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Azmera AbrahamReal Estate Intelligence & Data Science

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Combining real estate expertise with data science and product thinking to explore housing markets, uncover meaningful insights, and develop technology that solves real-world problems.

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Featured research

Research Working Paper 01Exploratory analysisVerification ongoing

The Price of Staying: How Housing Prices and Borrowing Costs Changed Across DC Condominium and Residential-House Transactions, 2015–2025

An exploratory working paper on what recorded DC condominium and house sales cost in real terms — and what financing a median-priced purchase implied as mortgage rates rose.

Read the working paper

Using 80,985 candidate qualified sales recorded in the District of Columbia's CAMA (Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal) data from 2015 to 2025, this working paper compares how transaction prices and illustrative borrowing costs changed for condominiums and residential houses. After adjusting for inflation, the median condominium transaction price in 2024 was 15.4% lower than in 2015, while the median residential-house price was 8.6% higher (2024 dollars). Fixed-basket checks that hold the 2015 mix of unit sizes or bedroom counts constant point in the same direction. Over 2015–2025, modeled monthly principal-and-interest payments on a median-priced purchase rose from $1,664 to about $2,400 for condominiums and from $2,569 to about $5,056 for houses. These are descriptive, exploratory results: they are not repeat-sales appreciation estimates, they do not establish causes, and key data definitions are still being verified with the DC Office of Tax and Revenue.

Author
Azmera Abraham
Published
November 2, 2026
Reading time
11 minutes
Topic
Housing Affordability
  1. 01

    Housing Affordability

    Who can afford to buy, rent, and stay — and how that is changing across places and incomes.

  2. 02

    Real Estate Markets

    Supply, pricing, and transaction behavior, read through both data and practitioner experience.

  3. 03

    Economic Trends

    Rates, employment, migration, and the macro forces that shape local housing outcomes.

  4. 04

    Product Innovation

    Discovery-led tools and workflows for agents, consumers, and housing stakeholders.

Research Series 001In progress

The Price of Staying: How Housing Affordability Has Changed Across the DMV

Research Series 001 examines how home prices, mortgage payments and household incomes have changed across the DMV, one phase at a time. Phase 1, Working Paper 01, analyzes Washington, DC sales only. Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland are future phases: no data from those areas has been analyzed or published yet.

Study period
2015–2025
Series coverage (phased)
Washington, DC · Northern Virginia · Suburban Maryland
View the research framework See the companion dashboard

Open questions the series will test

  1. Q1Phase 1 (DC): Did condominium and residential-house prices follow different real paths between 2015 and 2024, and does that hold after fixed-basket size and bedroom checks?
  2. Q2Phase 1 (DC): How much of the change in illustrative monthly payments between 2015 and 2025 reflects higher rates rather than higher prices?
  3. Q3Later phases: Did Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland follow different affordability paths from DC? (Not yet studied.)
  4. Q4Later phases: Do local transaction records and index-based measures such as the FHFA HPI point in the same direction? (Not yet studied.)
  5. Q5Later phases: How did prices and payments change relative to household incomes from the Census ACS? (Not yet studied.)

From the research desk

Research & Perspectives

All research

Research, methods notes, and practitioner perspectives on housing affordability, market intelligence, and product development. Each piece is labeled with what kind of work it is — empirical research or an experience-based perspective — so readers know how to weigh it.

Data Lab

Dashboards, models, and AI tools

Applied experiments that turn public and market data into tools — each documented with its data, assumptions, and limits.

Enter the Data LabProduct Lab

Product case studies, start to finish

From problem framing and discovery to PRDs, prioritization, roadmaps, and lessons — shown through a structured case-study format.

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Editorial standards

How the work is made

Research here aims to be useful to practitioners, journalists, and policymakers — which means being clear about what the evidence does and does not show.

Read the full standards
01Sources
Every published piece lists its datasets and links to the original publisher.
02Methods
Methods and code are documented so analysis can be checked and reproduced.
03Uncertainty
Limitations and margins of error are stated, not buried.
04Labels
Forthcoming, draft, and illustrative work is always marked as such.