Every year I sit at kitchen tables with Kitsap homeowners who’ve owned their homes for decades. The mortgage is paid off. The property taxes keep climbing. And a surprising number of them have never heard of the Kitsap County senior property tax exemption — Washington’s property tax exemption for seniors, people with disabilities, and disabled…
An accessory dwelling unit — a backyard cottage, a garage conversion, or an apartment inside your home — is one of the most common things people ask me about right now. Some want room for aging parents, some want rental income, and investors want to know whether the numbers work. Almost everyone starts with the…
The most common mistake buyers make in Kitsap isn’t overpaying. It’s buying the wrong type of property for how they actually want to live — then discovering the mismatch six months after closing, when the dock permit process has consumed three weekends, the shared well agreement turned into a neighbor dispute, or the rural acreage…
From the outside, a buyer’s agent can look like the person who opens doors and fills out paperwork. If the transaction goes smoothly, that impression gets reinforced — because smooth transactions feel simple, and it’s easy to assume simple means not much was required. What’s actually happening is the opposite. When a transaction feels smooth,…
Most real estate transactions that feel complicated aren’t actually unusual. They’re normal situations with more moving parts, more paperwork, and fewer easy answers — which makes them feel overwhelming when you’re in the middle of one. In Kitsap specifically, the same four patterns keep coming up: properties with tenants already living there, structures built without…
You’re scrolling through listings and you find it: a 2.5-acre parcel outside Silverdale or a waterfront lot on the peninsula. The price looks reasonable. The photos show open land, room to build, maybe a view. Then you dig in and realize the actual buildable footprint is maybe half — or less — of what you…
The short answer is no — you don’t have to use a real estate agent to buy a home in Washington. But “don’t have to” and “don’t need one” are two different things, and conflating them is where buyers end up in situations they didn’t anticipate. This isn’t a pitch for hiring an agent. It’s…
You’ve probably heard the term “silver tsunami” — the wave of baby boomers aging into their 70s, 80s, and beyond, and the housing market implications that follow. It tends to get discussed at a national level, usually in one of two oversimplified ways: either it’s going to flood the market with inventory and crash prices,…
Most real estate conversations focus on the first-order questions: What’s the payment? What’s the rate? Can I afford this right now? Those questions matter. But they’re not the ones that determine how Future You looks back on the decision. The second-order questions are the ones that don’t get asked often enough: What does inflation do…
One of the most consistent things I hear from military families in the middle of a PCS to NB Kitsap is some version of: “Is this normal? Or are we just bad at this?” And it’s almost always asked by families who are doing fine — they’re just doing something that’s genuinely hard and doesn’t…