Cashmere, Washington Real Estate and Area Guide

What Cashmere Is Actually Like

The city covers about 1.2 square miles, and the mean commute to work is 26 minutes. That number tells you something real about the place: people live here and drive somewhere else to work, which is a large part of why it functions as a year-round community rather than a seasonal one.

The town was originally called Mission, after the 1873 Jesuit mission, and took the name Cashmere in 1903. Liberty Orchards, the maker of Aplets and Cotlets, is a long-running Cashmere institution, and the Cashmere Museum and Pioneer Village sits at 600 Cotlets Way.

Cashmere School District runs three schools, Vale Elementary, Cashmere Middle and Cashmere High, serving over 1,600 students, and it has the kind of reputation where families relocate here specifically for the four high school years. US 2 and US 97 run together through town. West on US 2 takes you toward Leavenworth and Stevens Pass, east toward Wenatchee and the Columbia, and US 97 turns south over Blewett Pass. Martin's IGA is the grocery store; the big-box run is 15 minutes east in Wenatchee.

City Limits or Unincorporated County: Check the Parcel, Not the Address

Cashmere is one of the few incorporated cities in this market, and that creates a trap for out-of-area buyers. A Cashmere mailing address can be inside the city limits or in unincorporated Chelan County, and those are two different purchases with two different sets of rules. Pull the parcel number and confirm jurisdiction before you assume anything about utilities, zoning, permitting or rentals.

Fire service splits at the city line too. The City of Cashmere has its own fire department covering the incorporated city, and a Chelan County fire district responds outside it. Which agency covers your address, and how far it is from a staffed station, is one of the things a carrier looks at when it prices a policy.

Inside the city, the City of Cashmere is your permitting authority and your utility questions go to city hall. Outside it, you are on a well or a small community system, a septic system permitted through the Chelan-Douglas Health District, county zoning and county building review. Most of the rest of this page is written from the county side, because that is where the surprises live. If your target property is inside the city, verify the city's codes with the city directly.

What You Will Actually Find for Sale

In town, the inventory skews old. The downtown core is restored turn-of-the-century housing, and the Cottage Avenue Historic District is on the National Register. Budget your inspection accordingly. In a housing stock this age, knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring, galvanized supply lines, unreinforced foundations and thin insulation are normal findings rather than deal-killers. They are also the reason an offer here should carry real inspection time. If you plan exterior work on a Cottage Avenue house, talk to the city about design review first.

Outside town the character changes fast. There are orchard parcels on the valley floor, bench ground above the river, and homes scattered up the canyons on both sides of the valley. Bottomland parcels are generally reached by county road or state highway. Slope and canyon parcels are generally reached by long private drives in varying condition. There is also the Cashmere-Dryden Airport, a small county-owned strip; if you are looking at anything near the field, read the documents on what conveys, and do not assume anything about hangar or through-the-fence rights without seeing it in writing.

Roads, Winter Access, and Wildfire

Cashmere gets the least snow of anywhere I work, so plowing is a much smaller part of life here than it is in Leavenworth, let alone Plain. It still matters up the canyons. Chelan County does not clear private driveways, and the snow berm a passing plow leaves across yours is yours to move. School bus routes and major arterials come first during and after a storm, and local access roads are plowed after those. There is also a classification worth knowing: a county primitive road, gravel or earth with 100 or fewer vehicles a day, gets discretionary maintenance, is plowed last during the week and not at all on a weekend, and after a large storm it can take days for a plow to reach one. Ask Public Works how your access road is classified before you assume it gets plowed. If it is a private road, ask whether there is a maintenance agreement, who actually runs a plow, and what it costs; plenty of canyon roads run on a long-standing arrangement between neighbors, and you want to know which kind you are buying into.

This is wildland urban interface country. The exposure here is not the valley floor so much as the canyons and benches on both sides of it, where homes sit in timber and brush on long private drives, and where a drainage can be a dead end with one way in and one way out. Olalla Canyon and Nahahum Canyon are the two with the reputation: dry, timbered, and one road out. The upper reaches of Mission Creek carry some of the same exposure. Walk the driveway the way an engine crew would: width, grade, overhead clearance, a place to turn a truck around, and whether there is any second way out. Ask the fire district serving the parcel what its response looks like to that specific address.

