The Seattle-area housing market is heading into November with a combination we have not seen very often in recent years: a normal seasonal slowdown layered on top of unusually high inventory. That distinction matters. November almost always brings fewer new listings, shorter daylight hours, holiday distractions, and a smaller pool of active buyers. But 2026 is entering that quieter season with considerably more homes already on the market than a year ago. The result is not si

A seller can do everything right — prepare the house, attract a strong offer, negotiate the contract, and make it through inspection — only to hit a new problem a few weeks before closing: the appraisal comes in below the agreed sale price. That can feel especially confusing because the buyer already decided the home was worth the contract amount. But the appraisal is answering a different question. The buyer is deciding what the property is worth to them. The lender is decid

Aurora Avenue has always been a road with two identities. It is State Route 99, a major north-south highway carrying commuters, freight, and one of the region’s busiest bus routes. At the same time, it is the main street for a string of North Seattle neighborhoods where people live, shop, walk to transit, send children to school, and increasingly see new apartments replacing older low-rise commercial sites. For decades, those two roles have not fit together especially well. M

A backyard can look completely ordinary and still contain something that matters a great deal when you try to build, grade, remove vegetation, change drainage, or sell the property. A steep wooded bank may qualify as a protected slope. A seasonal-looking drainage channel may be regulated as a stream. A soggy corner that rarely holds standing water can still be part of a wetland. And even when the critical feature itself is outside the area you want to use, a required buffer a

Retaining walls are easy to overlook when they have been part of a yard for decades. A concrete wall beside the driveway, an old timber wall at the back of the lot, or a rockery holding up a slope can start to feel like part of the landscape rather than part of the structure of the property. Then something changes. The wall looks a little more tilted than you remember. A crack appears. Soil begins washing out from behind it. Water starts collecting at the base during heavy ra

Selling a rental is different from selling the house you live in. The property may look like any other single-family home, condo, duplex, or small multifamily building from the street, but there is another layer to the transaction: someone already lives there under a rental agreement, with rights that do not disappear simply because the owner wants to sell. That does not make a tenant-occupied property unusually difficult to sell. Investors buy occupied rentals every day, and

For years, the old Houghton Park-and-Ride was mostly a piece of transportation infrastructure people drove past on 116th Avenue NE. Then Metro stopped using it as a park-and-ride. Kirkland bought the roughly five-acre property, turned it temporarily into a mix of pickleball, gardens, biking, and skate features, and began considering what a permanent public use could look like. Now the temporary phase is over. The former Houghton Park-and-Ride at 6920 NE 70th Place is being re

If you looked into a heat pump, new water heater, insulation, or another efficiency upgrade a year or two ago, the incentive landscape may look familiar at first glance. That can be misleading. Some of the federal tax credits homeowners became used to seeing in rebate guides are gone for 2026. At the same time, Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, the City of Seattle, Shoreline, Eastside cities, King County, and Washington state still have active programs that can reduce t

Walk through a newer house and the outlets with TEST and RESET buttons are hard to miss. They show up in bathrooms, kitchens, garages, laundry areas, and outside. Walk through a Seattle-area house built in the 1950s or 1960s, and you may find only one or two — or none that are immediately visible. That difference does not necessarily mean something is wrong. Ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection, usually shortened to GFCI, has expanded substantially over the decades as

Solar panels can be an appealing feature when a Washington home goes on the market. They may reduce electricity purchased from the utility, give buyers a clearer picture of future energy costs, and make a home stand out to someone who values efficiency. But the panels themselves are only part of the story. For a seller, the first question is not simply, “Does the house have solar?” It is: Who owns the equipment, is there still debt attached to it, what agreement exists with t

Bellevue’s September housing numbers tell a story that is becoming familiar across the Seattle area, but with an Eastside twist. Buyers have considerably more inventory to choose from, fewer homes are going under contract than a year ago, and sellers are giving up more ground from their original asking prices. Yet Bellevue home values have not simply rolled over. The median residential sale price in September was about $1.89 million, up 8.3% from a year earlier. That combinat

For years, Mountlake Terrace’s future Town Center existed mostly in plans: taller buildings near transit, more housing around 56th Avenue West, new storefronts, better sidewalks, and a downtown that felt less like a collection of low-rise properties and more like a walkable center. Now the transit piece is real. Link light rail opened in Mountlake Terrace in August 2024, and as of fall 2026 both the 1 and 2 Lines stop at the station. What has followed is not one giant wave of

A fence can look like the property line for 30 years without actually being on it. A driveway may appear to belong to one house even though part of it crosses an easement. An old garage can sit close enough to a lot line that nobody is quite sure whether it meets today's setbacks. Then somebody wants to remodel, replace the fence, sell the house, or resolve a disagreement with a neighbor, and the question suddenly becomes important: where is the property line, exactly? That i

Most homeowners don’t think much about pests until they spot one in the kitchen, hear scratching in the walls, or notice damage that suddenly seems impossible to ignore. But by the time pests make themselves obvious, the problem may have been developing quietly for weeks — or even months. Here in the Pacific Northwest, fall is an especially good time to pay attention. The rains are returning, temperatures are dropping, and winter weather is approaching. Just as we start spend

If I had to describe our real estate market right now in one sentence, it would be: buyers have more choices, sellers have more competition, and negotiation is back. September continued a trend we have been watching for much of 2026. Inventory is substantially higher than it was a year ago, homes are generally taking longer to sell, and buyers have more room to be selective. At the same time, this is not one market. Single-family homes continue to perform noticeably better th

Homeowners insurance is there to protect you when something goes wrong, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should file a claim every time you have damage. Sometimes the decision is obvious. If you have a major fire, significant water damage, or a large storm loss, that is exactly what insurance is for. But what if the damage is only a little more than your deductible? That is where the decision gets more complicated. Insurance companies can look at your claims history when

A crack running across a wall can be easy to ignore for years — until one day you notice it looks longer than you remember. A thin line in a concrete foundation can create the opposite reaction, making a perfectly ordinary older house suddenly feel like it might have a major structural problem. The reality is somewhere in between. Cracks are common in houses, particularly as materials dry, buildings settle, temperatures change and decades of small movements accumulate. Some a

September gave Seattle-area homebuyers something that has been scarce for much of the past decade: a genuinely larger selection of homes to choose from. King County finished the month with 8,058 active residential and condominium listings, 31.1% more than a year ago. Snohomish County's inventory grew even faster, climbing 44.2% to 2,967 active listings. At the same time, fewer buyers were putting homes under contract, and closed sales declined in both counties. Yet prices bar

A shared driveway can be so ordinary that homeowners barely think about it. Two neighbors use the same paved entrance, everyone knows where to park, somebody calls the paving company when the asphalt gets rough, and the arrangement may work for decades without much discussion. Then one of the homes goes up for sale. Suddenly, buyers want to know exactly who owns the driveway, who has the legal right to use it, who pays for repairs, whether anyone can park in the shared portio

For decades, Northgate was defined by a few enormous pieces of infrastructure: Interstate 5, acres of parking, a regional mall, and a bus transit center. Most of those pieces are still visible. But the way they fit together is changing quickly. The former Northgate Mall property now has apartments, a hotel, the Kraken Community Iceplex, new restaurants and retail, while construction continues across portions of the site. A few blocks away, Seattle Housing Authority is beginni