10-acre slice of Seattle lists for $1.5M, with a catch: It’s a cemetery

Seattle’s frenzied, low-inventory real estate market just got a new listing: a 10-acre North Seattle property with territorial views for $1.5 million. 

The catch? It’s a cemetery.

The Crown Hill Cemetery in northwest Seattle was listed for sale Thursday. The unusual listing follows a similarly unusual court fight, one that saw a lender to the cemetery’s longtime owner force the business into receivership. The sale would go toward paying a seven-figure debt and wrapping up what’s become a contentious three-year saga in King County Superior Court.

Covering almost an entire city block, the Crown Hill Cemetery’s listing is being promoted as a “business opportunity for a cemetery company or funeral home business looking to expand.” 

Two lots there were sold for residential use after removing those parcels’ cemetery designation. A third lot is in the process to be sold separately.

“Developers/Builders are uncertain as to what buyers will pay for a new home as too many people have seen ‘Poltergeist,’” said Michael Peters, the listed real estate agent managing the cemetery sale, by email.

For a cemetery operator, there are opportunities for revenue growth, according to the listing, by adding buildings including a “mausoleum and/or columbarium,” or by adding plots where underused roads run through the cemetery.

The cemetery itself is older than the neighborhood that shares its name, and predates Seattle’s northward thrust at the turn of the 20th century. 

In 1902, residents of Ballard — then an independent city, before its much-maligned annexation by Seattle in 1907 — petitioned their municipal government for a cemetery capable of housing the growing city’s dead, according to HistoryLink.org, Washington state’s online encyclopedia. Ballardites were being interred at the half-cleared cemetery within the year, before a road to the cemetery had been built.

Headstones from those early days tell a piece of Seattle’s history.

“Many infant deaths and an over-representation of burials in 1918, the year of the Spanish influenza pandemic, give pause to any romantic notions of returning to simpler times in the Pacific Northwest,” HistoryLink author Louis Fiset noted in a 2001 essay. “Other weathered and almost illegible tombstones of war veterans remind visitors of the country’s bitter Civil War.” 

The two owners listed in the lawsuit are John Miller and Julia Miller, who have owned Crown Hill Cemetery since at least 1999, according to Washington secretary of state records.

So far, the cemetery has had three interested buyers, said Sid Constantinescu, the court-appointed receiver in charge of selling the property. He said he wants to wait one to two months to sell so the property gets the best price. In the meantime, the Crown Hill Cemetery owners are still operating the business.

Due to federal and state laws, Constantinescu said, the remains at the Crown Hill Cemetery won’t be exhumed when the new owner takes over the business.

Interested buyers are required to have a license to operate a cemetery with the Department of Licensing in order to buy Crown Hill Cemetery, he said.

“We’re not selling this to speculative investors who are going to throw condos on it,” Constantinescu said.

The cemetery’s longtime owners have been embroiled in a legal dispute with a lender since 2021. A receiver was appointed to manage the payment of the debts, and, ultimately, the sale of the property.

In January, a King County judge made the decision to sell off the whole cemetery to settle a portion of the debt, purported by the cemetery’s lender to be nearly $2.3 million.

Constantinescu said he came up with the $1.5 million listing price by reviewing comparable sales nationally and conducting a discounted cash-flow analysis on prospective future cash flows of the cemetery.

“Cemeteries are essentially real estate,” Constantinescu said. “We’re renting grave sites or selling, like a condominium.”

The case remains pending in King County Superior Court.