Insurers price all of this. Write the offer with a homeowners insurance contingency and get a binder during the inspection period, not after closing. Defensible space is the work that moves the score, and the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home designation and DNR's Wildfire Ready Neighbors program both help you get there and give an underwriter something to point to.

Water, Septic, and What It Takes to Build

Outside the city you are on a private well, a shared well, or a small community system. On a well, get the well log, the depth, a current flow test and a water test: bacteria every time, and nitrates on old orchard ground, which is most of the ground around Cashmere. A shared well means a shared-well agreement to read. Up the canyons, well production can get low, and at the back of some of them a well is not feasible at all; people there haul water, which works until January, when a water truck cannot get up the road. If that is the setup, storage capacity is the number to know before winter. If you are buying bare land or planning to add a dwelling, know that the county requires proof of legally available water before it issues a building permit, and a domestic well without a water right goes through the county's water mitigation process; establish what exists before your earnest money goes hard, and call Chelan County Natural Resources for current fees.

Septic is permitted by the Chelan-Douglas Health District, not by the county. On a rural resale, pull the CDHD file for the existing system: design, as-built, permit and inspection history. Pay attention to the approved bedroom count, because that number governs more than sleeping space. On raw land, water and septic are two separate approvals and neither one alone gets you a house.

Two more things specific to this ground. Irrigation water is a separate asset from domestic water; this is orchard country, many parcels carry irrigation district shares, and you should verify at title and with the district whether the shares run with the land and what the annual assessment is. And snow: the town itself gets the least in this valley, but the canyon and bench lots climb fast, and the roof questions still apply. If you are building or adding above 950 feet, the county sets a parcel-specific snow load and your designer will need it; a buyer of an existing house does not. On any parcel near the Wenatchee River or Mission Creek, pull the FEMA flood map and price flood insurance early. A low lot near the river is not the same risk as a bench lot well above it.

Short-Term Rentals: Different Math Than Leavenworth

This is where the Cashmere area is genuinely different from the rest of the valley. As of the county's 2026 count, unincorporated Cashmere still had most of its short-term rental allocation available, while Lake Wenatchee, Plain and unincorporated Leavenworth were all over cap. The live numbers are on the county's short-term rental statistics page (co.chelan.wa.us/community-development/pages/short-term-rental-statistics); new non-owner-occupied applications are taken June 1 through July 31. The usual county rules apply: permits do not transfer to a new owner, the septic approval sets the bedroom count, and the parcel's zone sets a minimum lot size for a new rental.

Two cautions specific to Cashmere. Inside the city's unincorporated urban growth area, the county adopts the city's own rules for rentals under thirty nights, so headroom on the county's line does not by itself mean a nightly rental is permitted there. And inside the city limits, the city's own zoning and licensing govern outright. Call both the Cashmere Planning Department and Chelan County Community Development before you underwrite rental income, and if that income is part of your math, I have a separate guide that covers the whole system.

Homes for Sale in Cashmere

The six newest Active, Contingent and First Look listings in Cashmere.

Active

Listing Broker: Mike West Leavenworth Realty

$750,000

317 Kennedy

Cashmere, WA

4 beds · 2 baths · 2,800 sqft

Active

Listing Broker: Mike West Leavenworth Realty

$475,000

123 Riverfront Drive

Cashmere, WA

2 beds · 2 baths · 1,926 sqft

Active

Listing Broker: Mike West Leavenworth Realty

$750,000

6478 Tripp Canyon

Cashmere, WA

2 beds · 1 bath · 1,454 sqft

Active

Listing Broker: Premier One Properties

$649,900

7985 North Dryden Road

Cashmere, WA

2 beds · 2 baths · 1,500 sqft

Active

Listing Broker: RE/MAX Advantage

$875,000

221 Libby Lane

Cashmere, WA

3 beds · 2 baths · 2,250 sqft

Active

Listing Broker: John L. Scott Wenatchee

$845,000

9375 N Fork Road

Cashmere, WA

4 beds · 3.5 baths · 3,870 sqft

See every active listing in Cashmere→

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