There is a small garden in front of the older office buildings at Halley Rise, the one you walk past on the way in from the parking lot. Kathy is fond of it. Under the plans a new owner filed this month, a 200-room hotel goes roughly where it sits. That is the kind of detail buried inside a 4.1 million square foot rezoning, and it is why we went through the whole thing block by block. We also dug into the latest Reston sales numbers, which have flipped in a way that surprised both of us: the most expensive homes here are now selling the fastest. We follow this stuff closely as local agents because a hotel replacing a garden and a condo sitting on the market for 26 days are both answers to the same question: what living here is going to feel like in five years.

You can watch the full episode or jump straight to the sections that interest you using the links below.

A penthouse at the JW Marriott Residences at Reston Station sold for $10.9 million, topping the $10.25 million record set in the same building back in April. The new one is the 28th floor. The old one was the 27th. Both were built as two units each and combined into a single full floor, and this one took about two years of custom build-out before the buyers moved in. The views run 360 degrees, from Tysons out to the Blue Ridge.

Every time one of these sells, the comment sections fill up with the same question, which is why anyone would spend eleven million dollars in Reston. We take a swing at answering it.

Watch the JW Marriott segment.

All ten pieces, spread across three separate days, with a selfie at each one. She had the map riding shotgun in her car for a week and planned her errands around it. The pieces were not hard to find, though most of them require getting out of the car and looking around a little.

Public Art Reston is giving away a $500 Visa gift card plus other prizes, and cards can be turned in through August 23. If Kathy's stories talked you into starting one, tell us in the comments how far you got.

Watch the scavenger hunt segment.

The July numbers came in and they run backwards from what you would expect in a market people keep describing as slow. Detached homes in Reston are going under contract in 9 days at a median price of $1.1 million. Townhouses take 13 days at a median of $709,000. Condos take 26 days at a median of $391,000. The cheaper the product, the longer it sits.

Look at the supply side and the same pattern shows up. Homes over a million had 14 active listings and 14 July sales, which is a single month of inventory. Townhouses in the $600,000 to $800,000 band were close behind. Drop to townhouses between $500,000 and $600,000 and there were 11 listings against 7 sales, so the number starts climbing. Reston condos are now sitting at three months of supply, which we have not seen here in a long stretch of years.

Two things are driving it. Condo fees have gone up sharply after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac tightened their requirements on condo associations, pushing them toward larger reserves and better insurance, and buyers are reading those numbers carefully before they write an offer. Meanwhile the average age of a home buyer has climbed to 40, and a 40-year-old with a bigger down payment saved is usually not shopping for an entry-level condo.

Kathy is calling it the summer of the condo, and she means it as an opportunity rather than a warning. Prices are holding roughly steady. What changed is that selling one now takes patience.

Watch the Reston market data segment.

Wegmans opened in 2023 and then, from the street, not much else happened. The Edmund and the Arbor went up, Panera and Chase moved in, and the rest of the site stayed parking lots. Part of the reason is that the original developer sold. WS Development, a Massachusetts company, picked up the undeveloped parcels and the existing office buildings for $42.7 million in July 2025, and this month its affiliate filed a revised plan for what comes next.

Worth saying clearly, because it comes up every time: this is not a bigger project. Halley Rise is already approved at 4.1 million square feet and that number does not move. What moves is where things sit. More housing gets pushed toward the Reston Town Center Metro station, and a large share of the office space slides south.

Block D takes the two office towers, about 775,000 square feet with 75,000 of that as ground-floor retail, split down the middle by a walkway that carries you toward the back of the site. Block E holds the parking, including a 1,504-space garage that goes entirely underground, plus 23,200 square feet of retail. Block G brings 450 residential units and a hotel of up to 200 rooms, which is the piece landing on Kathy's garden. Block H is the biggest single swing: 391 residential units, 800,000 square feet of office, and 108,400 square feet of retail, described in the filing as the new front door to the whole development.

The part we liked most is the open space. Roughly five acres of it, anchored by a green called Heafield Green with a multipurpose lawn, a food and beverage pavilion, a performance stage, and play areas. If you have been to the summer concerts at Halley Rise, that is very likely where they end up. A pedestrian connection called the Mews would run from there to the Metro, and eventually tie into the road network planned for Reston Crossing, the separate and equally large development we covered back in March.

None of this is approved. The application had not yet been accepted for review by county staff as of this week, and the developer held a community meeting on July 31. So there is still runway, and the garden gets at least another season.

Watch the Halley Rise segment.

Put the two stories side by side and they argue with each other in a useful way. Halley Rise is adding hundreds of rental units next to a Metro station on the theory that people want to live in the middle of things. The sales data says the buyers actually writing contracts in Reston right now are older, better capitalized, and heading for detached houses and townhomes while condos wait. Both can be true. Renters and buyers want different things at different points, and Reston is one of the few places around here building for both at once. The question we keep coming back to is whether the density arrives with enough of the other stuff, the parks and the walkways and the pavilion, to make the trade feel worth it. On paper, this plan does more of that than the one it replaces.

Follow along each week to keep up with the stories, debates, and local changes shaping Reston and Herndon. New episodes drop weekly.

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If you own a condo in Reston and the three-month supply number made you sit up, or you are trying to work out what a hotel and 841 new units next to Wegmans does to a particular street, reply to this email. We answer these questions all week for people who are not buying or selling anything. No pressure either way.