Downtown McLean Keeps Approving Condos. Few of Them Stay Condos.

Northern Virginia has more condos and townhomes for sale than it has had in years. In its September 2026 report, the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors counted condo and townhome inventory up 49.7% from September 2025. Detached-home inventory rose just 5.7% over the same stretch. In downtown McLean, the new for-sale condo homes you can actually walk through right now come down to the last few units at one building. The pipeline behind it keeps changing shape before anything gets poured.

That gap matters to one reader in particular. If you own a detached house in McLean and want a condo without leaving town, the regional numbers suggest you'll have choices. The downtown ledger suggests you'll have fewer than the headline implies, and that the timing of your sale should follow the projects, not the press release.

Where the regional numbers stop applying

NVAR's September 2026 figures describe a market with more listings and steady prices. The regional median sold price was $744,950, up 4.2% year over year. Average days on market held at 28, and months of supply reached 2.5. Those figures cover a multi-jurisdiction region, though, and most of the new condo and townhome supply is coming from places built very differently from McLean.

McLean is close to all detached houses. Fairfax County data cited by FFXnow puts the share of single-family detached homes at about 93% of McLean's housing units. At the top of that detached market, the numbers are big. FFXnow reported that 76 of the 144 sales in ZIP 22101 during the second quarter of 2026 cleared the region's $1.9 million luxury threshold.

So a McLean owner who sells a detached house usually leaves the closing with buying power. What they often lack is a local place to put it that isn't another detached house. The county's McLean Community Business Center plan, adopted in June 2021, was supposed to start fixing that by bringing multifamily housing to the downtown core.

The downtown ledger, as of mid-October 2026

Here's every downtown project with a known for-sale connection or an open tenure question, and where each one stood in its most recent public reporting.

Add up the units that have been built and sold as condos and you get 165. That's The Signet's 121 plus The Lowell's 44, and nearly all of them are spoken for. Since 2023, the county has approved or reviewed 405 more downtown units. None of them was a confirmed for-sale condo in its most recent public reporting.

How 104 condos turned into a different building

The McLean Professional Park approval is the clearest example. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved T&M McLean Ventures' five-story, 104-unit condo building in May 2024. It came with a 192-space underground garage and would replace half of the office park's 12 commercial townhouses. The developer also committed to 12,970 square feet of publicly accessible park space, undergrounded utilities and a 12-foot shared-use path along Chain Bridge Road.

Two years later, FFXnow reported that Sunrise Senior Living has a contract to buy 2.8 acres of the site. On September 2, 2026, it filed a rezoning application for a continuing care facility with 145 independent-living units. The building would expand Sunrise at McLean Village next door at 1515 Chain Bridge Road. It would be about the same size, height and square footage as the approved condo building, and Sunrise would deliver the same pedestrian improvements.

The application's own reasoning is the most useful document a would-be condo buyer can read. It argues that, given market conditions in Downtown McLean, the approved condo product, with "large units at price points" aimed at affluent buyers, would most likely have drawn the same buyers as the independent-living plan. On that reading, the two options compete for the same buyers, and the senior living building adds services, wellness programming and continuum-of-care amenities.

The sale had not closed as of FFXnow's September 22 report. As a condition of the purchase contract, the proposal keeps the option to build the existing condo approval if the deal falls through. As of that report, the largest approved for-sale condo project downtown had become a fallback clause.

Why the buildings that do rise take so long

The one new condo building that made it to model tours shows what the economics look like up close. When Winthrop's 44-unit project at 6707 Old Dominion Drive broke ground in March 2023, FFXnow reported that supply-chain problems and rising costs had held it up. The builder said it spent eight months with Winthrop getting the numbers to work. Temporary parking during construction was another hurdle, and Winthrop said the project "would've been dead" without off-site parking arrangements. That approval dated to 2018, so the building took years to go from approval to dirt moving.

The newer projects are keeping their options open in public. Highcrest President Colin Dean told FFXnow in July 2026 that the company hadn't decided whether the 115 Elm Street units would be rentals or for-sale condos. The proposal calls for a seven-story building with studios through three-bedrooms, a three-level underground garage and about 16,371 square feet of office space that Keller Williams would return to after construction. When JAG Partners' 130-unit Astoria was approved in October 2023, the developer hadn't named a tenure either. County parcel records refreshed this month list AG Astoria Partners LLC as owner of 6858 Old Dominion Drive.

Cypress Real Estate's 1368 Beverly Road made its choice. The Board approved the 56 units in March 2026 as an apartment building with ground-floor retail, seven of them workforce units.

A downtown approval in McLean settles height, density and sidewalks. Whether you'll ever be able to buy one of the units is often decided later, by the developer, after costs, financing and buyer demand have had their say.

What this does to the timing of a local downsize

The practical friction lands on the seller. If you put a detached house on the market expecting to buy into a new downtown building, your timeline now depends on someone else's tenure decision, a land sale that hadn't closed as of late September, and construction schedules that have run long before. For downtown McLean condos, the realistic pool is the last few new units at The Lowell plus resales from the 165 condo homes already built across The Signet and The Lowell. Only a small share of those come up for sale in any given month.

A few checks are worth running before your sale date is set:

1. Confirm tenure on the record. An approval marked "multifamily" can still be rentals. Highcrest and Astoria hadn't committed as of their latest public filings.
2. Follow the Sunrise sale. If it closes and the rezoning moves forward, the 104 approved condos at 1477 Chain Bridge Road come off the table. If it doesn't close, the condo approval stays alive.
3. Read rezoning filings directly. Each project above has a public application in Fairfax County's PLUS system, and the filings say more about intended buyers than the renderings do.
4. Price the resale pool honestly. With so few condo homes downtown, a single listing at The Signet or The Lowell can set a buyer's expectations for months. Line up your sale and purchase with that thin supply in mind, not with the regional inventory growth.

None of this means the CBC plan is failing. The Signet sold out, The Lowell is close behind, and more applications keep arriving. It does mean that in downtown McLean, the condo supply a downsizer can actually buy grows one finished building at a time, while each new approval stays an open question until the developer decides what to sell.

If you're weighing a move from a McLean detached home to a downtown condo, Bernstein Homes can help you map your sale against the units that are actually coming to market and prepare your house to sell when the right one appears. Schedule a Consultation, and we'll start with the ledger above.