While most home “owners” are nothing less than thrilled about skyrocketing real estate prices, mobile home owners are having the land sold out from under them as land owners cash in on Seattle’s bubble.
Our state is facing a mobile home space crisis. Exploding real estate prices are making the land too valuable for this moderate-to-low income way of life.According to state figures, 115 parks have closed in Washington since 1989.
In the past year, nine parks have sold or are up for sale in the Puget Sound area, where land prices have risen the most.
Six hundred twenty one families in our area now must find another place to move their mobile homes, 167 in King County alone.
I guess it’s not really surprising, as all sorts of low-cost residential options have been replaced with sardine subdivisions and chicly condos.
(Wayne Havrelly, KIRO 7, 02.21.2006)
In 2005 median house prices jumped up 18% in one year.
http://www.adjustable-mortgages.com
Excellent Blog. Very informative. And very well organized.
Keep it up. We need more such blogs which provide quality
information.
Thank you
Hi Everyone-
I had a new (really long!) list of price drops in Ravenna but when I typed it in and hit “log in & publish” the darn thing just would not enter.
Just wondering- does anybody else have that problem with this blog ? It’s happened more than once to me.
Now here is sthg. I just discovered that some of you may be interested in taking a look at. It is a blog by a “Seattle Real Estate Investor” that gives a blow by blow account of buying, working on and selling properties in the Seattle area:
http://seattlerei.blogspot.com
I guess perhaps you could call this guy a flipper but his profit margin seems so small to me that I am stumped.
As I read it I feel like I may be witnessing a train wreck in real time.
Having made way more $$ buying and selling RE in the past with not half the headache that this guy seems to be enduring I’m just wondering what it all means.
As I read this it just feels like this poor guy doesn’t realize he’s buying and selling at the tippy top of the market and it just wouldn’t be so hard to turn a profit if he waited 10 years and THEN put his skills to work.
Just another look at another side of our surreal and scary RE market.
What I’ve noticed in the northwest is that the margin for flippers is just too thin. For a while we entertained thoughts of buying an old beater and fixing it up. But unless prices continued just climbing and climbing, there was no incentive.
A house near the point of being condemned, sold for maybe a 8-12% discount in our zip.
Also I guess fitting in with this thread, a large portion of these wrecks were mobile or modular homes. And as such even after a fix up the resale is much lower then a stick built. (140-180k vs 230-300k)
Yes ob, that’s exactly right. The profit margin is too narrow here (in city anyway) right now. Just another indication that we’re at the top of the market.
Mid-Late 90’s would have been a great time to be a flipper. Buy a 2 or 3 bedroom off Cowen Park for 150K and flip it a few years later for 450-550K.
Now property is just too expensive at it’s baseline and we know that it cannot continue to go up forever and ever.
In reading the “flipper” blogs, it was interesting to see that many of them seem to equate debt with wealth. ie. the bigger their debt, the wealthier they felt themselves to be! Interesting concept!!
May have worked well for Donald Trump at various times in his career but I think even he got his start when Manhattan property had bottomed out at the end of an RE cycle.
Timing is everything and this is not the time!!
A great blog for comic relief is:
thereisnohousingbubble.blogspot.com
It addresses the “debt is wealth” concept. However when I first read it I had no idea how close the writer is to the truth. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction!
Nice site!