Who LIVES on Mercer Island (Seattle: real estate, apartments, houses)

[Beenhere4ever]

Casual interest made me look at a real estate site with Mercer Island homes. First one comes up says $18 million! Who the heck owns these places. This sounds like Beverly Hills or a similar neighborhood in LA.

[SitoUK]

Paul Allen lives there for example....

There's real estate available at much more reasonable rates as well though...

[Andy]

The waterfront areas are super expensive, just as are other areas along Lake Washington. The shores of Lake Washington are the Seattle area's "gold coast."

[Ira500]

Mercer Island has a lot of folks who have lived there a long time. It wasn't always insanely expensive, but they've long been noted for fine schools.
There are apartments on Mercer Island that are not especially expensive, but it's mostly single family houses, and a lot of them are from the 50's and 60's. It happens to be a style I like, but many of these were not houses of the wealthy when they were built. Currently, a major fixer, teardown of a small house on Mercer Island costs around 475,000 dollars.
It's not very showy.....There is a good place for pastrami sandwiches and a good book store.I don't live on Mercer Island, but it's a pleasant place. Then again I don't think I've been in an 18 million dollar house. They'd probably have the police escort me out of the neighborhod for not driving an 80,000 dollar car.

[Seacove]

Exactly. You can still buy fixer uppers on Mercer Island. They get the bump for the location but they are often in need of repair. It's a good commute location.

[Malloric]

Originally Posted by Ira500

Mercer Island has a lot of folks who have lived there a long time. It wasn't always insanely expensive, but they've long been noted for fine schools.
There are apartments on Mercer Island that are not especially expensive, but it's mostly single family houses, and a lot of them are from the 50's and 60's. It happens to be a style I like, but many of these were not houses of the wealthy when they were built. Currently, a major fixer, teardown of a small house on Mercer Island costs around 475,000 dollars.
It's not very showy.....There is a good place for pastrami sandwiches and a good book store.I don't live on Mercer Island, but it's a pleasant place. Then again I don't think I've been in an 18 million dollar house. They'd probably have the police escort me out of the neighborhod for not driving an 80,000 dollar car.

You'd be surprised. I used to ride on Mercer Island a lot... lots of Toyotas. Microsoft campus, however... Porsche, Porsche, non-Porsche, Porsche, Porsche, non-Porsche.

[Hemlock140]

Your search defaulted to "Highest to Lowest." Change it and you may find an older fixer as low as $450,000.

[Beenhere4ever]

I didn't care that the highest showed up because if I'd seen the lowest, it wouldn't have impressed me that much. I doubt I've ever lived anywhere that had $18 million houses. I just didn't know where the resident gazillionairs lived up thataway.

[Ruth4Truth]

A lot of the houses there are designed to look great from the outside, but they're really poorly designed on the inside, not even livable, some of them. Bedrooms in the basement with low ceilings, cheap construction. You don't get your money's worth when you live there, you're more paying for the Mercer Is. address, like paying for the designer label on clothes.

[theyreinphx]

We just moved from Phoenix to Mercer Island. We scored a 3-bedroom apartment for less than $1600 per month. We did this move blindly and chose Mercer Island because of the school district. My husband also loves the commute as it's only a 20 minute bus ride to downtown Seattle.

With that being said, I am now wondering what we are going to do here. We have only been here for 3 months and are completely conflicted. This is an absolutely perfect spot for our family but financially I doubt we will ever be able to afford to purchase a home unless we get really lucky. For now though, we are happy and realize how lucky we are to find what we found for the price that we did.