Tacoma, and the things you can't see from the curb

So here's the one that surprises people most: in Washington, the homeowner owns the sewer line from the main to the house. Not the city. You. I had a buyer under contract on a freshly finished flip, and what I'd been told was that the line had been replaced, permitted, all the way from the main. The scope showed it stopping at the sidewalk, with roots past that point thick enough the camera couldn't get through. I asked for the permit itself, not a description of it, and I never got a document I could match to what I'd been told. I told her to walk. Then we went to interpleader for her earnest money, and she got every dollar back in about a week.

Also, a lot of homes out toward Waller Road are on septic instead of city sewer. On one of those, my buyers found a patch of lawn noticeably wetter than the rest during the inspection window. The county had already passed the system, and they were buying the house either way. But a replacement out there can run $30,000, so the real question was whether we had a repair ask we could prove. I bought UV dye at the supply store, got the seller's permission, and poured it in the tank myself. My buyers checked under a UV light that night, and I walked it again the next morning. Nothing. It was just water coming off the hill.

Selling here has its own traps. An attached home in an HOA can be held up by a problem the seller isn't even party to. My South Tacoma listing had a shared-roof leak and neighbors who disagreed about who paid for it, and a buyer can't price an assessment nobody has decided yet. I pushed it until the association settled it at a meeting. I also measured the house myself, because the advertised square footage and the county's didn't match. It came back 1,497 square feet, the lower number. That cost my own seller money, and it's still the number you can defend at the appraisal.

And when you're competing, write an escalation clause instead of guessing. On a Bridgeview Park house in North Tacoma that had been listed two days, we won at around $500,000 against a list price in the mid $470s, and she sold it two years later for around $565,000.

My South Tacoma sellers had tried in 2023 and it didn't sell. When they came back in January 2026, relisting into the same conditions wasn't a plan, so I spent five months on it first: the roof dispute, a handyman, an electrician, a roofer, and a tenant whose lease ran into spring.

I shot the video, the 3D scan, and the drone footage myself, because the green belt only reads from above and from inside. Then we lost a buyer in July, cut the price, and found another. It went up around $400,000 and sold at $365,000 in August. I'd rather tell you that than pretend every hard listing ends in a bidding war. Some of the hard ones are really, really hard.