Should You Sell Your Anacortes Home in 2026?

by Leah Courage

The short answer: You can still sell well in Anacortes right now, but the market stopped doing the work for you. Inventory is up sharply, buyers have real choices, and homes priced on last year's comps are sitting. Sellers who price to current data and prepare properly are still closing. The rest are watching their listings go stale.

Leah Courage, Real Estate Advisor, North Puget Sound Last updated: August 2026

So here's the conversation I have most often on Fidalgo Island right now. Someone bought in 2019 or 2020, watched their equity balloon, and has been waiting for the "right moment" to cash out. They read a headline about a tight market, and they assume that moment is still sitting there waiting.

It isn't. Not the way it was.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't sell. It means the strategy that worked two years ago actively hurts you now. Let's go through what the Anacortes market is actually doing in 2026, what it means for your specific house, and how to decide.

Key takeaways

Active listings across the Northwest Multiple Listing Service area rose 19.8% year over year as of July 2026, and 25 of 27 NWMLS counties gained inventory.
The NWMLS median sales price fell 1.5% year over year to $640,000 in July 2026, with closed sales down 3.2% and pending sales down 7.2%.
Anacortes is holding up better than the statewide average, but it is no longer a market where mispricing gets rescued by a bidding war.
Overpricing is now the single most expensive mistake a seller can make, because there is no shortage of alternatives for buyers to move on to.
Waterfront, view, and walkable Old Town properties still behave differently than the rest of the inventory. Location advantages haven't disappeared, they've just stopped covering for everything else.

What is the Anacortes housing market doing in 2026?

Anacortes has softened from its peak but is holding better than much of western Washington, and the defining change is inventory rather than price.

The statewide picture from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service is unambiguous. In July 2026, active listings reached 24,888 across the NWMLS service area, up 19.8% from 20,781 a year earlier. Brokers added 11,517 new listings that month, a 10.5% increase over July 2025. Meanwhile closed sales fell 3.2% and pending sales fell 7.2%. The median sales price for homes and condominiums came in at $640,000, down 1.5% from $650,000 in July 2025.

Read those together and you get the story. More homes, fewer buyers moving on them, and prices giving back a little ground. NWMLS points at elevated mortgage rates as the reason buyer activity stayed soft through the summer.

Here in Anacortes specifically, the median sold price is currently [VERIFY: 98221 median sold price], homes are taking a median of [VERIFY: 98221 days on market] to sell, and we're sitting at [VERIFY: 98221 months of inventory] months of supply.

A note on the numbers you'll see online. If you've been checking Zillow, Redfin, and the various market-report sites, you've probably noticed they disagree wildly about Anacortes. That's not a glitch. Those sites use different datasets, different geographic boundaries, different lag times, and some of them mix listing prices with sold prices. The spread between the highest and lowest published figure for Anacortes this year is well over $200,000. NWMLS is the source of record in Washington, and it's what your appraiser and the buyer's agent will be looking at.

Why did the Anacortes market shift?

Rates and inventory, in that order.

Anacortes has a durable demand base that most Skagit County towns don't. Retirees drawn to the waterfront, remote professionals who can live anywhere and picked here, refinery workers at March Point, Island Hospital staff, and Navy families commuting to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island over the Deception Pass Bridge. That base is why the city held value through the 2025 cooling better than the county average.

But durable demand is not infinite demand. When mortgage rates stay elevated, the move-up buyer who would have traded a $500,000 house for an $850,000 house does the math on the payment and stays put. That buyer disappearing removes a rung from the ladder, and everything above it slows down.

At the same time, sellers who spent two years waiting for a better moment all started listing at once. That's where the inventory increase comes from. A lot of it isn't new construction. It's patience running out.

Is it still a good time to sell your home in Anacortes?

For most Anacortes homeowners, yes, and the reason is equity rather than market momentum.

If you bought before 2021, you're almost certainly sitting on substantial gains even after the recent softening. That equity is real and it's spendable. The question isn't whether you can sell for more than you paid. It's whether waiting improves your outcome.

Here's the honest case on both sides.

