Eddie Vedder's House: The West Seattle House He Bought in 1993

Eddie Vedder bought a house in West Seattle in January 1993, and King County's records show it has not been sold since. He paid $435,000, and the county's records name the buyer as Eddie J. Vedder. Every document recorded on the property in the 33 years since is a transfer between its owners, then a trust, and its trustees. The county's sales record shows one sale, in 1993. Where he lives today is not public record, and a deed cannot tell us. He moved to Seattle in 1990, and this is the only house we can document.

He had been a Seattle resident for less than three years. The Seattle Times told the story in December 1993: after a long phone call with Stone Gossard, Vedder got on a plane to Seattle in 1990 to sing for the band that became Pearl Jam. When he signed for a house of his own, Ten had been out for nearly a year and a half, and Vs. came out that October.

We hold the street address behind the ropes. The map pin, the property record and the county's figures for the house sit on Eddie Vedder's West Seattle home profile.

Two parcels for $435,000

The $435,000 covered two parcels in a single sale: the house, and the undeveloped lot beside it. The lot has gone with the house through every transfer since.

The house was 11 years old when he bought it. King County's tax records date its construction to 1982 and record a renovation in 2011. They also grade the building 11, a step the county's own scale labels “Excellent.” The grade scores the quality of the construction and the materials. What changed around 2011 is in the city's permit files.

A trust since 2004

In December 1994 he deeded both parcels to himself and a second owner jointly, and the same day they signed the property over to a trustee, a person named to hold it on their behalf.

A 2004 trustee deed, a deed signed by a trustee, moved both parcels into a family trust, a legal holder set up to pass property along, and the trust holds them to this day.

The latest document dates from 2021. It is a quitclaim, a deed that passes along whatever interest the signer holds, with no sale behind it, and it stays inside the same trust, naming a new trustee. The deed chain shows no sale out, then or since.

About $900,000 of permits, 2009 to 2012

Seattle's building permit records show the scale of the work. A permit issued in 2009 covered a swimming pool, two detached cabanas and site work, with the work estimated at about $410,000. A second permit, issued in 2010, covered a three-story addition to the house, estimated at about $490,000. Both closed in 2012. Together that is about $900,000 of permitted work in roughly three and a half years, and those are the estimates filed with the permits.

The site lies in what Seattle calls an environmentally critical area, ground the city reviews more closely before anyone builds on it. The permit files record an exemption from part of that review for the pool, the cabanas and the addition.

The permits say what was added. The home's profile holds what stands there now.

What we corrected

This page first ran in 2022, and parts of it were wrong. It had the $435,000 price right but missed that the sale bought two parcels, the house and the lot beside it. It said Vedder had put “thousands” into renovating the house over 16 years; the permits show about $900,000 of work, filed between 2009 and 2012. It described one poolside cabana, and the permit lists two. It repeated a rumor that he had planned to move out years earlier, and the deed chain shows no sale out. It also said he owned and was selling farmland on Molokai, in Hawaii, on the strength of a Dirt gallery we can no longer open and a broker's page we could not find. We found no record or reporting that ties him to that land, so that section is gone.

For how we decide which addresses to publish and which to hold, read our note on celebrity addresses.