Sequim Homes for Sale

Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate

Chuck Marunde, J.D., Broker, Attorney (Ret.), Serving Sequim for 24 years.

Sequim is a beautiful place to retire with only 16 inches of rain annually, 1/3rd of Seattle.

Best MLS Sites

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Today I share the best MLS sites you can use to search and find your home or land. I will tell you exactly why these are the three best Sequim MLS sites.

Sequim MLS

Best MLS Site #1

Our number one pick for the best MLS site in Sequim is Sequim4Sale.com, also known as Sequim-Homes.com. Unlike many MLS sites that are created and maintained by a corporation far away from Sequim, or other MLS sites that are awkward to use and not very friendly, this Sequim MLS site was designed and programmed specifically for Sequim buyers. It is easy to navigate, powerful in its search capacity, and you can save favorites and set up email alerts. 100% of all the Olympic Listing Service (OLS) listings are on this site. All local agents use the OLS, so this is where you will find all the local listings. There’s an introductory video, and a series of videos to help you get the most out of this Sequim MLS site. There is also a 24/7 technician standing by to help you if you have any questions. This is by far the best Sequim MLS site. Period.

Best MLS Site #2

Our second pick for the best MLS site in Sequim is LuxuryWaterViewHomes.com. This site includes all the Northwest MLS listings for homes and land in the Sequim area as well as most of the state of Washington, including the entire Seattle-Tacoma metropolis. Only 55% of the Sequim brokers are members of the Northwest MLS, so roughly half of the Sequim listings are in this system. But this site allows you to search a much larger area for other listings.

Best MLS Site #3

The last but very powerful Best MLS site is SequimForSale.com (as opposed to Sequim4Sale.com). This site includes all listings from both the Olympic Listing Service and the Northwest MLS, which makes it a very powerful site. Even Seattle area Realtors use this site to look at Sequim listings.

Use one or all three of these MLS sites, but if you are looking only at Sequim listings, we recommend our first choice at Sequim4Sale.com.

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What is the Range of Experience of Real Estate Agents?

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The experience of real estate agents varies dramatically, and yet it is amazing how many buyers and sellers seem unaware of the importance of having an agent with valuable experience. Can you imagine hiring an agent who has never closed a transaction? Many do without asking about experience. Believe it or not, many buyers hire the first agent who answers the phone (or email) with no interview and no qualifying whatsoever. Now if you were buying a hamburger or a used car, no big deal if your sales person has little or no experience (or knowledge), but you’re buying a house that will cost you six figures. I assume that was money you worked decades to save. Maybe the experience of real estate agents is important after all.

Experience of Real Estate Agents

Experience of Real Estate Agents

What is the requisite experience of real estate agents in order to get a license? None. They don’t have to have any real estate background, no marketing and sales experience, no business experience, no negotiating experience, no contract experience, no legal experience, no customer service experience, no technical experience, no software experience, and no Internet experience. Everyone has to start somewhere, right? Just not on your nickel. Let the inexperienced practice with someone else’s money and someone else’s life, not yours.

Experience of Real Estate Agents Major Issue

If you’re a buyer or a seller, the experience of real estate agents you may hire is not a casual or minor issue–it is a huge issue, a major issue, one of the most important decisions of your life. Your agent doesn’t have to have the experience of a Chuck Marunde, but why settle for less, and why settle for a lot less. Chuck is one of the nation’s foremost experts on real estate transactions, and he’s right here in Sequim, Washington. Having previous experience as a real estate attorney for 20 years, he is the author of numerous real estate books, and has published thousands of articles for buyers on the Internet. His experience, knowledge, competence, and professionalism is second to none. If you are planning to buy or sell in the Sequim area, why not see if Chuck Marunde can get you in his schedule. (See his resume here: Sequim Real Estate Broker) When it comes to the experience of real estate agents, I strongly urge you to choose your Realtor carefully.

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Sequim Real Estate Maps and Documents

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Sequim real estate maps and documents are hard to find online.  The Internet addresses for these Sequim maps are impossible to remember, especially the long government websites that don’t have logical names.  I’ve collected some of the most useful links to Sequim real estate maps so you can easily find all the information you need on particular properties.

1.  Tax Assessor’s Site is packed full of useful information on their Sequim maps where you can look up any home or vacant real estate in the county by address, name, or tax parcel number.

Sequim Real Estate Maps:  Clallam County Tax Assessor’s Site

You may be interested in reading this article about How to Use the Tax Assessor’s Website.

