Cascadia Northwest Real Estate opens

Several years ago, Shana O’Brien decided that she needed a change. She was working for a Vancouver-based real estate company at the time, but felt that the brokerage’s core values didn’t align with her own in terms of what it could be doing for the community it served.

“So I decided to venture out on my own,” she said. “(I wanted to) have a little bit more community focus and community involvement without a corporate entity advising on whether I could or could not do that.”

O’Brien used that mindset to launch a business of her own, Cascadia Northwest Real Estate, in 2020. Now, she’s counting on her community-minded focus more than ever as she prepares to expand her business to Washougal.

Cascadia Northwest Real Estate’s East Clark County office opened this month at 1887 Main St., Ste. A, in Washougal.

“The main reason (we chose Washougal) is that we are growth oriented, and the vibe I get is that so is the whole city of Washougal,” she said. “If our goal is to grow, it seems like that’s a great place to do it, because the whole town is doing it. It just made the (most) sense. There’s a lot of great things on the docket for Washougal, so that made the decision really easy.”

Cascadia Northwest, which operates from a main office in Vancouver and a satellite office in Ridgefield, provides residential real estate and homebuyer education services to clients in Washington and Oregon.

“We are an independently-owned, fast-growing real estate brokerage,” Cascadia Northwest’s website states. “We believe in growth through kindness, collaboration and positivity. We believe that education is the foundation for making good decisions. We strive to make sure our clients have a full understanding of the transaction process from start to finish. Serving our clients is our No. 1 priority, and we do so using the most state-of-the-art technology combined with old fashioned values and customer service. We take pride in being active and contributing members of our community.”

The company started out with about 12 realtors, most of them friends and former co-workers of O’Brien. It now has 46 agents.

“We started to think it was time to get a little bit more space,” O’Brien said. “We were possibly looking at doing that in Oregon (rather than) another Washington location, (but) it just made more sense to head east.”

O’Brien first looked into the possibility of opening an office in Camas.

“It didn’t work out,” she said. “Downtown is kind of saturated — the space that I was looking at had at least six other real estate offices within a three-block radius, so it didn’t seem like the greatest move. We started looking at Washougal, which is heading in (a positive) direction. It felt that Camas was a little played out, but Washougal was going to be the next thing. (Moving there) was a chance to be on the ground floor of something.”

O’Brien found what she was looking for on the corner of Main and 19th Streets in Washougal, the former home of Glo Beauty Lounge, which moved to 1076 N. Shepherd Road, Washougal, earlier this year.

“It’s a relatively new building, so there’s not a lot that needs to be done. It’s a great space,” O’Brien said. “We liked the location, the street frontage, the fact that it’s got some parking, and (the fact that it has) a nice, big open space without a bunch of little rooms that we would have to figure out what to do with. It definitely works with our open workspace concept.”

For more information about the company, visit cnwrealestate.com.