Seattle Bubble

Fun! New! More ways to research how best to throw huge piles of money you don’t really have into the local real estate market!
Finding the home of your dreams can take months of research. But thanks to new online tools — including aerial maps that incorporate residential listings — potential home buyers now [...]

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We’re venturing a bit further outside the Seattle area than usual for this story, but I thought it was interesting enough to merit that. From the Gray’s Harbor paper, The Daily World comes this story about an up-and-coming planned community of half-million to million-dollar homes in Pacific Beach:
On a cliff in the woods overlooking [...]

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County Council candidates in Snohomish are taking notice of the housing market insanity and (of course) attempting to gain votes based on their position on the matter.
The hot real estate market and its expensive “starter castles” are a key hurdle for the homeless, first-time home buyers and senior citizens, several Snohomish County Council candidates agreed [...]

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The usual suspects have chimed in this morning with their detailed stories (as well as graphs, figures, and photographs) reacting to the September sales figures.
Elizabeth Rhodes in the Times:
For the third straight month, there were more sales but fewer homes to choose from in King and Snohomish counties, compared with the same period a year [...]

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Home sales figures for the month of September have been released for the Northwest, with Pierce County’s combined (house & condo) median price posting a 19.5% gain year-on-year to $245,000, and King County’s median price (house only) gaining 15.5% year-on-year to $381,250.
Interestingly, that is a 1% decrease from August 2005’s $385,000 high for King County. [...]

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The Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate Journal takes an in-depth look at a local real estate investor in a multi-part, fourteen-month series:

A First-Time Landlord Launches His Investment
A Landlord Struggles To Find Qualified Renters
Landlord Finds a Renter After Some Concessions
A Landlord Experiences His First Repair Problems
Our Landlord Searches For His Next Investment
Despite Market Research, Our Investor [...]

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