Change You Won't See
Elections Don't Do Much to Local Home Market

By Maryann Haggerty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2008

A new president, new administration, new political appointees -- all that has to have an effect on the Washington area real estate market, right?

"Not much," said John McClain, a senior fellow at the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, which dissects local economic statistics.

"We've never been able to pick up a change in administration at the metropolitan scale."

It's a matter of numbers. The population of the Washington area is about 5 million, with about 3 million jobs.

For perspective: The government-published "plum book," a listing of legislative and executive branch positions outside the civil service, contained about 7,000 jobs in both its 2000 and 2004 editions. Those include an estimated 3,300 presidential appointees.

Not all those people will work in the Washington area. And of those who do, not all will be newcomers -- for instance, John D. Podesta, one of the team that will oversee the transition, is a former Clinton White House staffer who has held jobs here for three decades, most recently at a D.C. think tank.

They're not even a large slice of the federal labor force -- there are 345,000 federal workers in the region, McClain pointed out.

But what about closer in? In what most people would consider the inside-the-Beltway areas -- the District; Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland; Arlington and Fairfax counties, plus the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church in Virginia -- the population last year was 3.74 million.

The last administration changeover followed the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Home sales in the close-in area rose 7 percent in 2001, to 62,266, from 58,106 in 2000, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, the region's multiple listing service. (That number isn't comprehensive -- it doesn't count sales outside the system -- but it shows the trend.)

However, sales also rose 6 percent the following year, and 7 percent the year after that as the housing boom picked up speed.

In the 2006 election, control of Congress passed from the Republicans to the Democrats. Again, broader trends muffled any effect on the local market. Home sales in 2007 fell 21 percent from 2006 as the boom busted.

It may be possible to see effects in some neighborhoods, said Dan Fulton, president of Fulton Research and Consulting in Fairfax. That might, he speculated, include parts of Alexandria or the District, "especially the rental market," and such emerging neighborhoods as the area around Nationals Park and the cluster of new high-rise buildings in the NoMa neighborhood on the edge of downtown.

On balance, though, he said, "I think you'll probably see a minimal effect."