This is my view: Unless you decide to move 100%, and comfortable with that life, I would suggest not to 1031 with rental to Seattle.
Grow as long as you stay here, same way your rental may grow equally. Remote control rentals won’t benefit unless you have multiple properties (with real estate as business).
My good old realtor told me not to buy any property more than 50 miles where I stay. Her main concern is that in case of any issue, I can rush and maintain, takeover the issue…etc
There after, I did not even look at Sacramento even though I knew it would be profitable for me.
LOL This cracked me up. Sorry for not clarifying earlier.
When I joined, I had the option of listing out preferred locations and I put 1) NYC 2) Seattle 3) BA, and they put me in BA. My view on location preferences hasn’t changed much though I now think Seattle > NYC > BA. Maybe in another 6 years it’ll become BA > Seattle > NYC? Not sure…
I’ve only seen 1 aggressive homeless person in Seattle. He always yells at people, “Excuse me sir/ma’am”. If you ignore him, he gets even louder. He always has chunks of vomit in his beard.
If you want a high walk score, then Seattle is amazing for that. It’s pretty easy to not own a car in Seattle.
Actually one of the reason we move from Vancouver → Bay Area is that my wife said she doesn’t want to push the stroller and go for a stroll in the rain. As well as, getting in and out of your house / car with kids in the rain is such a big hassle, yes, even with Mini-van. Hence, we decided to make home in California and doesn’t look back to North West. Our goal is FIRE in bay area, a lot of nice area in Fremont / Dublin / Pleasanton or Pockets of Peninsula where nice neighborhood but school doesn’t need to be big when we retire.
Thanks to @marcus335 's comments, we’re visiting the said areas in Seattle this weekend. Looking at SLU area, this looks deceptively similar to Mission Bay in SF - clean streets by the water, bunch of new apartments + techies everywhere.
A realtor told me that they stopped building condos in Seattle around 2003 - due to all the lawsuits that HOAs file against the developers. Sounded like developers here are chickens compared to the ones in SF, where they almost seem like the lawsuits are priced into. Or maybe Seattle market hasn’t reached that price level.
We took a quick tour of around Lake Union (Queen Anne, Westlake, Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, Eastlake, Capitol Hill, …). So far we like Queen Anne/Westlake and Fremont the best. Though the tech shops moving from Fremont to SLU is a bit of concern for price appreciations.
All in all, it looks like Seattle has much more room for development. Talking to the locals, they seem less opposed to tech concentration (unlike SF). Amazon employs 40,000 (gasp!) just in Seattle alone, and the many neighborhoods don’t seem that impacted. There are still many local mom&pop restaurants / coffee shops across the city.
Those are all popular areas that are a short commute. Most peoole living that close take the public bus. You’re right about the lack of new condos. All the new construction is apartments. You must have seen a ton of construction cranes.
