The headline most people will take from September’s housing numbers is “inventory is flooding the market and prices are finally dropping.” In Kitsap, neither part is quite true. Our median sales price was $589,500 in September — up 1.6% from a year earlier — and closed sales actually rose 2.3%, to 351. Across the wider…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Two fears come up constantly with VA buyers new to the Kitsap market. The first is whether a VA offer will be taken seriously in a competitive situation — whether sellers will pass on it in favor of a conventional buyer. The second is whether Kitsap’s older housing stock will keep failing VA appraisals and…
The question that runs in the background of every NB Kitsap PCS decision is some version of this: will our BAH actually cover life here, or are we about to end up house-poor at a new duty station? It’s a reasonable thing to worry about — and the honest answer is that it depends almost…
For a lot of military families, the real question underneath “where should we live?” is a more specific one: are we about to uproot our kids into the wrong school with no support system around them? That fear is real and it’s reasonable. And in Kitsap, school zone and childcare availability often end up driving…