Buying a Home in Sunset, Anacortes

Buying a home in Sunset means choosing the last streets in Anacortes, off Sunset Avenue between the Skyline plats and the Washington Park entrance at 6300 Sunset Avenue. This is a park neighborhood rather than a marina neighborhood, and people choose it for the park and the west light. Getting anywhere means Sunset Avenue and Oakes Avenue east past the ferry terminal to 12th Street and downtown, so every trip to town or the mainland crosses the whole island. That is either exactly what you want or it is not, and it is worth deciding before the touring starts.

We begin with a free consultation of 60 to 75 minutes rather than a showing. You will know what your range buys out here, what the search is likely to turn up, and what an offer has to account for on older housing stock. You will sign a buyer agreement that spells out what I do and how I am paid, agreed between the two of us. Then we look, with a plan.

Condition comes first on older homes. The roof, the systems, the windows, the foundation, and what the salt air has done to the exterior all get looked at before you fall for the light. I bring in inspectors and, where a house calls for it, a specialist, because a general inspection is a starting point rather than a finish line on a home built decades ago.

The view claim gets verified second, from inside, at a normal hour. A minimal view is a real and honest thing to buy. A minimal view sold as a water view is a problem you inherit at resale, so we sort out which one is in front of us early.

Then the offer gets built against genuinely comparable west-end sales rather than a citywide Anacortes average, which would flatter some properties out here and punish others. I write it, present it, negotiate it, and coordinate the inspection. After closing I check in at 30, 90, and 180 days, because settling into a town is a separate piece of work from buying a house in it. My current listings are on the listings page, and I can show you everything else too.

One thing worth knowing before we tour, because it changes what an inspection should be expected to find. Skagit County Assessor records for the pocket of streets between Skyline and Washington Park, Sands Way, Sugarloaf Street, Parkside Drive, and Curtis Court, show homes built predominantly between 1976 and 1998, on standard suburban lots of roughly 0.17 to 0.31 acre. That is an established late-1970s through 1990s subdivision, and it is a very different purchase from one of the older homes along the Sunset Avenue corridor itself, like the 1924 house above. On the county's books those streets are the Skyline No. 1, 2, and 16 plats, inside the Skyline Property Owners Association, and I get you the association's documents and current dues for the specific address before you write.

The utilities question is the other one that has to be settled per address out here, because Sunset is not uniform. The assessor shows these parcels on piped water, but some of the older homes on the Sunset Avenue frontage are on septic even inside the city limits, which changes your inspection list and your lender's questions. I find out which a specific home has before you tour it, not after.

Read the Sunset neighborhood page, then book the consultation, then drive out here at the end of the day and see whether the light does for you what it does for the people who live here. How I represent buyers from consultation to keys is on buying a home, and if you are choosing this island from out of the area, start at relocation.

Tell me what you are looking for and I will tell you straight whether the west end is it. DiAnn Sager, RE/MAX Gateway, Anacortes. Let's get you home.