As owner of Evers & Co. Real Estate in Washington, D.C., just across the state line from Chevy Chase, her main territory includes lower Montgomery County, but ‘‘we’ve sold up in Frederick, Upper Marlboro, the Eastern Shore also,” she said.

The Business Gazette talked to Evers recently about the current market.

There were newspaper articles this week about home prices declining and worries about the housing market overall. What’s your take on that?

The national numbers are an average of the entire U.S. marketplace, and they will vary according to how healthy the local economy is in that area. The Washington Metro marketplace has the strongest economic marketplace in the Eastern U.S. and one of the strongest in the nation. For our market, prices actually went up in March. Accordingly, our real estate market is already rebounding from the downturn of 2006.

And you say you have a shortage of houses in your market?

I’ve got agents saying to me, ‘‘I’ve got all these buyers and I’ve got nothing to sell them,” [with] multiple contracts on houses.

Sellers just absolutely will not get with it, reality-wise, how to price it. Or they are not just fixed up at all. Not even a coat of paint ... those tend to sit on the market, too.

So we’ve gone from too much stuff, to a steady stream of declining inventory. A lot of people took their house off the market for the holidays [end of 2006] and we thought, OK, there’ll be a glut in January or February. No such thing.

My theory is a lot of news reporting having to do with the real estate market is very negative, because bad news is news, good news is not news. What you were hearing all during 2006 is how the market was going down the tubes. And the market is now recovering but we are getting no coverage on this.

So sellers are thinking, ‘‘I’m not going out there and getting creamed, getting so much less for my house than I thought I could once get like in 2005.”

But really, there’s not much difference in what you could get now than what you could get in 2005.

How many agents do you have?

I have 50 and I’m looking to add 10 more. We’re in an expansion mode right now.

How did you get to this area?

My husband came to work for government. I got my real estate license in 1975 after my kids were in school. At one point I had three under the age of 5; my kids are two years apart.

I will say after that, everything else you do in your life is easy. There is nothing harder than having a little brood of little kids running around that you’re in charge of. Everything else is a cinch.

Why go into real estate?

I’ve always been very interested in architecture, design, redoing properties. My husband and I redid houses in California, big time. We always bought horrible fixer-uppers and redid them. We did it as a hobby.

Do you remember your first sale?

Oh, of course I do. Everybody always remembers their first sale. And this was before they had fax machines, so I remember driving around at 2 o’clock in the morning, getting things signed. That house was $71,000, in Chevy Chase.

What made you think you could start your own company and succeed?

Back then it was a little different from what it is now. There were a lot of small independent companies in 1985. A lot of them dropped by the wayside in 1990 when we had a pretty serious recession from 1990 to 1997.

This is an area where independent companies can flourish; it’s a sophisticated area. When you’ve got that kind of atmosphere where people are very discerning and where they check everything out, they don’t just look for the Campbell soup brand. They’re going to cross-reference friends and ask, ‘‘OK, who’s the best?”

What’s your range for sales prices?

Our sales prices range from $300,000 to $800,000. Our sales volume for 2006 was $242 million, which was down from $260 million in 2005 because of the downturn.

What was your biggest sale?

Five-something, over $5 million.

Donna Evers

Position: President, broker, Evers & Co. Real Estate Inc., with offices in Washington, D.C., and Bluemont, Va.

Family: Husband, Bob, and three children, including Andrea, an agent for Evers & Co.

Organizations: National Association of Realtors, Greater Capital Association of Realtors, International Real Estate Federation, Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate, Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber of Commerce.