Results tagged “realestate”

Seattle Bubble sees a flatline, more or less, for housing prices since this March, with a loss of 22 percent off the price peak. So the question you have to ask yourself is, is this the moment when the hero pulls himself up over the edge of the cliff and dusts himself off...or is this the moment when the branch that stopped his fall pulls loose? Barring more economic shocks, we lean towards a slow recovery. But economic shocks aren't really barred, so long as Boeing is still thrashing around, trying to get its new plane to fly.

The real estate sales report from Northwest MLS says median home prices are up 4.4 percent across the area, with King County coming in at just over $363K. Bargain homes are selling, but condos are still taking a beating. The main thing is that people are out making offers on houses, so realtors have a reason to change out of their pajamas--pending sales (offers made and accepted) are up, though a significant portion of those fail in the financing round. The Seattle Bubble has a good media-coverage round-up, and notes with some satisfaction that the rah-rah contingent is getting less play this time around.

• The bus tunnel shut down at 7:10 a.m. this morning for about 20 minutes, thanks to an automated (and false) alarm--for the third time in six months. Funnily enough, we think every time has been during morning rush hour, too.
• Publicola's newest addition, Erica Barnett, broke the news to Seattle taxpayers that we've paid over $43,000 since 2006 to send the City Council's Jan Drago to China, India, Iceland, the United Arab Emirates, and Finland.

...depending on your subscription. Business Week is bullish about Seattle burning off its excess housing inventory, while Forbes says that foreclosures are gonna keep prices in the tank. Meanwhile, Seattle Bubble is building a Google map of construction projects that have stalled out. (The Weekly's Damon Agnos beat us to the "dueling national pubs" angle. We admit it. But what if you don't read the Weekly? What then?!)

Yesterday the Seattle Times reprinted a New York Times article on the "third wave" of foreclosures--foreclosures on people who had good credit and reasonable mortgages, but who have fallen behind due to job loss or pay or hours reduction. The first wave came when flippers and speculators got caught by plunging real-estate prices, and wave number two arrived when option-ARM mortgages reset at higher rates. Foreclosures are terrible for the value of surrounding homes. In Seattle, says the PSBJ, the "average price of a Seattle home dropped 16.4 percent in March from a year earlier, which is moving closer to the national average decline of 18.7 percent."

Seattle Bubble directed us to this Bloomberg article the Seattle Times picked up suggesting there might be a "lost generation" of U.S. home values. Baby boomers are downsizing and it's "unlikely that Generation X, born between 1965 and 1976 (or more derisively called 'baby busters'), will bid up home prices. They are only 44 million strong, not as wealthy and even more in debt from college loans." On the bright side, there's probably never been an easier time to buy an apartment near Green Lake.

Just two hours after we got back from a day-trip to Bremerton and its beautiful waterfront, we got an email announcing that Bremerton's Westsound Bank was defunct. The Washington Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) took possession, "citing severe asset problems, significant losses and inadequate capital," brought in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the FDIC sold Westsound to Kitsap Bank of Port Orchard.

"Pending sales of single family homes in King County surged in April," reports the Seattle Times. "Pending sales...were up 25 percent from March." But what's this in the bottom half of the story: "But the number of closed single-family home sales in King County in April--1,004--represented just 60 percent of the pending sales reported in March, an unusually low share." Seattle Bubble breaks it down for you (with charts): "[P]ending sales are rapidly becoming a totally useless measure of actual market activity." Meanwhile, Aubrey Cohen notes that about 21 percent of Seattle homeowners are underwater.

The Case-Schiller Home Price Indices show the Seattle market has unwound to July 2005 valuations. The Seattle Bubble has updated its time-shifted home price comparison graph, which illustrates what happens when you remove a 17-month lag between Los Angeles/San Diego, and Seattle/Portland: the curves' slopes match up real nice.

So the developers of Thornton Place are stealing a page from Hyundai and offering to pay your mortgage for six months if you lose your job in the year after buying one of their condos.

• Finally, some good news on the horizon with regards to housing in Seattle! Seattle Bubble has the story.
• Real estate on Beacon Hill is looking promising, too, reports Beacon Hill Blog, thanks to light rail plans.
• Ballard has a lot to discuss about how the viaduct will affect their neighborhood, and My Ballard hosts the conversation. (My Ballard has an unusually active comments section, we're noticing today.)

