Million-dollar home sales heat up in Richmond

Axios

21-05-2025

Competition and out-of-town buyers with bigger budgets are pushing more parts of the Richmond metro into the millionaire home club, agents tell Axios.
Why it matters: The majority of Richmonders don't make million-dollar house money, at least if U.S. Census Bureau data is any indication.
The big picture: Before the pandemic, million-dollar home deals were a rarity in Richmond, Dawson Boyer with Providence Hill Real Estate tells Axios.
And the region's occasional million-dollar home sales were concentrated in a few parts of town, like the Fan and Windsor Farms, or on specific streets, like Hanover, Grove and Monument avenues.
That changed with Covid and the influx into metro Richmond of more than 50,000 newcomers in four years.
Between the lines: Many of those transplants came here from bigger cities — often armed with equity from home sales in pricier markets or remote jobs paying bigger-city salaries. At the same time, locals were looking to level up their homes in search of more space for their remote jobs.
Plus, the Richmond region, like most of the country, hasn't been building quickly enough to meet demand.
All of this helped drive up Richmond's home prices and created the "kind of crazy" home sale market we see today, Boyer says.
Case in point: $1 million-plus listings are cropping up everywhere, in Westover Hills, Forest Hill, parts of Stratford Hills, Northside, and the Near West End.
They're also in James River and Midlothian high school districts in Chesterfield County, as well as in Freeman and Godwin high school districts in Henrico County.
By the numbers: 114 homes in metro Richmond sold for $1 million or more in 2019, according to an Axios review of data from the Richmond Association of Realtors.
Last year, 496 homes in metro Richmond sold for $1 million or more.
As of Tuesday, 170 homes had sold for at least $1 million this year, putting RVA on track to surpass all of 2020's million-dollar-plus home sales by the end of this month.
Reality check: The median home sale price in metro Richmond is $410,000, per Richmond real estate data from April. That's up nearly 4% year over year.
The intrigue: Bidding wars are driving up prices, creating a $1 million home where one wasn't before.
Of the 170 homes that have sold for $1 million or more this year, just 148 had been listed for seven figures.
Boyer said that over the weekend, his $950,000 listing sold for $1.1 million, and a couple of weeks ago, his colleague had a $1.6 million listing go for $2.3 million.
What's surprising in the market now, though, Boyer says, is the number of cash offers coming in, especially in the Near West End, Fan and Museum District.
"I bet if you pulled 20 houses" from those neighborhoods, "14 of them were cash deals," he says.
In some cases, Boyer has seen transplants flush with recent home-sale money driving the cash sales, but increasingly, "it's early transfer of wealth" — that is, parents gifting their children their inheritance early so their kids can finally get into the housing market.
Zoom out: Richmond isn't the only city seeing a million-dollar home boom. There are now 233 U.S. cities where a typical starter home costs at least $1 million — up from 85 cities in March 2020, according to a Zillow report.