Limping Into The End of 2025

Contract activity for the week of December 21 - 27 in the Virginia Countryside and West Virginia Panhandle area was down 13.7% compared to the same seven-day period last year.

Key Takeaways

• This is the eighth weekly decline in the last nine weeks.
• Nonetheless, with only four calendar days remaining in 2025, total new contract activity year-to-date is only off 1.3%. That closely mirrors the close-in metro DC area decline of just 1.5%
• Despite the wide weekly swings we see, it has simply been a flat market almost all year.

Why It Matters

• We expect Christmas week to be the slowest of the year, and that was certainly the case. There were only 82 newly-ratified contracts last week.
• As we have noted many times this year, this is a remarkably resilient market that has stayed level despite all of things that could have been hugely disruptive. Federal job layoffs and an historically long government shutdown, persistently high interest rates, economic uncertainty, trade wars and wars in Europe and the Middle East undoubtedly impacted the market, but they most certainly haven’t killed it.
• On average, homes took 14 days longer to sell last week (54 days) than last year (40 days).

The Real Estate Details

• Virginia Countryside was down 6.3%, but is up 2.3% year-to-date.
• West Virginia Panhandle was down 21.3% and is down 5.8% year-to-date.