A Few Reasons Why Home Prices are Increasing in Whatcom County

There's a lot of new companies that are coming to Washington. Obviously, we all know there's a lot of huge companies that are in Seattle, and they're starting to look at maybe coming up north. So what does that, I mean what does that say for us? There could be more jobs. We don't really know what's going to happen with that, but we do know that Bellingham is a much less expensive option for a lot of big companies as far as rent and home prices go. We are seeing a lot of people migrate to Bellingham from California, from Seattle., last year alone, we saw 3,500 people come up here that weren't from here. So there are a lot of people coming in, so it is driving our economy up.

In Whatcom County, there are about 3,000 new kids being born every year, but there are about 2,400 deaths every year as well. So our net growth is about, let's say, 500 or so. But with 3,500 new people comin' into Whatcom County, that's where we started to see the prices go up. We saw a lot of people coming up from Seattle, California, when they sell their $800,000 house to buy a $500,000 house, they have a lot more equity to work with.