Who is your neighbor....?

I got a call yesterday from a client to tell me about her new neighbor who happens to be 'Obama's speechwriter'. She was 'Tres EXCITED'. She think she might invite him over for tea. How did she find out? This article in the New York Times. Hmmmmmm.... I wonder who my neighbor's are?

(An aside- the last two weeks have been insanely busy - and it is DECEMBER! Maybe this - and the fact that interest rates went down quite a bit
Location! Location! ... Obama!

THESE days, the capital’s top real estate brokers are keeping more secrets than usual.

Or trying to, anyway.

Driving around town on Tuesday, Terri Robinson, the longtime Washington real estate agent who was responsible for selling the Clintons their $2.85-million house on Whitehaven Street, said she has seen a trickle of high-profile newcomers in the early days of December.

“I have to be discreet, you know,” Ms. Robinson said, before letting it slip that she was en route to meet a client: Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter for President-elect Barack Obama, who was about to sign the closing papers on a luxury condominium in the Dupont Circle neighborhood.

On Wednesday, Jim Bell, a broker who deals in some of the city’s most expensive enclaves, said he had just given a tour of a six-bedroom Spanish-style house on California Street in the exclusive Kalorama neighborhood — for the wife of a very important soon-to-be Washington official.

“I can’t tell you who it was,” Mr. Bell said conspiratorially. “But it was a $3-million showing. For someone coming in from Chicago.”

He continued: “Their advance people have already been inside the house twice. Two different groups.” (The second group, he said, was the Secret Service.)

There have been a lot of potential buyers from Chicago quietly descending on Washington this month, according to real estate brokers. Multimillion-dollar homes have been snapped up in all-cash deals. First-time buyers have toured apartments in the fashionable neighborhoods of Logan Circle and the U Street corridor. Big-money donors have gone house-hunting in the upscale blocks of Kalorama and Georgetown.

Yes, change is coming to Washington — at least it in the real estate market, which is loosely segregated by both race and party, and thus subject to abrupt shifts in population every four or eight years.

Take the last eight years of Republican rule. Georgetown, for decades the fabled center of the city’s power elite, was said to have been displaced by the bucolic Virginia enclave of McLean, or “the new home of America’s ruling class,” as The New Republic put it in a 2006 cover story.

Now as the Obama Democrats begin their move to Washington, they appear to be moving the center of power back to the district. Moneyed Democrats are still attracted to Georgetown and Kalorama, young families to Chevy Chase and Capitol Hill, and 20-somethings to Adams Morgan, U Street and Logan Circle.

In the last month, there has been a sharp increase in interest in properties across the district, in both upscale and gentrifying neighborhoods, said Jim Firkser, an agent with TTR Sotheby’s International Realty.

THE surge in interest, from Democratic administration officials, diplomats, journalists and big-money donors, has given real estate agents across Washington a glimmer of hope amid a cratering national housing market.

Fred Kendrick, a broker for TTR Sotheby’s who writes a monthly housing report on Washington, said the local market had remained relatively flat all year, until sales hit a wall in October — down 20 percent from the previous October. (So far in 2008, the average single-family house in Washington sold for $682,428, down 1 percent from 2007.)

But last week saw a trickle of significant sales, including five houses in Georgetown priced from $1.5 million to $5 million.

And Mr. Kendrick predicted there would be more to come from new members of Congress and the Obama administration, some of whom have recently purchased property.

“The assistant secretaries, the undersecretaries, they’ll buy,” he said, adding that some announced Obama Cabinet nominees — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example — already own homes in Washington. “I’m thinking: ‘Please, appoint some people who don’t live here. Help us out a bit.’ ”

Some Obama advisers — Chicago transplants like Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, and Desirée Rogers, the new White House social secretary — are starting from scratch in Washington. (After her appointment was announced Nov. 24, Ms. Rogers said in an interview that she had not found a place to live yet.)

Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s incoming chief of staff, lives in a basement apartment on Capitol Hill but has told friends that he will shop for a house when his family relocates from Chicago in the spring.

Many Republicans who are out of official power will stay in Washington, and many incoming members of the Obama administration (Eric H. Holder Jr., Bill Burton) already have homes here.

But the younger set is settling in Melrose Place-like proximity around 16th Street in Dupont Circle, one of the city’s grander thoroughfares that also happens to lead directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a mile away.

After a weekend of searching in mid-November, Mr. Favreau bought a condominium in the Chastleton, an eight-story Gothic-style luxury building, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur once lived. It will be a dramatic switch from his most recent housing situation, where he shared a house in Lincoln Park with other Obama staff members.

“In Chicago, we lived in a house with seven people,” Mr. Favreau said. “Everyone’s pretty much staying close together here.”

Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman, moved into an apartment several blocks away from Mr. Favreau. A short stretch from there is the apartment shared by Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Michelle Obama, and her boyfriend, Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Mr. Obama.

And supporting the old real estate adage that Democrats rent and Republicans buy, a healthy number of young Obama staff members will settle into rentals. Reid Cherlin, another Obama staff member, has moved into a rental in the Dupont Circle neighborhood.

“A lot of the people who are coming in are kids,” said Pat Kennedy, a Washington broker who also writes Capital Homes, a real estate blog. “I think they’re going to be looking for rooms and group houses on Craigslist.”

One broker cited the hangers-on, Democrats who don’t work for Obama but just want to get in on the action. “Three weeks before the election, several Obama-related people, big-money supporters, started buying properties here,” said the broker, who asked to remain anonymous because the deals were confidential. “These are people who aren’t even working for the administration. They just really want to be a part of the movement and a part of this moment in time.”

While it is still too early to tell if the change in administration will have a lasting effect on the real estate market, one broker said that the last time there was such a potentially large swing was when the Republicans seized control of Congress in 1994 and the Democrats left town en masse.

“People are predicting that there are going to be 40,000 transactions,” Ms. Kennedy said. “And people who have houses on the market or are about to put them on, think the Obama people are going to be their salvation.”

But the people who may suffer the most are the Republicans who are leaving town and trying to unload their properties. After all, home prices have stalled, Ms. Kennedy said. “I do have one listing from a Bush administration official, who’s going back to California,” she said, clucking her tongue at the timing. “I guess the Bush people’s loss is the Obama people’s gain.”

NEW YORK TIMES. PUBLISHED DEC 5th by By JULIE BOSMAN