Home moving ‘ramping up' around Seattle

SEATTLE — It happens to many residents. They grow out of a city, but not their home. Usually leaving the city means leaving behind the house. But not if you move it.

“We have had customers who lived in Ballard their entire life and are retirement age, and they have to fight for a parking spot every day, and they are just tired of the hustle and bustle of Seattle,” said Nick Carpenter with Nickel Bros. “So they’ll buy a piece of property on Orcas Island, Lopez Island, San Juan Island, and we will relocate their home that they raised their family in from Seattle all the way over to Friday Harbor.”

Nickel Bros has always specialized in lifting homes off foundations and other specialized jobs. But in recent years, the company has discovered a unique real-estate niche — lifting historic homes from their spots and moving them to where they are wanted. It turns out, there’s quite a demand for it.

“Especially with the housing market we are seeing in Seattle right now — developers don’t want their home,” Carpenter said. “A lot of times they can negotiate to keep their home when they sell their lot.”

Home moving

Nickel Bros was founded in 1956 and is based in Marysville. But the moving aspect of the business has been “ramping up” over the past few years, Carpenter notes. There are many reasons. For example, it is often cheaper for a developer to move a home than to tear it down. Over the past couple of decades, the company realized there is a market for the historic homes.

“That 1920s-era home has so much character with it, and people just eat it up,” Carpenter said. “They love that kind of a home. They prefer that over a square box. We know for a fact we will find somebody we can take a house to.”

“Buying and selling buildings is something we’ve been very successful at,” he said. “We’ve done selling and reselling, upcycling building for a couple decades. It’s a very stable part of our business … We know that there is this secret sauce, perfect-sized building that we are looking for. When we see one available, in good shape, we know we can turn it around and find somebody to take it.”

Nickel Bros’ Facebook page serves as a chronicle of homes floating to new shores. They generally choose historic houses near bodies of water where they can barge them to another location.

“Everybody comments, ‘Oh, it’s the 1 percenters. Oh, look at the 1 percenters,’” Carpenter said. “It’s not the 1 percenters. These are middle-class people trying to buy a home. And it works.”

Take West Seattle, for example. The West Seattle Blog notes that there are six homes in the neighborhood that Nickel Bros has taken on. The company's website currently features a few Alki bungalows.

“We have houses in West Seattle,” Carpenter said. “We have houses, a lot of times, in Hunts Point, Medina. The older neighborhoods around Lake Washington are being built out with new homes so we are moving houses out of there. We’ll take houses through the locks. We’ve seen houses come out of Mount Vernon. We’ve been approached by people in Marysville wanting to move houses close to the river.”

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