2.  The County Parcel Maps have a tremendous amount of information available at your fingertips. You can look at Sequim maps showing boundaries and dozens of selectable map features (roads, streams, lakes, tribes, DNR land, the Discovery Trail, city and county boundaries, etc.).  By the way, the county programming on this Sequim real estate map will not load the map if your browser is sized too large. If it doesn’t load properly, reduce the size of your browser on your monitor.  This is true for all the county online maps.

Sequim Maps:  Clallam County Parcel Maps

3.  The County Boundary Maps are where you can see many more specific pieces of information about a property by selecting options in the right margin, like which irrigation district a parcel is in, school districts, hospital districts, precincts, fire districts, and so on. This looks very similar to the last map, but they are different.  On the last map, for example, you won’t see irrigation districts.

Sequim Real Estate Maps:  County Boundary Maps

4.  The Parcel Status is where you can see the complete status of a property on all county issues. You can find out on this page if the land is included in the Dungeness Water Management area. You type in the tax parcel number and hit search, and up comes a screen with a link on the parcel number, and when you go to that link, you’ll get a page full of more information and links on documents effecting that parcel.  Copy and paste this tax parcel number (033029550130) into the page below, and you’ll have an excellent example of the information you can see.  All tax parcel numbers in this system must be typed with exactly 12 digits.  If you have more zeros, delete them.

Sequim Real Estate Status:  Parcel Status

5. The County Auditor’s site includes all recorded real estate documents. This is where you can look at warranty deeds, deeds of trust, foreclosure notices (Notice of Trustee’s Sale), CC&Rs (Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions), plats, and much more.

Sequim Real Estate Documents:  Real Estate Recordings

These Sequim real estate maps are very useful when you’re thinking about buying a property.  You need to know about the property restrictions and what you can and cannot do.  If your property will have a private well, you need to know if you’re in the water management rule that restricts residential use to 150 gallons per day for an entire family. If you will have a mini-farm or animals, you may want to be within one of our irrigation districts so you can have access to more water from April 15 to Sept 15.

There’s no way to memorize these url’s.  They’re too long and not intuitive, so be sure to book mark this page for future reference.

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How to Intelligently Search for a Home

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Do you know how to intelligently search for a home? In other words, do you know how to effectively search without wasting time on poor websites or syndicated MLS sites with inaccurate information? Do you know how and where to search for answers to your questions an area or buying a home, and do you know the difference between credible information and unreliable information?

Why is this important? When you’re retiring, the last thing you need is a nightmare that costs you money and creates tremendous stress for you! I don’t doubt your ability as a buyer to make wise decisions for yourself and your family, provided you have accurate information and you get good advice from your Realtor. But this is where many buyers fall down. They don’t know where and how to get good and accurate information and credible advice when buying a home.

For example, many buyers are using Zillow to do their home search. I have written elsewhere about the grotesquely inaccurate information on Zillow. The list of problems with Zillow is well known across the country, but buyers still use it. [Read Bad Zillow Information.] 

I strongly urge buyers to use a Sequim MLS site that includes all the local listings and that is 100% accurate because it pulls all its information from the source listings. 

The single most reliable real estate information on questions buyers ask all the time is found at the largest Sequim real estate blog. If you are on a mission to search for your retirement home, you definitely want accurate and reliable information about buying Sequim homes. You’ll find thousands of articles written for buyers at Sequim Real Estate Blog. These are carefully written by a Sequim real estate attorney (ret.) and broker who has lived in the area for 20 years. 

There are multiple links to other reliable and accurate sources in the right margin of that real estate blog. In addition to all these accurate resources, Chuck Marunde is available as your personal advisor, and that means you can be assured that you are getting honest and professional advice you need to avoid a nightmare scenario. It also means you will be equipped to make wise decisions as you search for a home.

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7 Myths of Selling Your Home – How to List a Home for Sale

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Home sellers who want to sell their homes have major decisions to make. The challenge for the vast majority of home sellers is that they have not had a career in real estate, and there is much they do not know about how the real estate industry really works, the differences between listing agents and selling agents, and they don’t know the gimmicks that listing agents use to get listings. Having been a real estate attorney and now a real estate broker, I have a passion to protect consumers and give them the absolute truth. This book will show sellers what they need to do to get their homes sold, and what they should avoid.

List a Home

How to List a Home for Sale

Most home sellers do not know the dramatic differences between a listing agent and a selling agent. Some think they are the same person, but they are not. Today listing agents, as they have for several decades, focus on getting listings. The more listings they have, the more money they can make, because other “selling agents” will sell their listings for them.

