The view of 3303 Water Street NW condo building from the C & O Canal in Georgetown on April1, 2015. | John Shinkle/POLITICO | John Shinkle/POLITICO Jumping the (Real Estate) Gun?

Is someone optimistic that Hillary Clinton is going to be spending a lot more time in Washington, D.C., in the years ahead? Donna Shalala, the longtime Clinton family confidante who was announced as the head of the New York-based Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in March, closed that same month on a Georgetown condo in an upscale building with waterfront views. According to real estate records, Shalala purchased for $862,500 the one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit on Water Street NW under a trust account in her name; at just 924 square feet, that’s quite the pricey pied a terre.

Sources say Shalala will likely spend most of her time in New York for her foundation job, which would make the Georgetown property a secondary home—the type of place you’d use frequently if your boss, for instance, was the First Husband and your other boss was the President. Shalala has gotten used to cushy digs. As president of the University of Miami, where she has been since leaving the Clinton administration as secretary of health and human services in 2001, she lived at the school’s massive Coral Gables presidential house until it was sold for $9 million in 2012. Since then she’s been bunking at a new, 9,000-square-foot, two-story home, complete with an elevator, dubbed “Ibis House,” in Pinecrest, an expensive gated community. Shalala is slated to depart University of Miami in early May, at the end of the academic year.


Price-per-square-foot notwithstanding, Shalala’s loft-style space is one of the smaller condos in the Georgetown building, but she can always upgrade. Susan Lehrman, local philanthropist and ex-wife of Sam Lehrman, the heir to the Giant Foods fortune, recently listed the penthouse in the same building; it’s on the market at $6.5 million.