28.5% of Fort Washington Listings Did Not Sell This Year (Part 1 of 30: The Fort Washington Files)
This is Part 1 of The Fort Washington Files from Donnell Williams Jr. and DMV Prime Properties, a thirty-part series built entirely on what 689 Fort Washington listings actually did in 2026. DMV Prime Properties is headquartered at 12815 Old Fort Road, about four minutes from most of the homes in this data set, and this series exists because Donnell got tired of hearing sellers describe a market that his own records do not show.
Here is the number that starts everything. Across 689 Fort Washington listings tracked through September 17, 2026, 505 of them finished. They either sold or they came off the market without selling. Of those 505, exactly 144 never sold. That is 28.5%. Not a slow month, not a soft week, not a seasonal dip. Nearly three out of every ten Fort Washington sellers who put a house on the market went through the entire experience, the photography, the showings, the strangers walking through the kitchen, and came out the other side with no sale.
What the 144 actually are
Failure in an MLS is not one thing, so it helps to break it apart. Of the 144 Fort Washington listings that left the market without selling, 79 expired, 43 were canceled, and 22 were withdrawn. Those are three different paperwork outcomes and one identical result for the homeowner.
Expired means the listing agreement ran out with the house still sitting there. Canceled usually means the seller and the agent ended the agreement early, sometimes to change agents, sometimes because the seller stopped wanting to sell. Withdrawn means the listing was pulled off the public market while the agreement stayed in place. Sellers often think of the canceled and withdrawn homes as a different category, as a choice rather than a failure. The data does not support that separation. The pricing pattern that shows up in the expired group shows up in the other two as well.
It is worth saying plainly what these 144 homeowners went through, because the statistic flattens it. Each of those listings represents a family that cleaned the house on short notice, left for showings, kept the yard sharp through a Maryland summer, and made plans around a closing date that never arrived. Some of them were buying somewhere else and had to unwind it. The 28.5% is not an abstraction in this zip code. It is a lot of people who did everything they were asked to do.
The 361 and the 144, side by side
The comparison is where this gets useful, because these two groups came from the same zip code in the same period, and they look nothing alike on paper.
The 144 failed listings carried a median original list price of $534,748 and a median final list price of $525,000. Their median days on market was 50, and their median cumulative days on market was 75. Their median above-grade square footage was 1,952.
The 361 closed sales carried a median original list price of $479,900 and a median final list price of $474,000. Their median days on market was 18 and their median cumulative days on market was 22. Their median above-grade square footage was 1,716.
Read those two paragraphs again. The homes that failed started at roughly $54,848 higher on original list, sat almost three times as long, and were about 236 square feet larger. Every one of those figures comes from Donnell's Bright MLS export covering 689 Fort Washington listings, all statuses, entry dates from November 2024 through September 17, 2026.
The failures were bigger houses, not worse ones
This is the part that surprises most sellers, and it is the reason Part 4 of this series is devoted to it. The failed listings were not small, tired properties that nobody wanted. They were, at the median, larger than the homes that sold. Nineteen hundred and fifty-two square feet above grade against 1,716.
That matters because it kills the easiest explanation. If the failures had been the smallest and cheapest homes in the zip code, the story would be about condition or about a thin buyer pool at the bottom. Instead the failures skew toward the larger end of Fort Washington's housing stock, and they asked a price that matched their size.
Half of them cut price and it did not save them
Of the 144 failed listings, 50% cut their price at least once, and the median cut was $25,000. They still did not sell. Among the 361 closed sales, only 29% ever cut at all.
That contrast is worth sitting with. Cutting price is the single most common response when a Fort Washington listing goes quiet. Half of the sellers who failed did exactly that, by a meaningful amount, and it did not change the outcome. Meanwhile, seven out of ten homes that actually closed never needed a reduction in the first place.
Donnell's read on that is not that price cuts are useless. It is that by the time a Fort Washington seller is cutting, the cut is usually arriving after the window in which it would have mattered. Part 2 of this series walks the days-on-market data that shows exactly where that window closes, and Part 3 puts a number on what the cut costs the sellers who do go on to close.