Selling agents are the agents who market directly to buyers, and it is selling agents, not listing agents, who have large marketing systems. Home sellers typically expect listing agents to have large marketing systems, but it just isn’t true most of the time. This book challenges traditional thinking, and as a result many home sellers are deciding to list their home with a selling agent who actually does everything a listing agent does but a whole lot more when it comes to marketing.

List a Home

If you are going to list a home for sale anywhere in the United States, I strongly recommend you read this book first. It will save you from making some potentially big mistakes, which could mean tens of thousands of dollars for you, not to mention delays for months and all the stress. You can learn more about how to list a home by going to Amazon at 7 Myths of Selling Your Home.

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3D Virtual Tours Offered by iRealty Virtual Brokers

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3D Virtual Tours are the latest and the hottest way to walk through on a home online, and iRealty Virtual Brokers (also registered as Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate) is once again way out in front of all other local brokers. You can use your mouse or the arrows on your keyboard to walk through a home interactively. Try it, and see how fun it is by going inside this 3D Virtual Tour:

Virtual Tours Taken to a New Level

Not only can you walk through this home with your fingers online from anywhere you have a computer or a tablet or smart phone, you also get a floor plan so you can see exactly what the layout is. Buyers have complained for years that MLS listings don’t include floor plans, but these 3D Virtual Tours do, and buyers love them. These are the most accurate virtual reality tours available in the history of real estate. You can view more photos and the entire MLS data sheet at Bell Hill Home for Sale.

Virtual Tours

Chuck Marunde and iRealty Virtual Brokers are very pleased to bring this new technology to the Sequim, Port Townsend, and Port Angeles areas.  Be sure to play with the options on the bottom right and left sides, and notice you can enlarge the 3D Virtual Tour to fill your entire computer screen.

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Beachfront Homes

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Beachfront Homes on the Olympic Peninsula are not easy to find, especially the kind of beautiful and modern beachfront homes most buyers today would like to own. Of course, beachfront homes are more expensive than similar homes with no beach, so if you are looking at beachfront homes, you’ll see the premium these homes get in the MLS.

Beachfront Homes

Beachfront Homes

The home in this photo just sold for $900,000, and I represented the sellers. This gorgeous custom built home is located on the beach of the Strait of Juan de Fuca just a few miles north of downtown Sequim, and is near the center of the Sequim Blue Hole. The water view includes a view of the Sequim-Dungeness Lighthouse and the San Juan Islands.

Beachfront Homes

You can search for homes in the MLS on the beaches and with water views on two main MLS sites. The first includes all listings from the Olympic Listing Service MLS, and the second includes all homes in the Northwest MLS.

Beachfront Homes – Sequim, Port Townsend, Port Angeles

Beachfront Homes – Expensive Luxury Homes From Sequim to Seattle & the Islands

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Bell Hill Water View Home

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This Bell Hill water view home is beautiful from the outside, but the floor plan inside and the kitchen and master bedroom are precisely what so many retirees want now, and this home sits in a very peaceful location.

water view

Bell Hill Water View

The very first thing you undoubtedly want to do is see more larger photos, and you can right here at Sequim Water View Home. Be sure to click on one of the three thumbnail photos, and you will get more photos.

Many retirees want a modern home built with high quality materials, preferably hardwood floors, a large modern kitchen, stainless steel appliances with a gas (propane) cooktop, and an open floor plan between the kitchen, dining and living rooms. They also like the laundry room near the kitchen or between the kitchen and the master bedroom. They love a large master bedroom, a walk-in closet with a skylight or window, a modern master bathroom with double sinks and both a shower and comfortable soaking tub. Of course, it would be ideal if most of these rooms had a water view.

An attached garage with an easy entry into the kitchen for carrying groceries is important. They also like a den on the main floor. In fact, they want all of this on the main floor, all one level. Having a second floor is okay for many buyers, because the guest rooms can be on that floor for kids and grandkids, but they do want to be able to live all one one floor. 

They also would like water available outside for all the landscaping without having to worry about water restrictions. A year round irrigation ditch or a creek would be the perfect solution. A modern electric forced air heating and cooling system with a heat pump is ideal for the Sequim climate and the most efficient way to heat a home in such a mild climate.

Water View of the Strait of Juan de Fuca

Most buyers would love some privacy if they could find the perfect location. And if there is one last and major feature almost every retiree would love is a water view of our beautiful Strait of Juan de Fuca with the islands and Mount Baker on the horizon.

