WASHINGTON — Several of President Donald Trump’s well-heeled appointees deployed some of their wealth to purchase multimillion dollar homes in the District, and those purchases had an acute impact on the luxury market in the nation’s capital.
Real estate firm Redfin said the average price for a luxury home in D.C. in the first quarter was 32.6 percent higher than then average price of a luxury sale one year earlier — by far the largest year-over-year jump in any metro area in the country.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross paid more than $10 million for his Massachusetts Heights home and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin purchased his nearby home for $12.5 million. Typically D.C. records only a few $10-million sales in any given year.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson paid $5.5 million for his Kalorama home.
Those three high-dollar sales alone in the first quarter boosted the overall luxury price point for the entire city to just over $2.7 million. Compare that to the average sale price for the bottom 95 percent of D.C.’s housing market: $570,000
Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner also occupy a Kalorama home that sold for a reported $5.5 million, although it is believed that they are renting that property from its current owner.
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