We haven't had to rent anything lately by perusing Craigslist, but a friend of ours was telling us the other day about a con they ran across. The scammer found an actual rental property offered through a management firm, copied it, undercut the price several hundred dollars, and said they were the owners, offering a special direct-to-you rate. But when our friend responded, they got a long reply explaining the "owners" were on a Christian mission in Nigeria and had brought the keys with them--easiest thing to do was to send a rent check, they'd send the keys. Luckily, CL has a little banner that says: "Avoid scams and fraud by dealing locally! Beware any arrangement involving Western Union, Moneygram, wire transfer, or a landlord/owner who is out of the country or cannot meet you in person." And so it goes.

In the latest edition of her quarterly-ish email newsletter, Marya Sea Kaminksi--actress, writer, director, Genius, and WET co-founder, just to name a few--shared some info on one of her upcoming projects. She's developing a monologue on a timely topic: Seattle's rampant condo abuse, in a work titled Condomillennium: A New Play About Fantasy and Real Estate.

Keep going. The bottom is near. The real estate market has finally bottomed out says one agent. UW is cutting 600-800 jobs And they weren't bottom-heavy to begin with. Some of those people might consider opening an SBC franchise. We love how they put a little chocolate bar on each mocha.

Over at Capitol Hill Seattle they're going all i-team over the Howell airgun shooting. The Rainier Valley Post has got hints to where all the Valentine hearts are hidden in Hillman City. MyBallard has the pre-opening news on Green Go Food, "fast food with a conscience." And Publicola busts new HUDster and inveterate Twitterer Ron Sims for his faulty real estate prediction.

That's the stat that jumped out at us from the Seattle Times story on our woozy real estate market; they went with "Nearly 30 percent of all homes sold at a loss at the end of 2008." So says Zillow's quarterly home value report. The King Country assessor's office data shows that "Most homes bought since mid-2005 and sold during the last three months of 2008 fetched lower prices than their owners paid." But that twenty percent underwater worries us because that's a sizable chunk who no longer have the recourse of being able to tap home equity in an emergency.

We had a server snafu earlier this morning, which kiboshed our Neighborhood News roundup. Here's a summary version: that student who was shot to death while wearing a Nazi uniform was a UW German Studies major, even in this real estate market, someone still wants to kick the B&O out in favor of a 75-unit apartment complex, and Cliff Mass says probably no snow today, but watch out for tomorrow. Has your Zune started working again? Meanwhile, most of our secondary pages are still offline, and we're still experiencing some "server optimization" issues with commenting login times. If you have particular difficulties with anything, shoot us an email at tips (at) seattlest dot com. And Happy 2009!

Nationally, existing home sales fell by 8.6 percent in November, says the P-I. Troublingly, "sales of distressed properties made up 45 percent of all property sales in November." But here's the kicker for local home shoppers and sellers: "Sales of existing homes in the Seattle area were down nearly 37 percent in November from October and 45 percent from November 2007." Seattle Bubble reports that in King County, the existing inventory of homes on the market, selling at the current rate, would take nine months to work through. They also have a cool graphic that breaks the inventory down for you.

Pioneer Property creditors received notice from the group's bank over the weekend of the group's bankruptcy filing that their bills are not being paid. Pioneer Property Group was behind the Live Historic brand, and at one point owned seven "rehabilitated" vintage buildings on Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and First Hill, and in Fremont and Pioneer Square. We visited a few of them, condo-shopping, and they were great old buildings, but Pioneer was sailing directly into the teeth of a bursting real estate bubble and general recession. Our condolences to the people who thought they'd bought into the safety and security of a home. UPDATE: Now we hear that bankruptcy has not been filed, but Live Historic's office is closed and their phone is dead.

(First, did you get our Herb Alpert reference? This is the kind of thing that gives us the eye-twitch.) Spencer Alpert--he's a real estate developer, he owns a 2008 all-electric Tesla--says on his website that he's "partnering with a major New York developer on an iconic high rise tower project in downtown Seattle." Now the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reports (thx, Jesse!), that Alpert is courting the Donald, and wants to build a "strikingly tall marquee two-tower condo project." It seems like perfect timing: "With five new buildings, encompassing about two million square feet, opening next year, the vacancy rate [in Seattle] is expected to hit 15 percent. Most of the new space has not been leased."

