Buying a Home in Clearridge Puts You on the Hill Above the Ferry

Clearridge is the neighborhood a lot of people have driven past without knowing its name. Drive west from downtown Anacortes on Oakes Avenue toward the ferry, turn uphill onto Ship Harbor Boulevard before you reach the terminal, and you are in it. It runs along the hill between the west end of Oakes Avenue and Anaco Beach Road, above Ship Harbor. The Anacortes Airport is close by.

Buying a home in Clearridge means buying a position rather than a landmark. There is no marina at the bottom of the street the way there is in Skyline and no historic downtown grid the way there is in Old Town. What there is instead is the ferry terminal below you, the Guemes Channel Trail along the waterfront, and a platted subdivision laid out on a hill.

What you get from me is the checking. This neighborhood has fewer sales to learn from than the bigger Anacortes neighborhoods, so I do the verification on each specific home rather than relying on a general sense of what things go for here. That starts with a free 60 to 75 minute consultation before any showings.

The view comes first, because this is a hill and hills are inconsistent. Which rooms see Guemes Channel, how much of it, and whether neighboring trees or rooflines are in the way now or will be in five years. I confirm that from inside the home at the time of day you would actually be using those rooms.

The airport is close, so I check what that means for a specific address rather than generalizing about the neighborhood. The same goes for the ferry: close is an asset, and summer weekend traffic on Oakes Avenue below is real. Both are worth experiencing before you commit, not after.

Then the ordinary expensive things: the era of the home and what the inspection is likely to find, the drainage and the slope, and the association questions where they apply. Pre-approval and a written buyer agreement are both in place before showings start, and how I am paid is spelled out in that agreement first.

Because this was platted and built as a subdivision rather than settled lot by lot, the homes here tend to share an era and a layout logic, which cuts both ways for a buyer. The good half is predictability: what you learn from one inspection tends to apply to the next. The other half is that when a price looks high, there is often no obviously similar recent sale to argue with, so the comparison has to be built from the surrounding west side and defended out loud. I would rather do that work and lose a deal than let you pay a number nobody can support.

Being ready matters even in a quiet corner of town. The median Anacortes home went pending in 11 days in June 2026 (NWMLS InfoSparks), and the most competitive activity sits under $600,000. When something on this hill comes up and it is right, we should not be starting the financing conversation that week.

Some of that checking is already done for the hill as a whole. Skagit County Assessor records for the Clearridge streets show lots mostly between 0.18 and 0.35 acre, with occasional larger parcels out to about 0.47, and homes built predominantly between 1980 and 2006 with the median right around 1990. So you are buying into an established subdivision with 1980s through 2000s construction, and the inspection you should plan for is the one that era earns. The Clearidge Homeowners Association is voluntary, with dues of $60 for 2025 that fund the Oakes Avenue frontage, the mailings, and the website, and covenants and any shared road agreement still get confirmed in writing for the specific address before you write an offer.

Walk this hill before you decide. Clearridge, Navigator, and Mariners are neighboring pockets of the same west side slope, and the honest way to choose between them is to see all three in one afternoon with someone who can tell you what differs. That is a normal afternoon for me.

Book your free buyer consultation and we will plan it. The whole buyer process is on buying a home, the neighborhood profile is on the Clearridge area page, and the citywide view is on buying a home in Anacortes. My current homes are on the listings page. DiAnn Sager, RE/MAX Gateway, Anacortes.