Failure is not spread evenly across price
The 28.5% is a countywide-style average for one zip code, and averages hide things. Broken out by original list price, the fail rate moves a lot:
- Under $300,000: 9 failed against 21 closed, a 30.0% fail rate
- $300,000 to $400,000: 17 failed against 80 closed, 17.5%, the lowest of any band
- $400,000 to $500,000: 34 failed against 116 closed, 22.7%
- $500,000 to $600,000: 32 failed against 65 closed, 33.0%
- $600,000 to $800,000: 33 failed against 66 closed, 33.3%
- Over $800,000: 19 failed against 13 closed, 59.4%
That last line is the only price band in Fort Washington where more listings failed than sold. Nineteen did not sell, thirteen did. Part 5 takes that band apart in detail, including what the ten homes currently listed above $800,000 are doing right now. Part 6 does the same for the $300,000 to $400,000 band, which at 17.5% was the most reliable place to be a seller in this data.
None of this is a statement about any neighborhood or any group of people. It is a statement about where the buyer pool in this zip code actually has depth, and where it thins out.
What the wider county data looked like at the same time
Fort Washington was not operating in a vacuum. According to PGCAR's August 2026 Market Watch for Prince George's County, the countywide median sale price was $445,000, up 1.1% year over year. Active listings numbered 2,134, up 15.5%. Average days on market was 38, up 18.8%. New pending sales totaled 687, down 4.2% from July. Sellers received an average of 98.7% of original list price, against 98.5% a year earlier.
So the county was seeing more inventory and slower movement while prices held roughly flat. For comparison, PGCAR's July 2026 report showed a $450,000 median, 2,083 actives, average days on market of 37, and 99.1% of original list.
Financing conditions were tightening at the same moment. Per Freddie Mac's survey for the week ending September 17, 2026, the 30-year fixed averaged 6.95% and the 15-year fixed averaged 6.26%. That was up from 6.76% the prior week and up from 6.26% a year earlier. It was 6.65% on August 20, 2026. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun, speaking on September 16, 2026, described rates moving from 6% in late February to 7% that week, and called 7% "the new normal," pointing to an oil price shock, inflation, and the federal deficit, while naming job growth as the factor that could sustain buying.
A buyer's budget is a monthly payment before it is a purchase price. When the rate on that payment moves, the top of what a buyer can reach moves with it. That is the backdrop against which 144 Fort Washington listings failed.
So what separated the 361 from the 144
On this data, the separation is not condition, not marketing, and not square footage. The homes that sold asked less at the start and found their buyer fast. Median days on market of 18 means half the closed sales were under contract inside about two and a half weeks. Median cumulative days on market of 22 means most of them were not relisted retreads.
The homes that failed asked more at the start, waited, cut, and waited again. Median cumulative days on market of 75 means that by the end, many of those houses had accumulated a long public history. A house does not get tired. Its listing does.
The practical takeaway for a Fort Washington homeowner is simple and a little uncomfortable. The original list price is the decision that most predicts the outcome, and it is made before the sign goes in the yard, usually in one conversation, often based on what a neighbor got two years ago. Everything after that is damage control.
That is not an argument for underpricing, and Donnell does not make it as one. Among the 361 closed sales, 34.6% sold above original list and another 20.8% sold at original list. The median sold-to-original ratio across all 361 was exactly 1.0000. Fort Washington sellers who priced to the current buyer pool routinely got their number or better. The problem is not ambition. The problem is picking a number that never had a buyer behind it and then spending three months finding that out.
What the next twenty-nine parts cover
This series runs thirty posts. Parts 1 through 8 stay on why listings fail. Parts 9 through 14 cover pricing and preparation, including what a Fort Washington home is actually worth at the median and how price per square foot moves by decade built. Parts 15 through 21 go neighborhood by neighborhood on the closed sales. Parts 22 through 27 are written for buyers, including financing type and the county purchase assistance programs. Parts 28 through 30 cover owning here, including the 1976 median build year and the Homestead Tax Credit.
Every figure in all thirty comes from the same export or from a named outside source. Nothing is estimated.
If you are thinking about selling in Fort Washington
If your home is in 20744 and you are weighing a 2026 or 2027 listing, the most valuable hour you can spend is the one before you pick a number. Donnell Williams Jr. will sit down with your address, pull the comparable closings and the comparable failures, and show you both sets. Call 301.818.0313 or email donnell@dmvprimerealty.com to set that up. DMV Prime Properties is at 12815 Old Fort Road, Suite 105, and the brokerage philosophy is Educate to Elevate, which in practice means you get the numbers before you get a pitch.
Part 2 of The Fort Washington Files looks at the two-week window that decides your sale price, and at why the odds invert after day 30.
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