Market Data 
- A Washington DC developer was forced to build a skinny home — six feet wide at its narrowest point.
- Zoning laws made it hard to build any bigger on the 0.02-acre property, the listing agent said.
- The narrow home listed for $799,900 in July 2023, but the price just dropped further to $570,265.
A real-estate developer in Washington, DC, had a small canvas to build a modern home.
Now there’s a 10-foot-wide, one-bedroom skinny home on what used to be a driveway.
It’s for sale for $570,265 — an almost 29% price reduction from the $799,900 it was asking when it first hit the market in July 2023.
Jennifer Young, the home’s listing agent with Keller Williams Chantilly Ventures, said zoning laws changed shortly after developer Nady Samnang purchased the 0.02-acre property, so they had to either scrap the idea of building a home or tighten their floor plan.
“It literally came down to sometimes a centimeter of getting the exact measurements right to both comply with DC zoning and build a really nice home that was functional,” Young told Business Insider.
Samnang, a contractor bought it in 2021 for $200,000, according to the Zillow listing.
Samnang, tasked with figuring out how to build a narrow home on a driveway in between two alleys, told The Washington Post that the design went through many iterations and took nearly seven months to get approved by the city’s permit office.
“I wanted to quit so many times,” he told the Post.
The skinny house has drawn interest from people across the country.
“It’s one of the most-viewed homes on Zillow that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Young said. “We do have quite a bit of looky-loos, but we have a lot of first-time buyers looking and investors — people that want to Airbnb it or rent it to college kids.”