Someone recently spray-painted “Punk is not dead,” etc., on a fence near our house--which is essentially the bank’s house, since we have two adjustable-rate mortgages.

Found in our Theo Chocolates promotional newsletter this morning: "Sales of existing houses dropped more in Washington than anywhere else in the nation last quarter, compared with a year earlier, according to a new report. King County's median sale price also dropped roughly 10 percent from a year earlier." Who was saying that Seattle wasn't immune to, but typically lagged the national trends? With the drop, 57 percent of the state's first-time buyers have enough income to afford the median home price.

Yesterday we mentioned the scuttlebutt about malled-up REIT General Growth Properties putting Westlake Center up for sale. Today GGP stocks were hammered after the company announced it "might be forced to seek protection from its creditors as it struggles to refinance debt," and are now trading at around $0.40 in after-hours trading. GGP has $958 million in debt due Dec. 1, but a "good price" for Westlake was quoted at just $150 million, so it's going to take more than that to right the REIT's ship.

NYT über-pundit Thomas Friedman is married to Ann Friedman (née Bucksbaum), whose family (still) runs General Growth Properties, a Chicago-based REIT heavy into malls (they own eight in Washington alone). General Growth is trying to make some hefty debt payments and has to unload some of its inventory, which means Westlake Center downtown may now have a For Sale sign attached. The price tag is estimated at around $150 million. Who wants to start the bidding?

This morning, Cindy Zetts, the Seattle Times real estate editor, decided to head for greener pastures, which seems to say something not good about both the real estate market and the Seattle Times. It's a kind of Black Friday Remix over there, as reporters make long walks into management offices. At the Times, the involuntary staff exodus shows no signs of abating--management keeps talking about belt-tightening but without giving any sense of where the last notch on the belt might be. And as the Seattle Bubble points out (with a sadly hilarious "bottom-calling" graph), the Seattle real estate market's bottom is proving to be elusive.

We'd heard that the media's other, cash-poor shoe would be dropping after the election, when all the campaign money dried up. But the Seattle Times is going shoeless a day early, with the announcement of a "workforce reduction of approximately 130-150 positions, a combination of voluntary separations and layoffs." Back in April, the Times shed 200 employees, and said then that further cuts might be necessary. What with classifieds, real estate, and financial services advertising down to a trickle of their former Niagaras, political advertising was the last...oh, we've done the shoe thing already. But you get the idea. Next up, similar news from the P-I?

The latest Case-Schiller numbers are out, and they're...not great. Seattle area housing values are down "8.8 percent from August 2007," says the P-I, and they quote an economist who says that "as bad as the latest Case-Shiller numbers appear to be, they are bound to get much worse." We were having lunch with a friend of ours who was reminiscing how, in the mid-80s, he and his wife bought a teensy bungalow for a price also in the mid-80s. He was making about $30,000 a year. Not quite ten years later, they sold for over $300,000, and the property kept appreciating. However, to this day, his old job pays around $30,000 a year. "I don't understand," he said, shaking his head. "We couldn't get started here, today."

The local blogosphere has fastened on the news that WaMu's former president and COO Stephen Rotella is asking $6.25 million for his 1909 Capitol Hill mansion--the Stranger's investigative reporter Dan Savage bicycled by to produce a photo of the real estate in question. Ironically, the asking price exhibits the kind of crazy thinking that sank WaMu; Rotella bought the place for $3.78 million just three years ago. Now, during a major market downturn, he apparently thinks he's due a 65 percent return. That's a lot of fixer-upping!

It doesn't seem that long ago that no matter which daily newspaper you picked up, the real estate news was good and getting better the by the second. This morning the Seattle Times has a story about even highly motivated home-sellers not finding buyers. Key sentence: "The Seattle-area housing market, once touted as bulletproof against the forces that were pulling down other markets across the country, is now stressing out sellers, who are seeing inventories rise, sales fall and prices drop." We love that "once touted." Wonder who was doing all that touting? Damn those touts!

The folks from HGTV are coming to Seattle next month to shoot another season of real estate porn. "Owning a home can be a great investment. And with the ups and downs of the current real estate market, it may be worth your while to find out what your home may sell for in today’s market!" So reads the press release asking for volunteers. Local realtors are also invited to apply as "experts." Former Apprentice Kendra Todd hosts. Interested? Go here.