	Sell now	Wait
Buyer pool	Smaller than 2021, but active and serious. Tire-kickers left when rates rose.	Could grow if rates fall. Could also shrink further.
Competition	Rising. More listings every month means more direct comparison.	More sellers are waiting for the same signal you are. When rates drop, they all list at once.
Pricing power	Reduced. Sale-to-list ratios have weakened statewide.	Unknown. Depends entirely on rates.
Your equity	Substantial if you bought pre-2021. Slightly below the 2024 peak.	Builds slowly, or erodes if prices keep slipping.
Your next purchase	You buy in the same softer market you're selling into, which helps if you're moving up.	Same trade in reverse.
Carrying cost	Ends at closing.	Taxes, insurance, and maintenance keep running.

The trap in "waiting for rates to drop" is that every other seller in Anacortes is waiting for the exact same thing. If rates fall meaningfully, you don't get a private window. You get a flood of new inventory competing with you, and the price improvement you were waiting for gets partly eaten by the competition.

If you're selling to move up, a softer market is arguably better for you, not worse. You give up a little on the sale and get more back on the purchase, and the purchase is the bigger number.

If you know you need to move in the next two years, listing while your home still stands out in a manageable inventory pool usually beats listing into everybody else's simultaneous change of heart.

If you have no reason to move and no plan for the proceeds, that's a real answer too. There's nothing wrong with staying put.

This is exactly the kind of decision where a conversation is worth more than an article. Jon and I will sit down with you, look at your actual house against actual comps, and tell you straight whether now makes sense for your situation. No pressure and no obligation, anywhere in Skagit, Island, Whatcom, or Snohomish County.

How should you price a home in Anacortes right now?

Price to current comps, not to what your neighbor got in 2024, and resist the urge to "test" a higher number.

Sale-to-list ratio is the percentage of the asking price a home actually sells for. When it runs above 98%, sellers have the upper hand. Below that, buyers are negotiating and winning.

The overpricing trap works like this. You list high to leave negotiating room. The first two weeks are when your listing gets the most attention from buyers who have alerts set and agents who watch new inventory. Priced wrong, you burn that window. By week four you're stale. By week six you cut the price, and now buyers read the cut as a signal that something is wrong with the house rather than that it was simply priced too high to begin with. You end up accepting less than your correct list price would have gotten you, and it took three extra months.

In a market with [VERIFY: 98221 months of inventory] months of supply, a buyer who thinks your price is high doesn't negotiate. They just go look at the next one.

Watch for any pricing conversation that starts with what you need to net rather than what the comps support. Those are two separate problems, and only one of them is negotiable with the market.

How do you prepare an Anacortes home for sale in 2026?

Do the work before you list, because buyers with options no longer overlook condition.

Get an honest condition assessment first. Walk your house with your agent and a contractor before you spend anything. In a market this competitive, the goal is knowing what a buyer's inspector will find, not fixing everything.
Handle the island-specific items early. If you're on well or septic outside city sewer, get the septic inspected and pumped before listing. If you have a private water system, gather the documentation. These derail closings when they surface late, and on Fidalgo Island they surface constantly.
Address deferred maintenance that reads as neglect. Roof moss, failing exterior paint, rotted trim. Salt air is hard on houses here, and buyers price these items at three times what they cost you to fix.
Fix the light before the finishes. Clean windows, trim back the vegetation blocking views, replace dim bulbs. Anacortes homes sell on light and view. A cluttered sightline costs more than a dated kitchen.
Stage for the actual buyer. If your house appeals to downsizing retirees, stage it that way. If it's a family house near the schools, stage it that way. Generic staging appeals to nobody in particular.
Invest in real photography, including drone where the setting supports it. For water-view and Cap Sante or Skyline properties, the aerial shot is what makes someone click. Most buyers see your house on a phone screen before they see it in person.
Time the launch deliberately. Spring through early summer still brings the strongest buyer traffic in Anacortes. But with inventory climbing, being one of fifteen spring listings can be worse than being one of five in October. That call depends on your specific competition.

What if you're selling in Anacortes and buying somewhere else?

