It’s Christmas for D.C.’s Luxury Brokers

Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

You may be distressed over the outcome of the presidential election, but the D.C. luxury market is not. “I think we will see some big numbers transact again starting around January,” says Michael Rankin, the principal and managing partner of Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington, D.C. “People don’t want to spend $5, $10, $15 million if they don’t know whether they’ll be confirmed or not. But what we do know of the people who are coming is that it’s the multimillionaire and multibillionaire class.”

The last time Donald Trump took office, the area saw a flurry of high-priced house sales. “We were calling all our clients and saying, ‘Hey, do you want to sell your $9 million house?’” says Maxwell Rabin, an associate broker also at Sotheby’s International Realty. During that time, Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross paid $12 million for a seven-bedroom Beaux-Arts mansion in Massachusetts Heights, close to Rock Creek Park; Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin dropped $12.58 million on a 16,000-square-foot house in the same neighborhood; and secretary of State Rex Tillerson spent $5.5 million on a four-bedroom in Kalorama. (Jared and Ivanka, meanwhile, opted to rent, also in Kalorama.)

Brokers are expecting more of the same this time around — not that they can talk about it. One agent told me that he knew of at least two high-profile administration figures who’d been looking around since the election — he couldn’t say who, though, since he’d had to sign NDAs. One, he added, was so ironclad he didn’t even want to speak in generalities like price range or neighborhood. But if the past is prologue, one can assume it’s someplace like Mass Heights, Kalorma, or Woodland Normanstone, where Kellyanne Conway bought a Mediterranean-style combo mansion in 2017 and 15 percent of the homes are embassies. “It’s a more palatial atmosphere in Kalorama compared to Georgetown,” Washington hostess Sally Quinn told Esquire during the last Trump administration. “Bigger, newer houses. I have not heard of any of the Trump people living in Georgetown.” (As one broker told me, Georgetown is rich but liberal.)

Unfortunately for area brokers, one of wealthiest members of Trump’s new crew, Elon Musk, “isn’t a big house person,” says Rankin. “Maybe he’s going to fly in and fly out.” (But Musk, despite his declaration that he was done owning real estate, has also been busy building a secret mansion compound in Austin, Texas, for his unconventional and increasingly large family. So who knows?)

Eva Davis, an executive vice-president at Compass, says that there is always a rush of transactions whenever administrations change — a luxury bump in the $1 million-plus range and a slew of rentals as lower-level staff turns over. Although this year, there was actually a pre-election flurry as well, when the Conservative Partnership Institute went on a buying spree, buying up nine properties in the neighborhood to create a “Patriot’s Row” campus.

Some of this enthusiasm is dampened by Trump’s threats to slash the federal workforce, shrinking the middle and upper-middle class that accounts for most deals. “My team has had a number of calls from people at agencies like the HSS and EPA, places that would likely see cuts first, saying, ‘We don’t know what’s going to go on, but we might need to sell,’” says Davis. There is also concern about what will happen if Trump revokes the home rule — a 50-year-old law that allows D.C. to manage its own municipal affairs. “People are saying, ‘I don’t want to be here for that,’” or are worried about the effect such a move would have on home prices.

And there is some fear, too, that Trump’s wealthy Cabinet picks might not be investing much in local real estate at all — given Trump’s proclivity for holding court from Palm Beach. “I think this administration doesn’t spend as much time in the district as other administrations,” says one broker. “They’re more in Florida and New York.”