.
How to actually figure out what your unit is worth.
Before you make any decision, you need a real number — not an automated estimate, not a neighbor’s wishful list price. Here’s how I look at it.
Pull the actual closed sales in your building or immediate comp set for the last eighteen months, filter by your unit type and approximate square footage, and look at the price-per-square-foot on what sold — not what was listed. That spread between list and sale tells you what the market is actually clearing at right now.
Then account for what makes your unit different from those comps. Outdoor space is real money in DC condo buildings, particularly where most units don’t have it — a private patio or meaningful terrace can add $30,000–$50,000 depending on the building, because it’s genuinely scarce and buyers know it. A top-floor unit, a quiet exposure, a renovated kitchen: all real, all quantifiable if you look at the closed data carefully.
The data usually tells people in this market that their realistic sale price is close to — and sometimes at — what they paid. That’s a hard conversation. But making a $200,000 decision based on a number you made up is worse.
The case for selling now.
Here’s the honest version of the sell argument: the market is not on a clear upward trajectory. Inventory is high, demand is suppressed by rates and by genuine uncertainty around the DC federal job market — Bright MLS has flagged it explicitly as a DC-specific drag that other mid-Atlantic markets aren’t carrying. The buyers who are out there are doing their homework.
If you sell now, you take the capital off the table, you stop the HOA burn — $12,000 a year before mortgage, taxes, or any capital costs — and you make your next move from a clean position. And here’s the part worth saying plainly: a sixteen-year-old building is a capital event waiting to happen. HVAC, refrigerator, washer/dryer, water heater — you’re probably looking at $15,000–$25,000 in replacements over the next three to five years, and that clock is running regardless of whether you’re living there, renting it, or trying to sell it. A buyer doing their due diligence is going to see the building age and price accordingly, or ask for credits. Better to know that going in than to discover it mid-negotiation.
The case for holding and renting.
Now here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, because the rent-and-hold strategy has a real logic to it — under the right conditions.
If you bought in 2020 and locked a rate in the 3s, your carrying cost may be low enough that a DC rental — typically $2,500–$3,500 a month for a well-located one-bedroom — covers your mortgage and HOA with room to spare. You keep the asset, you get the tax deductions on mortgage interest and property expenses, and in years where the rental income creates a net loss on paper, that loss offsets your ordinary income. For someone in a high tax bracket, that’s meaningful.
The longer-term argument for holding is what I call the annuity view: at some point the mortgage is gone. What you’re left with is a DC-located asset generating all-cash rental income minus the carry. That’s a different asset than a condo you’re trying to sell in a soft market. That’s a machine — eventually.
But you have to run the actual numbers, not the optimistic ones. The sixteen-year-old building means the capital replacement costs are real and coming soon whether you’re the owner-occupant or the landlord. Budget for them before you decide holding is cheap. And factor in that the rental market has its own softness right now — nearly six in ten DC-area rental listings are currently offering concessions to attract tenants. You may get a tenant, but you may also need to offer a free month or come in below your target rent to get there.
The framework I’d use to decide.
The question I always ask before I tell someone to hold is: what’s your next best option? “Hold the condo” isn’t a strategy in isolation — it’s a strategy versus something else. If selling gives you capital that earns a solid return while you rent comfortably at a monthly cost lower than ownership, the math might favor selling even if the condo appreciates modestly from here. If selling at roughly your purchase price feels like a loss and you’d just let the capital sit idle, holding and renting starts looking considerably better.
Here’s a rough framework:
Lean toward selling if: you need the capital for a next move, your carrying costs are high relative to current rents, you don’t want to manage a rental, or you think DC’s job market headwinds run deep and long.
Lean toward holding and renting if: your 2020 rate is sub-4%, current rents comfortably cover your PITI and HOA, you’re in a high tax bracket and can use the paper losses, and you’re genuinely thinking in a ten-plus year horizon where the annuity value kicks in and the appliance replacement costs are behind you.
Don’t hold just because selling at your purchase price feels like losing. You haven’t lost money — you’ve had a place to live, you’ve built equity through paydown, and you still have the asset. The emotional anchor to a number the market has moved past is the thing that costs people the most, not the market itself.
The bottom line.
In the current DC condo market, holding and renting is a legitimate strategy — but only if you’ve run the actual numbers with the capital costs of an aging building built in. Selling is equally legitimate, especially if the capital has somewhere productive to go. What’s almost never a good strategy is drifting: not deciding, not running the math, watching the inventory clock tick and the systems age.
If you want to work through the numbers on your specific unit — real comps, a realistic price range, and a rent-versus-sell model with your actual carrying costs — I’m happy to do that. Send me the address and a few numbers and I’ll put together something you can actually decide from.
This was Issue 009 of The Condo Report. See you next week.
— James Grant — Condo Report
