District officials are “looking into” claims by two attorneys that developers or building owners may have avoided paying millions in taxes over the past decade.
With the District facing a deficit in the hundreds of millions in the coming years, it seems like a potential windfall if it would be feasible to go after the “lost” revenue.

The Case-Shiller report was released last week, and D.C. was the strongest market of the 20-city index. Home prices were up 0.9 percent from February to March, and up 4.3 percent from last March. That’s compared to the national trend of prices falling 5.1 percent from last year. That’s not to say that prices in D.C. have been on a steady climb.

Good morning Washington. The Susan J Komen race for the cure is underway, so expect some additional pedestrian traffic and road closings around the National Mall. A friendly reminder that the Franconia-Springfield and Van Dorn Street Metro stations are closed and there’s single tracking on the Blue and Red Lines this weekend. There will also be some road closings around the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and near Yortkown High School in Arlington.

While some of us spend chunks of our day in search of a coffee shop with decent WiFi, others have jumped on the 4G train. But finding a signal outside the Beltway has often been a challenge.

While 2010 seemed to be the year that you could hardly set foot on the Metro without bumping into someone entranced by their Kindle, the one big knock on Amazon’s popular e-reader was that it did not support any kind of e-book lending program, while the Nook and Sony’s e-reader did. That should change later this year. Amazon has announced that it has partnered with Overdrive to launch Kindle Library Lending at 11,000 libraries nationwide, including in the District.

The Case-Shiller numbers are out for December, and Washington’s housing market was the healthiest in the 20-city index over the past 12 months. Home prices were up 0.3 percent from November to December, but were also up 4.1 percent from December 2009 to December 2010.

According to new data from the Brookings Institution, D.C.’s home price recovery is “among the worst in the nation,” ranking 33rd on a list of the 100 biggest housing markets. What’s that you say? You thought the D.C. housing market was doing pretty well, up, say, 4.5 percent year over year?

It may not be quite as sexy as the X Prize or the Netflix prize, but MRIS, which is the listing provider for D.C. and quite a bit of the mid-Atlantic region has announced a MRIS Innovation contest to develop a local real estate app, with a grand prize of $25,000.

D.C.-area home prices on the whole were up in August, bucking the national trend. But some Maryland and Virginia homes appeared to be really priced to move in the third quarter of this year, according to data provided by ZipRealty. Three ZIP Codes in D.C. proper appeared on the discount brokerage’s “cool” list (20032, 20037 and 20024), which is for areas where homes are selling below list price on average.

Last spring, we noted that Atlantic business editor Megan McArdlejust could not find a tolerable home in the District on which to spend her federally-subsidized home buyer tax credit! McCardle received a fair amount of criticism from various sources for saying things like there are no Metro stops in Anacostia. (But there is a Ray’s the Steaks nearby!)