What 115 Active Listings Say About Your Competition Right Now (Part 8 of 30: The Fort Washington Files)
This is Part 8 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.
Most sellers price against what their neighbor got last spring. Buyers do not. Buyers price against what is sitting on the shelf the weekend they go out looking, and in Fort Washington on September 17, 2026, that shelf held 115 active listings.
This post is a walk through that shelf, exactly as it stood. Not what sold, not what failed, but what a buyer scrolling on a Saturday morning is comparing your house to right now.
## The shelf has already marked itself down
Start with the two prices. The median list price across those 115 active listings is $499,900. The median original list price on the same group is $520,000.
That gap is the story. The standing inventory in Fort Washington has already come down roughly $20,000 from where it started, collectively, before any individual buyer has made an offer. The shelf is discounting itself.
A seller preparing to list is not joining a market of confident asking prices. They are joining a market where the typical competitor has already blinked once.
It is worth being precise about what that $20,000 is and is not. It is not a measure of what Fort Washington homes lost in value, and it is not the average price cut on any individual listing. It is the distance between where the current inventory started and where it is standing today, measured at the middle of each group. A seller who prices off what the neighbors are asking is pricing off a set of numbers that has already been revised downward once.
Half have cut, and 42 percent have gone stale
Fifty-eight of the 115 active listings, which is 50 percent, have reduced their price at least once.
That figure is worth sitting with next to what the closed data shows. Among the 361 Fort Washington homes that actually sold, only 29 percent ever cut. Among the 144 that failed to sell, 50 percent cut, with a median reduction of $25,000, and came off the market anyway.
The current active shelf is cutting at the failure-group rate, not the closing-group rate. That does not predict anything about how those specific homes will end up, and this post is not making a forecast. It is a description of where they stand today.
Forty-eight of the 115 actives, which is 42 percent, have been on market more than 60 days. The median days on market across the whole active group is 43, with a median cumulative days on market of 60.
Compare that to how Fort Washington homes actually sold. The 361 closed sales carried a median of 18 days on market and a median cumulative days on market of 22. Half the homes that sold this year were under contract inside of three weeks.
So the active shelf is running more than twice the days on market of the homes that closed. That is what an active list looks like in any market, because the fast ones leave and the slow ones accumulate. The useful takeaway is that a large share of what a buyer sees online has been available for a while, and buyers read that.
Roughly 2.9 months of supply
Against the 2026 closing pace in Fort Washington, 115 active listings works out to roughly 2.9 months of supply.
Months of supply answers a simple question. If no new listing entered the market, how long would it take buyers to absorb what is there at the current rate of sales? Under three months is not an oversupplied market by any conventional reading of that measure.
This is the tension a Fort Washington seller has to hold. Supply is not heavy, and yet half the shelf has cut and 42 percent has gone stale. Both are true. Low overall inventory does not protect an individual listing that is priced past its buyer pool, which is the finding that runs through this entire series.
Band by band, who you are actually competing with
Sorted by current list price, here is the entire active shelf, with the median days on market and the share that has already reduced:
- Under $400,000: 25 listings, median 29 days, 44 percent already cut
- $400,000 to $500,000: 36 listings, median 51 days, 61 percent already cut
- $500,000 to $600,000: 24 listings, median 45.5 days, 50 percent already cut
- $600,000 to $800,000: 20 listings, median 49 days, 40 percent already cut
- Over $800,000: 10 listings, median 85.5 days, 50 percent already cut
Find your number on that list. The row you land in is your competition, and the two figures beside it tell you how that row is behaving.
The under $400,000 row is the fastest one
Twenty-five listings, a median of 29 days on market, and 44 percent having cut. That is the shortest days on market of any active band in Fort Washington and the lowest cut rate on the shelf.
It also matches the closed data exactly. Sorted by original list price, listings that opened between $300,000 and $400,000 failed only 17.5 percent of the time, the lowest failure rate of any band in the export, on 80 closed sales against 17 failures.
Two independent measures, the completed sales and the standing inventory, are pointing the same direction. Part 6 of this series covers that band in full.
