What’s moving the custom home market in the Pacific Northwest this week

At Lockie Homes, we track the forces shaping our clients’ decisions — from shifts in Seattle’s tech economy to lumber tariffs affecting build costs in Snohomish and Island Counties. Here’s what caught our attention this week.

A Historic Wealth Event Is Playing Out in Seattle’s Backyard

The SpaceX IPO closed last Thursday at $161 per share — a 19% first-day gain that made it the largest initial public offering in history, valuing the company at $1.77 trillion. SpaceX has operated a major satellite engineering hub in the greater Seattle area since 2015, which means a meaningful number of the newly liquid employees are right here in the Pacific Northwest.

We’ve seen this pattern before: a major tech liquidity event creates a wave of remote-capable, financially empowered people who start seriously asking “where do I actually want to live — and what do I want to build there?” Waterfront and rural retreat properties on Whidbey Island, Camano Island, and throughout Snohomish County tend to see renewed interest in the months that follow. If you’ve been sitting on a property and wondering about timing, that context is worth knowing.

Close behind it: Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Two generational wealth events in 17 days is unusual — and the ripple effects on the broader Seattle tech ecosystem (Amazon, Microsoft, Google employees recalibrating their own plans) tend to unfold over the following 12–18 months.

The Eastside Housing Market Is Sending a Signal

Luxury inventory on the Eastside — Bellevue, Kirkland, Mercer Island — surged 62% year-over-year in Q1 2026, with median prices easing about 7% and days on market climbing to 46. The market is rebalancing after years of extreme scarcity.

What this often means in practice: people who have built significant equity in an Eastside home, but who feel like they’ve outgrown it or are ready for something different, now have more reason to act. For many of our clients, that transition leads to a conversation about building — something designed specifically for how they want to live, on land they’ve chosen, rather than another resale compromise.

What We’re Watching on Build Costs

Canadian softwood lumber remains subject to a combined tariff rate near 35%, with a final trade determination expected in late August. Framing lumber futures, which dipped to around $437/thousand board feet in early May, have recovered to roughly $598/Mbf as of last week. The May dip may have been the seasonal floor.

For clients in early design conversations with us, this is relevant to how we sequence material buyouts. It’s one of the things we actively manage on your behalf — the goal is to lock pricing at the right moment, not after the window closes.

A Tool We’re Paying Attention To

Autodesk released Forma Building Design in April — a cloud platform that runs real-time environmental analysis on a building site before design begins. Wind, sunlight, noise, microclimate. For the kind of constrained rural and waterfront lots we work with regularly — shoreline setbacks, critical areas, view corridors — tools that compress the feasibility timeline matter. We’re evaluating it for our pre-design workflow.

Lockie Homes is a custom design-build firm based in Washington State. Our primary build territory is Snohomish County, and we also work with clients on Whidbey Island and Camano Island. We work with a small number of clients at a time — if you’re thinking about building, we’d be glad to talk.