Moving to Liberty Lake, WA

Are you thinking about buying a home in the Spokane area and you’re curious what Liberty Lake specifically has to offer? Maybe you’re wondering if it be convenient for you especially if you have to drive downtown or to the airport often and maybe you’re wondering if there is anything to do in Liberty Lake. Well if you’re having those questions, this blog is for you! I’ll be bringing you around google maps and showing you everything you need to know about Liberty Lake so that if you are thinking about moving there, this will give you all the information you need.

Location

So, taking a look at the map, Liberty Lake is situated on both sides of Interstate 90 that runs east and west and is the main way of traveling west to Downtown Spokane or you can take it all the way to Seattle if you want to and to the east it takes you over to Idaho and all the way to Chicago. If you wanted to head north or south you would still have to jump on I 90 to hit 195 to go down to Pullman, highway 2 to go north to deer park, highway 27 is another way to head south on the palouse and will take you to the Pullman area, or highway 95 over in Idaho will take you to Sandpoint to the north and Moscow to the South, just depending on where you’re heading. 

So let’s see what google says, Liberty Lake to Spokane to give you an idea if you’ll be commuting to an office in Downtown you’ll be commuting about 20 minutes but in the rush out times, west bound I 90, the side of I 90 that you would be driving on can get pretty backed up because you have everyone from Idaho, Liberty Lake, and the Spokane Valley all commuting west to go to work. And then the same thing happens in the evening rush hour. East bound I 90 becomes pretty backed up as well so I would say if you will be commuting during these rush hour times that I would give yourself at least another 10 minutes so you could be looking at around a thirty minute commute if that’s where you need to be going every day. Which I know is more and more of a non issue as people are working remotely more often and if you’re coming from Seattle or California you probably don’t think that’s a big deal at all, but here in Spokane that would be considered a pretty long commute. 

If you’re going to be traveling to the airport regularly for travel or work then you see you are about a 25 minute drive to the airport but what’s awesome is it’s basically a straight shot down I 90. The airport is right off the exit so traveling to the airport from Liberty Lake is extremely easy. 

So let’s zoom in here and see what’s going on around Liberty Lake. So as the name states, there is a lake actually called Liberty Lake so you’re very close to that and have easy access to the Lake if you live in the area. And what the Liberty Lake boundary map doesn’t show is that there are actually tons of residential properties all along the lake. Many can be on the high end but some of the secondary homes are pretty normal 2000 sq ft, 1970’s homes that you can actually purchase for well under five hundred thousand. So if you’re not too concerned about living directly on the water but just want to be close and have the benefits of the lake, there is actually a pretty affordable community right there. 

Things to do

You also have three golf courses within the city limits of Liberty Lake, they really crammed them in there. Trailhead is a nine hole course and is a good practice course or one to bring beginner players too because the holes are pretty short and it’s relatively flat as well. But you also have the Liberty Lake golf course and MeadowWood golf course. So it’s a big golfing community in the Liberty Lake area. Many of the gated communities are surrounding the golf courses and it’s legal in Liberty Lake to drive your golf cart on some of the streets so it has much more of an Arizona type feel to it in the summer. 

And in terms of getting outdoors, Liberty Lake is close to a handful of really nice hiking and camping areas. The Saltese uplands are a relatively easy place to hike but with a lot of trails so you can take a different route each time you go. The Liberty Lake regional park is almost thirty six hundred acres of forest and wetlands that you can go hiking in and there’s a very popular eight and a half mile loop trail through it that’s not too difficult and you get to see a lot of the park. There’s camping and ORV parks as well so it’s just an awesome place that is really just a stones throw from Liberty Lake. 

Community Development

Other than that, there isn’t a whole ton going on in Liberty Lake but it is rapidly expanding. I’m going to switch over to the satellite view to show you a little more detail. So you can see, right along I 90 is a lot of commercial properties. You do have a home depot out there so any home renovations you won’t have to go too far for that but if you need things like Costco you’ll have to drive into the Spokane Valley about 12 or so minutes to get there. And you see Huntwood cabinets pop up on here, they were featured in one of my recent blogs as one of the top employers in Spokane so they bring in a lot of people from other parts of spokane for work each day. 

But the biggest thing I wanted to show you is how much Liberty Lake is expanding. You can see right by the golf courses that it’s already really built up but if you look to the west of that, just south of Home Depot there are large areas of land that are being developed right there and if we go North of the freeway you see a lot of vacant land in between Orchard Park and the Harvard road trailhead and all of that will becoming housing as well over the next few years. 

Food Scene

So let’s see what food there is in Liberty Lake. You have most of your chain restaurants like McDonalds, Carls Jr, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Papa Murphy’s but there are some great local places as well. Starting up by Orchard park, they’ve built a little corner in the middle of the neighborhood over here for a few restaurants. They have Annie’s Ice Cream which is absolutely amazing. I would go into detail about what is amazing at each of these places but that’s for another blog or you’ll just have to go try them out. Next door to Annie’s is Hello, Sugar an extremely popular mini doughnut shop, and then they have Versali pizza next to that which is a stone fire pizza place and they are excellent as well. 

But jumping around, another great place is 3 Ninjas, kind of a fusion taco place, there’s a couple mexican restaurants, a couple japanese restaurants and then they also have Trailbreaker brewing which is cool spot to hang out. The brewery itself is very nice and they have some outdoor areas to hang out in the summer. So there’s really something for everyone, I wouldn’t say Liberty Lake is really missing anything but it’s also really convenient to have a date night in Coeur D Alene or in Downtown Spokane where you can be exposed to dozens of amazing restaurants. I think people moving from out of the area can be worried about the food sometimes and I think we have a really incredible food seen here in Spokane. 

Housing

So in terms of housing, there are a handful of different price points in Liberty Lake. You can find a 1 bed 1 bath condo around two hundred and fifty thousand and you can also find the most expensive homes in all of Spokane up on Legacy Ridge around 1.5 to 2 million dollars. The north side of the highway by Orchard park and everything that is being built up around there are more of your standard residential homes and those go from the mid five hundred thousands to about eight hundred thousand at the top. When you’re looking at the map, in that area South of Home Depot, all of those winding roads are working up a hill right there where all of the more high end homes are built on and we call that area Legacy Ridge. And in terms of what builder you should be looking for in the area, the developer on the north side of the freeway is Greenstone and the D.R. Horton has two communities on Legacy Ridge, one is called Ascend and the other is the Cottages. 

But many neighborhoods in Liberty Lake are gated communities, incredibly clean and well maintained and are really attractive for people moving from out of the area because they kind of know what to expect. It’s definitely one of the more high end neighborhoods in all of Spokane, so it’s not for everyone at every price point, but for those that are looking for a good neighborhood and community to live in then Liberty Lake is a great choice. 

There are a lot of opportunities in the market right now, I just helped a family this past weekend negotiate over twenty five thousand dollars in closing costs in the Liberty Lake area so now is an amazing time to take advantage of some of the deals that can be found out there.