The middle two bands sit close together and behave similarly. Twenty-four listings between $500,000 and $600,000 at a median of 45.5 days with half already cut, and 20 listings between $600,000 and $800,000 at a median of 49 days with 40 percent cut. On the closed side those same ranges produced fail rates of 33.0 percent and 33.3 percent, nearly identical. A seller moving from one to the other is not changing their odds much. They are changing the size of the buyer pool.
The $400,000 to $500,000 row is the crowded one
Thirty-six listings, the largest group on the shelf. A median of 51 days on market. Sixty-one percent of them have already cut price, the highest reduction rate of any band in Fort Washington.
This is the heart of the local market and the most contested ground in it. The median Fort Washington sale this year closed at $470,000, so this band sits right on top of where buyers actually transact. It is also where the most sellers are trying to stand at the same time.
On the closed side, that band produced 116 sales, more than any other, against 34 failures for a 22.7 percent fail rate. High volume and real risk together.
The top of the shelf moves slowest
The 10 active listings above $800,000 carry a median of 85.5 days on market, nearly double the overall active median of 43, with half having already reduced.
The closed data explains why. Above $800,000, Fort Washington produced 19 failed listings against only 13 closed sales, a 59.4 percent failure rate. More listings failed than sold in that band, which Part 5 of this series covers in detail.
That is a statement about the size of the buyer pool at that price point in this zip code, not about the homes or the streets they sit on. Fort Washington is overwhelmingly a resale market. Only 9 of the 361 closed sales this year were new construction.
What is standing just behind the active list
The 115 actives are not the whole picture. Donnell's export also shows 21 listings active under contract, 21 pending, 18 temporarily off market, and 9 coming soon.
Those last two categories matter for timing. Eighteen homes that will likely return to the active list, plus nine that have announced themselves, means the shelf a seller joins next month is not the shelf they see today.
The county-level numbers point the same way. According to PGCAR's August 2026 report, Prince George's County had 2,134 active listings, up 15.5 percent year over year, with average days on market at 38, up 18.8 percent. The median sale price was $445,000, up 1.1 percent, and sellers received an average of 98.7 percent of original list price against 98.5 percent a year earlier. More inventory, moving slower, at prices that have barely moved.
How to actually use this
Pull up the five or six active listings closest to your house in price, size and age, and look at three fields on each one. Original list price. Current list price. Days on market.
That is the competitive set, and it is the same set a buyer's agent will put in front of a client before writing an offer on your home. If three of those six have already cut and are sitting past 60 days, the market has told you what your number needs to be before you ever ask it to.
Then do one more thing that most sellers skip. Look at what those same six homes offer that yours does not, and the reverse. Among Fort Washington's 361 closed sales this year, 300 had a basement and 61 did not, 252 had a fireplace, 260 had central air, and 140 had a two-car garage. Those features are close to standard in this market rather than premium, so a listing that lacks one is competing at a disadvantage that a price adjustment, not a better description, has to answer for.
The one thing worth adding as context rather than pressure is financing. Freddie Mac's survey for the week ending September 17, 2026 put the 30-year fixed at 6.95 percent, up from 6.76 percent the prior week and 6.26 percent a year earlier, and it was 6.65 percent as recently as August 20, 2026. That moves what a given monthly payment buys, which is the real constraint on the buyer pool for every one of these 115 listings.
Get the competitive set for your specific house
General market numbers are useful. The five listings a buyer will actually put next to yours are more useful. Donnell Williams Jr. is the broker-owner of DMV Prime Properties at 12815 Old Fort Road in Fort Washington, and pulling that competitive set for a specific address is something he does before every listing appointment in this zip code. He will show you the actives your home competes with, what they started at, what they are asking now, and how long they have been sitting, then tell you where your house belongs in that lineup. Call 301.818.0313 or email donnell@dmvprimerealty.com.
Part 9 of The Fort Washington Files takes on the question behind all of this, which is what your Fort Washington home is actually worth.
.png)
.png)