Are VA Offers Weak? What 223 Local Closings Show (Part 20 of 20: The Southern Maryland Buyer and Seller Files)
This is Part 20 of The Southern Maryland Buyer and Seller Files from Donnell Williams Jr. and DMV Prime Properties, a twenty-part series answering what people in Prince George's and Charles County are actually asking this month.
There is a sentence that gets said at kitchen tables across this county, usually quietly, usually by someone who means well. It is some version of this: we should probably take the other offer, VA offers are weak.
Donnell Williams Jr., Broker-Owner of DMV Prime Properties, has heard it from sellers, from other agents, and once from a seller repeating what an agent had told them. He has also heard the other side of it, from a service member who wrote three offers in a summer and started wondering whether the letters on his pre-approval were the reason none of them landed. A buyer posted online recently asking exactly that question while preparing to PCS into the DMV with a VA loan.
So this post does what the series has done for nineteen parts. It goes to the data and asks whether the claim survives contact with what actually closed here.
The claim, stated fairly
The claim, in its most reasonable form, goes like this. VA financing carries more conditions than conventional financing, those conditions create risk for a seller, and a seller who has a choice should take the more predictable offer.
That is a real argument, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. The answer is not that VA buyers are nicer people. The answer is what happened across 1,397 closed sales.
What 1,397 local closings actually recorded
Donnell's own Bright MLS export covers 1,397 closed sales in Prince George's and Charles County that settled between July 1 and August 22, 2026. Every one of those transactions closed. Sorted by financing type, the picture looks like this.
- Conventional: 599 closings, median sale price $459,900, median 17 days on market
- FHA: 384 closings, median sale price $430,000, median 24 days on market
- VA: 223 closings, median sale price $500,000, median 23 days on market
- Cash: 151 closings, median sale price $260,000, median 21 days on market
Read that table twice, because the headline is in the third row.
VA financing produced the highest median sale price of any financing type in the two counties this summer. Not the lowest. The highest, at $500,000, above conventional at $459,900 and well above the cash median of $260,000.
The highest median price is not a small detail
There is a mental picture behind the phrase "VA offers are weak," and the picture is of a buyer stretching to reach a price. The data in Prince George's and Charles County does not support that picture.
Two hundred twenty-three households used VA financing to close on homes here this summer, and the middle one of those transactions landed at half a million dollars. That is the top of the four financing categories, in a market where the countywide median sale price was $450,000 in July according to the Prince George's County Association of REALTORS.
Whatever else is true about VA financing, buyers using it in this market were transacting at the highest median price point of any group. A seller who declines those offers as a category is declining the group that paid the most, on median, across 1,397 settled sales.
FHA and VA together were 43 percent of the market
The second number a seller should sit with is scale.
FHA and VA closings together accounted for 607 of the 1,397 sales, roughly 43 percent of everything that settled in the two counties between July 1 and August 22, 2026.
That is not a niche. It is close to half of the buyer pool in Prince George's and Charles County. A seller who treats those loan types as a last resort is not being selective, they are declining to compete for nearly half of the people shopping for homes here.
The Prince George's County Association of REALTORS reported 2,083 active listings in July 2026, up 15.5 percent year over year and the highest July level in five years. In a market with more competing inventory than at any July in five years, narrowing the buyer pool by 43 percent is a strategy with a cost attached.
Now the honest part: the days on market difference
There is a real difference in the data and it should not be buried.
VA closings ran a median of 23 days on market. Conventional closings ran 17. That is a six-day gap, and it is genuine.
FHA ran 24 days, so the gap is not unique to VA. Cash, which is the financing type most often described as the fastest, ran 21 days, which is slower than conventional.
Anyone arguing the "weak offer" case will point at 23 against 17. Fair enough. The question is what those six days actually represent.
It is also worth noticing what the four rows do not line up with. If speed and strength moved together in a simple way, cash would sit at the top of the table on both, and in this data it does not. Cash closings ran 21 days on market at a median sale price of $260,000. Conventional ran the fastest at 17. VA ran 23 days at the highest median price of the four. Price and pace are two different measurements, and they do not sort into a single ranking of good offers and bad ones.