Sequence the two transactions before you list either one, because the timing problem is harder than the pricing problem.

This is where a lot of Anacortes sellers get stuck. You want to sell into a decent market and buy into a softer one, but you also need somewhere to live in between. The bridge loan, rent-back, and contingent-offer options each carry different costs and different risks depending on how fast your house moves. [INTERNAL LINK: coordinating a sale and a purchase]

If you're leaving the North Puget Sound entirely, that's worth a conversation too. We keep an in-house referral network of agents we've actually vetted in other markets, which beats calling whoever Zillow serves up in a city you've never lived in and hoping for the best.

Anacortes doesn't move in lockstep with the rest of the county, either. [INTERNAL LINK: the broader Skagit County picture] is worth understanding if you're weighing where to buy next, and [INTERNAL LINK: how Anacortes neighborhoods differ] matters more here than in most markets.

Frequently asked questions

Is Anacortes a buyer's or seller's market in 2026? It's moving toward balanced. NWMLS reported active listings up 19.8% year over year across its service area in July 2026, with closed sales down 3.2% and the median price down 1.5% to $640,000. Anacortes inventory is currently [VERIFY: 98221 months of supply] months of supply. Practically, that means buyers have real choices and sellers can't rely on competition to fix a pricing mistake.

How long does it take to sell a house in Anacortes? Currently a median of [VERIFY: 98221 days on market] days. Be careful with figures you find online. Published days-on-market numbers for Anacortes in 2026 range from under 20 days to over 60 depending on the source, because different sites measure different things. Properly priced homes in good condition still move quickly. Overpriced ones skew the average badly.

Should I wait for mortgage rates to drop before selling my Anacortes home? Probably not, if you know you're moving within two years. Every other hesitant seller is waiting for the same signal, so a rate drop likely brings a wave of new inventory that competes directly with you. If you're also buying, a lower rate helps your purchase but raises the price you pay. The two mostly cancel.

What's my Anacortes home worth? No online estimate can tell you accurately. The automated values for Anacortes disagree with each other by more than $200,000 this year, because algorithms handle water views, lot orientation, and Fidalgo Island's mix of housing stock badly. A comparative market analysis using NWMLS sold data for your specific street and view corridor is the only figure worth acting on.

Do waterfront and view homes in Anacortes sell differently? Yes, substantially. View and waterfront properties in Skyline, Cap Sante, and along the western shoreline draw from a different and more geographically dispersed buyer pool than inland Anacortes homes, and they hold value better in softening markets. They also take longer to sell, because that buyer pool is smaller. Different pricing strategy, different marketing, different timeline expectations.

Does the ferry terminal affect Anacortes home values? It cuts both ways. The Washington State Ferries terminal serving the San Juan Islands drives tourism and supports demand from island-adjacent buyers. It also means summer traffic on the way through town. Proximity is a genuine amenity for some buyers and a genuine negative for others, and it shows up in pricing by street.

What are the closing costs for a seller in Anacortes? Expect real estate excise tax, title and escrow fees, prorated property taxes, and any negotiated buyer concessions. Washington's real estate excise tax is tiered by sale price, and both state and local portions apply. Get an estimate specific to your price point before you list, since concessions have become a more common part of deals as the market has softened.

The bottom line

Anacortes in 2026 isn't the market it was in 2021, and any agent telling you it is hasn't looked at the NWMLS numbers.

But "not 2021" is a long way from "don't sell." Inventory is up and prices have softened modestly, while the fundamentals that make people want to live on Fidalgo Island haven't changed at all. Homes that are priced to current data, prepared honestly, and marketed properly are still closing.

The difference is that the market has stopped forgiving mistakes. Price it wrong now and you don't get bailed out.

If you want to know where your specific house actually stands, that's a conversation, not a calculator. Jon and I will pull the real comps for your street and give you a straight answer about whether now is your moment, including if the answer is that you should wait.

Leah Courage is a real estate advisor with [BROKERAGE LEGAL NAME], license #[NUMBER]. Leah and Jon Courage lead The Courage Group, serving Skagit, Island, Whatcom, and Snohomish counties, plus parts of King County.