When I write that this description is what most buyers want, I am being totally sincere. This Bell Hill water view home just happens to have them all. If you would like to view this home, call Chuck at 360-775-5424. Meanwhile, check it out at Sequim Water View Home.

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Bluff Stability

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Bluff Stability is no small matter if you are considering a home on a bluff of any height. Most bluffs along the Olympic Peninsula are stable, not not all. The Sequim Buyer’s Guide can help you know how to do your due diligence on important issues like bluff stability. The all new 2nd edition of Sequim Real Estate: A Buyer’s Guide is available on Amazon.com. This Buyer’s Guide has been very popular with buyers looking at Sequim and Port Angeles and Port Townsend, including buyers in more than 25 states from Alaska to Florida and Hawaii to New York.

Bluff Stability

Bluf Stability

Here’s a quote from the chapter entitled Bluff Homes and Bluff Stability. “We have bluffs in the Sequim and Port Angeles and Port Townsend areas with absolutely stunning water views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and International waters with Victoria’s night lights glowing on the horizon. But what about bluff stability? Is a 100 foot or 200 foot bluff stable? The answer is not easy, but there is a logical analysis that can help you decide on a particular bluff property. . . . I’m not a geologist or a bluff stability engineer, but I have spent 20 years in the area studying our bluffs, and I’ve read a number of bluff stability reports. More importantly, I’ve talked with the county’s number one bluff stability engineer about the history and the issues that influence bluff stability.” 

Bluff Stability Bullet List

In the book Sequim Real Estate: A Buyer’s Guide, I provide a bullet list of issues that help to understand bluff stability, and a buyer’s options when looking at a property on a high bluff. This Buyer’s Guide is the result of over three decades in real estate, including 20 years as a real estate attorney. Chuck Marunde is the author of a number of real estate books, thousands of articles about buying, and he’s a top selling buyer’s agent. Chuck was just awarded the prestigious Five Star Real Estate Award for 2014, an award granted to less than 7% of over 25,000 Seattle area agents.

If you’re going to spend six figures on a home in Sequim or Port Angeles, $29.95 for this Buyer’s Guide is a bargain. You can order directly online from the publisher at Sequim Real Estate: A Buyer’s Guide, or in a few days you will be able to order directly from Amazon.com, too. The book is full of practical advice for buyers of Sequim real estate as well as Port Angeles real estate and Port Townsend real estate. 

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Sequim Videos on Real Estate

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Did you know there is a Sequim Video Youtube site all about buying real estate? There are Sequim videos on the real estate market, videos on the area, and instructional videos about how to find and use some powerful Sequim resources online.

Sequim Videos

Sequim Videos

Just go directly to Sequim Videos, and you’ll see a home page with some videos, but you can also go to “Playlists” which you will see near the top under the banner, and there’s a link to all the videos, too. If you’re in the market for a home in Sequim or Port Angeles or Port Townsend, you will find many videos on how to find and use the best MLS site for the area and how to get the most out of that MLS site.

Sequim videos are just another service offered to buyers courtesy of iRealty Virtual Brokers and Chuck Marunde.

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About iRealty Virtual Brokers

iRealty Virtual Brokers reaches out to buyers around the United States with thousands of online articles, MLS sites, apps, real estate books, videos, and much more specifically to help buyers find all the answers to their questions. Call or email one of our Agents for the kind of professional help you want and expect from your Sequim Real Estate Agent.


iRealty Virtual Brokers
dba Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate
125 Olympic Ranch Ln, Sequim, WA 98382
360-775-5424

7 Myths of Selling Your Home
Sequim Real Estate A Buyers Guide

Your Sequim & Port Angeles Realtors

Call Chuck Marunde at 360-775-5424.
Call Daniel Binswanger at 360-979-5312

Sequim Real Estate Blog

The Sequim Real Estate Blog

The Sequim Real Estate Blog, aka SequimBlog.com or Sequim-Real-Estate-Blog.com, is the largest real estate blog on the entire Olympic Peninsula for buyers. Over 2,200 articles have been written on very specific subjects that buyers wanted addressed over the past dozen years. Actually, since the author has been in Sequim going back 25 years and practiced […]

How Do I Sell My Home?

How do I sell my home is a question being ask by many homeowners today. The world has changed dramatically over the past decade, and technologies and the Internet have revolutionized the real estate industry. You’ll need a few things to sell your home, and I wouldn’t compromise on these if you want to get […]

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