Six days is a timeline question, not a strength question
Days on market measures the stretch between when a home was listed and when it went under contract. It is a measure of how the listing moved through the market. It is not a measure of whether a transaction closed, and every transaction in this export closed.
Donnell's read is that a six-day median difference belongs in the timeline column of a seller's thinking, not the risk column. Sellers do have real timeline concerns. Someone selling one home to buy another, or moving on a fixed relocation date, needs the calendar to work.
Timeline concerns get solved with contract terms. Settlement date, contingency periods, and the sequence of milestones are negotiable items that both sides put in writing. A seller who is worried about the calendar can negotiate the calendar. Declining an entire category of buyer is a very blunt instrument for a problem that has precise tools.
One important limit on what this data can tell anyone. The export records what closed, at what price, after how many days. It does not record why. This post makes no claim about VA appraisals, funding fees, entitlement, or any program rule, because those are lending questions rather than market data questions. Donnell Williams Jr. is a broker, not a lender or an attorney. Buyers and sellers with questions about how a specific loan program works should ask a VA-approved lender.
What the claim costs veterans
For a military buyer, the practical damage of the "weak offer" reputation is that it gets applied before their offer is read.
A veteran writing a competitive price, with sound terms and a solid lender, can be sorted into a pile based on three letters rather than on the substance of what they wrote. That is a bad outcome for the buyer and, on the evidence above, frequently a bad outcome for the seller too.
Donnell's advice to military and veteran buyers in Prince George's and Charles County is to make the substance impossible to ignore. Come with a strong pre-approval from a lender who will answer the listing agent's phone call. Be specific about the settlement date being workable. Ask your agent to present the offer rather than email it into a void. None of that changes your financing. All of it changes how the financing gets read.
It is also worth knowing the local context: 223 households closed here this summer using VA financing. Whatever a seller's assumption is, veterans are buying homes in these two counties in volume.
What the claim costs sellers
The seller's side of this is simpler. Screening out FHA and VA offers as a category means competing for roughly 57 percent of the market instead of 100 percent of it, in the highest-inventory July Prince George's County has seen in five years.
It also means passing on the financing type that recorded the highest median sale price in the two counties this summer.
There is a version of this that is not about prejudice at all, just habit. An agent absorbed a rule of thumb years ago, repeated it to sellers, and never went back to check whether it still described anything. Donnell's view is that a rule of thumb that has not been checked against local closings in the last twelve months is not advice, it is folklore, and sellers are the ones who pay for it when the folklore is wrong.
The check is not difficult. Any seller can ask their agent one question: what does the local closing data actually show about this loan type, here, this year? An agent who can answer that is worth listening to. An agent who cannot is repeating something they heard.
The better approach is to evaluate offers rather than labels. Read the price. Read the settlement date. Read the contingencies and the deposit. Ask your agent to talk to the buyer's lender. Those five steps tell a seller far more about an offer than the loan type ever will, and they work identically regardless of what kind of financing is behind the contract.
Where the series lands
Twenty parts ago this series set out to answer what people in Prince George's and Charles County are actually asking, using local numbers rather than national talking points. This last one is a decent summary of the whole approach. A claim gets repeated until it sounds like knowledge, and then 1,397 closings say something different.
Educate to Elevate is the philosophy at DMV Prime Properties, and it usually comes down to this: look at what happened here, not at what everyone says happens.
Talk to someone who reads the offers, not the labels
If you are a veteran or an active duty service member buying in Prince George's County or Charles County, Donnell Williams Jr. and the team at DMV Prime Properties will help you write an offer whose substance speaks louder than its loan type, with the local closing data to back it up. And if you are a seller weighing offers right now and wondering what to make of the financing on one of them, Donnell will walk you through what the terms actually say and what the local data shows about how those transactions closed. Call 301.818.0313 or email donnell@dmvprimerealty.com.
This is the final part of The Southern Maryland Buyer and Seller Files. The full series, along with The Southern Maryland Money Guide, is available at donnellwilliams.com.
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