People want to believe the market will suddenly “pop” now that the shutdown is behind us. The truth is usually far less dramatic. If history is any guide, shutdowns don’t crash home prices. They freeze activity, build up some tension, and once the uncertainty clears, the market tends to settle back to roughly where it was. Transactions that were put on pause come back online, but pricing doesn’t swing wildly.
That’s why it’s worth looking at inventory, new contracts, interest rates, and how buyers are behaving right now to predict whether the market will go back to normal. And yes, I use the word “normal” reluctantly. Nothing about the Northern Virginia or DC market has been normal since before the pandemic. But we can get close to defining what a functional buyer’s market should look like, which is where we were before the shutdown.
Buyers Are Curious Again
Rate cuts, or even the hint of cuts, have a way of waking buyers up. You see it long before contracts pick up. It starts with people poking around online again, calling their agent “just to check in,” or walking into open houses without the usual hesitation. Over the last couple of weeks, even with the shutdown freezing actual transactions, buyers never really disappeared. They were out there circling.
You can feel it on the ground. Open houses have more energy. I’m hearing from clients who’ve been quiet for months. Our pipeline was soft heading into October, but has filled up fast.
The DC region logged 76,071 showings for the week ending November 9. That’s roughly a six percent increase from last year and the third week in a row where showings beat 2024 levels. Part of the motivation is simple: price cuts. We’re seeing a record number of reductions across the region, and that naturally pulls in bargain hunters. When buyers sense a market that’s bending even in their favor, they start to get active again.
Pending sales, or homes under contract, tell a similar story. The Mid-Atlantic saw 5,451 new purchase contracts last week, completely flat year-over-year. On its face, that seems uneventful, but last year didn’t have a federal shutdown weighing on buyer confidence. Nationally, pending sales actually jumped 15 percent over the same week last year, which suggests that once people felt the worst was behind us, or at least that the worst-case scenario wouldn’t play out, they started transacting again.
And historically, that’s exactly how shutdowns play out. They don’t cause price declines, they delay decisions. When the uncertainty clears, that backed-up demand tends to release. If that pattern holds, the “flat” numbers we are seeing today might look surprisingly sturdy a few weeks from now. Whether the pent up demand shows up this year or next spring is the big question.
So Will the Market “Pop”?
Probably not in any dramatic way, and I’ve long stopped pretending I can predict the future. All I can do is report what the data and the behavior are telling us. There is pent-up demand, and it will work its way back into the market, but it won’t come rushing in all at once. Seasonality still matters, and this time of year rarely rewards buyers who don’t have a compelling reason to move. Unless you stumble into a genuinely great deal or have a hard deadline, most buyers will wait for spring. That’s good news for sellers in 2025, but less encouraging for the homes sitting on the market today.
