What we do, and what we don’t.

Salt & Cedar is a two-person Ballard brokerage. We represent six to twelve homes a year — almost always architectural or character properties — across Seattle, Bainbridge, Vashon, and the San Juan archipelago. Sara handles architectural and character homes in the city; Marco handles waterfront and islands.

Why small, on purpose

The market structure assumes you want every house tracked and every offer pursued. We’ve found that most sellers of distinctive homes actually want the opposite — they want a small number of qualified buyers, walked through the house by someone who can answer the questions an architect-built or century-old home gets asked. That requires capacity. Capacity is incompatible with carrying twenty active listings.

So we cap. Six to twelve listings a year, with a soft preference for representing one side of any transaction at a time. We turn down work; the work we take, we attend to.

What we look for in a listing

• An architectural or vernacular character worth describing — built well, kept well, or both
• A seller who’s patient enough to wait for the right buyer rather than the first offer
• A location we know — Seattle proper, Bainbridge, Vashon, the San Juans, occasional Olympic Peninsula
• Documentation we can verify: architect of record, build year, addition dates, system updates