Guides · Selling
Selling a house with knob and tube wiring in Washington
Yes, you can sell it, and you do not have to rewire first. The real question is narrower: whether your buyer will need a mortgage. Knob and tube rarely stops a sale outright — it shrinks the pool of buyers who can get insured and financed, and everything else follows from that.
Notice who is telling you this is a catastrophe#
Search this question and you will be told your home has lost ten to fifteen per cent of its value and will sit on the market half again as long as it should.
Look at where those numbers come from. The pages publishing them are, overwhelmingly, cash-buying companies whose business is purchasing houses below market, and electrical contractors selling rewires. Both are honest about what they do. Neither is a neutral source on whether your house is a disaster, and neither has any obligation to you.
I am not going to tell you the wiring is nothing. It is a real condition with real consequences for financing. But the gap between "this narrows your buyer pool" and "this has destroyed your equity" is enormous, and it is a gap somebody profits from.
What is actually true, in the order it bites#
Insurance comes first. Some carriers decline to write a policy on a home with active knob and tube, some will write it with a surcharge, and some want certification from a licensed electrician. Which carriers do what changes over time and differs by house.
Financing follows insurance. A buyer who cannot insure the home cannot close, because their lender requires coverage. Separately, government-backed loans frequently require remediation before funding, which quietly removes a large share of first-time buyers from your pool.
Only then does the buyer pool narrow. That is the actual mechanism — not that buyers are frightened of old wiring, but that a chunk of them structurally cannot complete the purchase. Cash buyers and renovation-loan buyers are unaffected, which is precisely why cash-buying companies are so keen to tell you about it.
Thinking about listing this year?
Talk through your timelineYou have to disclose it. That part is not optional.#
Washington's Seller Disclosure Act requires a completed Form 17 on most residential sales, covering known conditions of the property. If you know the home has knob and tube, it belongs on that form.
This is the one place I would be inflexible. An undisclosed known defect is a far worse problem than the defect — it survives closing, and it is the kind of thing that ends up with lawyers rather than electricians.
The good news is that disclosure and price are the same conversation. A buyer told upfront, with a scope and a quote attached, negotiates against a number. A buyer who discovers it at inspection negotiates against their own imagination, and imagination is always more expensive.
Sources
- Seller Disclosure Act — RCW 64.06 — Washington State Legislature
Your three real options#
Rewire before listing. The cleanest, and the most expensive up front. It restores the full buyer pool and removes the insurance and financing objection entirely. Worth it when the remaining wiring is extensive, when you have the weeks, and when your neighbourhood's buyers are financing rather than paying cash.
Get it scoped, disclose it, and price it. Usually my recommendation. Pay an electrician to document which circuits are live and what remediation would cost, put that in the listing file, and price accordingly. You give up some buyers, you keep control, and you are negotiating from a real quote instead of a guess.
Sell to a cash buyer. Genuinely valid if speed matters more than price — and it is the option the cash-buying companies want you to reach first, which is why their content is written to make the other two sound impossible. Take it because it suits your timeline, not because you were frightened into it.
The partial-rewire question, from the seller's side#
Most older Seattle homes have been partly updated. Owners naturally describe this as "the electrical has been done."
Buyers' insurers ask a narrower question: is any knob and tube still active. If you cannot answer that precisely, a buyer has to assume the worst, and they will price accordingly.
So the single highest-return thing you can do before listing, cheaper than rewiring by an order of magnitude, is pay an electrician to establish exactly what is live and what is abandoned, and get it in writing. That document does more for your price than almost anything else on your pre-listing list.
Common questions#
Do I have to rewire before I can sell?
No. There is no requirement to remediate knob and tube in order to list or sell. What changes without it is which buyers can obtain insurance and financing, which narrows your pool rather than closing the door.
Is it legal to sell a house with knob and tube wiring in Washington?
Yes. What is not optional is disclosure — Washington's Seller Disclosure Act requires a Form 17 covering known conditions on most residential sales, and known knob and tube belongs on it.
How much value does it actually cost me?
Widely quoted figures of ten to fifteen per cent come mainly from cash-buying companies and contractors, and I would not plan around them. The honest answer is that it depends on how much is live, what remediation costs on your specific house, and how many buyers in your price band are paying cash. A scoped quote turns that from a guess into a number.
Will it show up on the buyer's inspection anyway?
Almost certainly, yes. Which is the argument for disclosing it with documentation rather than hoping. Found at inspection, it is a renegotiation from a weak position; disclosed upfront with a quote, it is a priced-in known quantity.
Should I just sell to a cash buyer?
Sometimes that is genuinely the right call, particularly if timing matters more than price. Just make it a decision rather than a reaction. Get the wiring scoped and a market valuation first, so you can compare a real cash offer against a real listed outcome instead of against a worst case someone described to you.