The Month You List Matters Less Than You Think (Part 11 of 30: The Fort Washington Files)
This is Part 11 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.
The most common question a Fort Washington seller asks in September is not about price. It is about timing. Should they go now, or hold until spring? The premise behind the question is that the calendar carries a lot of weight. In this zip code, this year, the calendar carried some weight. It did not carry nearly as much as the list price did.
Donnell sorted all 361 closed sales in his Bright MLS export by the month they settled, and pulled four things for each month: how many closed, the median sale price, the median days on market, and the share that sold for less than the original list price. Here is the whole table, followed by what it does and does not tell a seller.
The table, January through September
Each row is the month of settlement, the number of Fort Washington closings that month, the median sale price, the median days on market, and the share of those sales that closed below their original list price:
- January: 29 sales, $480,000, 43 days, 55.2 percent below original
- February: 37 sales, $492,500, 18 days, 43.2 percent
- March: 56 sales, $459,500, 19.5 days, 42.9 percent
- April: 45 sales, $471,000, 12 days, 46.7 percent
- May: 51 sales, $475,000, 21 days, 49.0 percent
- June: 62 sales, $469,500, 15.5 days, 35.5 percent
- July: 40 sales, $453,250, 17 days, 50.0 percent
- August: 30 sales, $483,000, 17.5 days, 46.7 percent
- September: 11 sales, $450,000, 11 days, 27.3 percent
September has to carry a warning label. It is a partial month, cut off at September 17, 2026, when Donnell pulled the export. Eleven sales is the smallest count in the table by a wide margin, and a small sample produces numbers that swing. Nobody should build a listing decision on the September row, and this post does not.
Start with the column everyone skips
The share selling below original list price is the column that matters most to a seller, because it is the closest thing in the table to a measure of whether sellers were getting the number they asked for.
Among the eight full months, January was the weakest on that measure at 55.2 percent below original. June was the strongest at 35.5 percent. That is a spread of just under 20 percentage points between the best month of the year and the worst.
Twenty points is not nothing. A seller would rather be in the June column than the January column. But hold that number, because the rest of this post is about what twenty points looks like next to the other spreads in this data.
January is a February and March listing
Before drawing conclusions from the January row, it helps to remember what a settlement month actually is. A home that closed in January was listed weeks or months before that. A home that closed in June was probably listed in the spring.
The January row shows it. Those 29 sales carried a median of 43 days on market, by far the longest of any month in the table. The overall median across all 361 Fort Washington closings this year was 18 days. January's settlements were the slow ones, the listings that had been sitting, and a listing that sits is a listing that has usually negotiated. That is why 55.2 percent of them closed below original.
So the January row is not really a statement about January. It is a statement about what happens to a listing that has been on the market long enough to settle in January. The distinction matters, and it points straight at the real driver.
The pricing spread is four times larger
Part 2 of this series laid out the days on market cliff across all 361 Fort Washington closings. Here is what happens to the below-original share as a listing ages:
Sales that closed within 7 days of listing sold below original 13.0 percent of the time. At 8 to 14 days it was 25.8 percent. At 15 to 30 days, 42.6 percent. At 31 to 60 days, 72.5 percent. At 61 to 90 days, 82.6 percent. Past 90 days, 94.3 percent.
That is a spread of more than 81 percentage points, from 13.0 to 94.3, driven entirely by how long a home sat. The monthly spread was under 20 points. The time on market spread is roughly four times larger.
Part 3 made the same point from the other direction. Of the 361 closed sales, 257 never cut their price. They carried a median of 11 days on market and sold at exactly 100 percent of original list. The 104 that cut at least once carried a median of 60 days on market and sold at 94.83 percent of original. The median cut among that group was $25,000, which was 5.0 percent of original list.
A seller cannot choose which of those two groups they land in by picking a month. They land in one or the other based on where the price starts.
Median price moves less than people expect
The median sale price column swings less than the below-original column does. Across the eight full months it ran from $453,250 in July to $492,500 in February, a spread of about $39,250 on a zip code median of $470,000.
That is real money, and it is also a reminder that median price by month is a composite of whatever mix of homes happened to settle that month. A month with more Tantallon on the Potomac closings at a $605,000 median will read higher than a month with more Devon Hills Condo closings at a $239,900 median. Those swings are mix, not season.
Notice also that February, the second month of the year, posted the highest median in the table at $492,500, and July, deep in what most people call the selling season, posted the lowest at $453,250. If there were a clean seasonal price curve in Fort Washington, it would not look like that.
Volume does have a shape
The one column with a recognizable seasonal pattern is the count. Fort Washington closings built from 29 in January to a peak of 62 in June, then fell to 40 in July and 30 in August.
June alone accounted for 62 of the 361 closings this year, the busiest settlement month in the zip code. March at 56 and May at 51 were the next two.
More closings means more buyers moving, and it also means more competition from other sellers. Those two effects run in opposite directions for any individual listing. The table cannot separate them, and no honest reading of it should pretend otherwise.
Days on market by month
The days on market column is tighter than most sellers expect once January is set aside. February 18, March 19.5, April 12, May 21, June 15.5, July 17, August 17.5. Every full month from February through August landed between 12 and 21 days.
That is a band of nine days across seven months. Against that, the gap between the never-cut group at a median of 11 days and the cut group at a median of 60 days is 49 days. Again, the pricing decision moves the needle several times harder than the calendar does.
The current shelf is the real comparison
Whatever month a Fort Washington seller lists in, they are pricing against the inventory standing on the market that week, not against a historical average.
As of September 17, 2026, Fort Washington had 115 active listings. Their median list price was $499,900, down from a median original list of $520,000, which means the standing inventory has already come down roughly $20,000 from where it started. Forty-eight of those 115, or 42 percent, had been on the market more than 60 days. Fifty-eight of them, or 50 percent, had already cut price. That is about 2.9 months of supply against the 2026 closing pace.
For county context, PGCAR's August 2026 Market Watch reported 2,134 active listings across Prince George's County, up 15.5 percent year over year, with average days on market at 38, up 18.8 percent, and a median sale price of $445,000, up 1.1 percent.
What a seller should actually do with this table
Three things follow from it.
First, do not hold a house off the market for a season on the theory that the calendar will pay you. The full-month spread on the measure that matters was under 20 percentage points, and part of that spread is explained by aging listings settling in the winter rather than by anything about the month itself.
Second, do not treat a strong month as cover for a stretch price. June was the best month in the table and better than a third of June's closings still came in under original list.
Third, put the effort into the number rather than the date. The 28.5 percent of Fort Washington listings that left the market without selling this year, 144 of 505, did not fail because of the month. They carried a median original list of $534,748 against $479,900 for the closed group, on homes that were actually larger at a median 1,952 square feet above grade versus 1,716. They were priced at $267 per square foot on original list against $273 for the closed group, so they were not overpriced per foot. They were priced at an absolute number the local buyer pool could not reach.
Talk through your timing with the numbers in front of you
If a Fort Washington seller is weighing this fall against next spring, that is a conversation worth having with the actual data on the table rather than with a rule of thumb. Donnell Williams Jr. is the broker-owner of DMV Prime Properties at 12815 Old Fort Road in Fort Washington, and he tracks this zip code month by month because it is his home market. He will show a seller what is standing on the shelf against their house right now, what it has already cut, and what the right opening number looks like in either scenario. Call 301.818.0313 or email donnell@dmvprimerealty.com to walk through it.
Part 12 of The Fort Washington Files takes apart the 44.6 percent of Fort Washington sales that closed below asking, and explains how that can be true while the median sale still landed at exactly 100 percent of original list.
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