Hi, @Corinne Stroum! I live in Bellevue as well. I'm still very new to real estate as an investment rather than just buying a place to live, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I think you can make some strategy work here if you are knowledgable and have time and money to invest. If your goal is long term appreciation, you will get that here if you buy (or create) a good property, but the high prices make it difficult for most of us to scale up (in this lifetime) using that strategy. If your goal is cash flow, you probably have to buy something distressed and fix it up to have any chance of rents outpacing mortgage payments around here. Or move to an outlying area where the rent:mortgage payment ratio is more favorable. There is a rental property calculator on this site that helps you plug in all the numbers when trying to analyze whether a given property would make you money as a rental. It helps you make sure to figure in allllll the costs. In Bellevue, many properties can be written off without any calculator, as the mortgage payment is so close to the potential rent that you just know it will be eating money every month.
Do you have full-on "flipping" skills to apply to some Bellevue property? Or deep enough pockets to keep purchasing multiple full priced homes among this current frenzy of sales? You might consider partnerships at some point, as well.
Also make sure you attend some local meet ups and/or REIA meetings to meet others in person and get some perspective on what serious investors are up to around here.
Most important of all, keep reading, posting, learning, and figuring out a strategy that will work for you! Hope to see you around. Keep us updated! And hopefully you'll get some more experienced folks piping up here to give you advice as well. :)
