I hate niche sellers. Gawd the profession is rife with them. Lately, I offer what everyone needs–dicounts for service—the dirty word in real estate. This means I charge A LESSER COMMISSION! I’m not alone either, but I’m a real paraiah among the traditional companies.
I love this website.

There are six of these McMansions going in; 3 shoved shoulder to shoulder on 2 plats right here and 3 more up the hill. I won’t bother to mention the dozens of other McCrapman’s across the city destroying neighborhoods and stealing views for fun and profit.

Hideous McCraftsman on a sliver of land for a paltry $1,350,000

Pathway to riches: They buy 2 plots for around 450K each, demolish the perfectly decent mid-century houses on the land, build straight up using very questionable quality, stealing the views of the homes behind (after promising they wouldn’t), make sure to spend on the finishes, and collect 4 million minus building costs.

I hope these sit on the market for 5 years. Who in their right mind would buy these for that price?

“I find morons with a million dollars to overpay for your POS house!”

Now that’s a niche that looks to be in increasing demand in Seattle.

I’m seeing these absurd prices on renovations and McMansions shoved on short plats, and I can’t fathom who would buy them. There can’t be that many idiots out there with that kind of green. Usually you have to be at least reasonably smart to accumulate that amount of loose change.

For example:

Finding a buyer for this Shack with waterfall and granite appears to be a bit beyond Mr. Hopper’s limited abilities. 240 days and counting. Perhaps it’s time for Mr. Hopper to tell them that no matter how much granite and tasteless nik-naks they add to the 2300 sq/ft shack, it’s not worth a million more than they paid to attempt to flip it 2 years ago. They even hijacked Zillow to state their case, tallying all the money the spent making the house “beautiful”.

When are people going to realize that crappy updates don’t increase the value of the place dollar for dollar. It’s worth what people will pay, and anyone willing to pay more than half asking for this place is a moron, imho. These folks are finding out the hard way that most of the bigger fools have already been parted with their money.

“how could anyone want anything but a 30 year fixed”

That is a great question with a simple answer, once you run the numbers. By backloading the debt repayment schedule, suicide loans let you outbid other households of similar financial means. So long as readily-available suicide loan financing and a belief on the investment side that there is little risk in subprime lending remain part of the mortgage market landscape, GFs who don’t understand risk will be able to outbid old-fashioned precautious types in the competition for homes they cannot afford.

The office vacancy rate in downtown Seattle fell to 9.8 percent in the fourth quarter, a report released Wednesday by the Grubb & Ellis brokerage firm showed.

That was down from 13.4 percent a year ago.

A vacancy rate below 10 percent marks the point at which it becomes a landlord’s market and developers begin discussing plans for new buildings, said Nick Pappa, a research analyst at Grubb & Ellis.

Landlords are now able to raise rents as leases come up for renewal.

Brokers say the current demand for office space is driven by job growth across a broad range of business sectors and reflects a more thoughtful approach.

The S&P/Case-Shiller composite index for 20 major markets in the United States released on Tuesday showed homes in Portland, along with its bigger Pacific Northwest neighbor Seattle, posting strong gains, 13.2 percent in Portland, 14.1 in Seattle.

It seems that the point of globalisation is to promote trade — but service/sales/realtors seems like so much fluff. I wonder how many of the huge number of people jumping on board the real estate bandwagon are moving less than two properties a year?

I have to say, if the unfortunate event of economic hardship did occur, I probably would’t feel sorry for anyone in the bread line who gave up a real job to become a used-house-saleschick.

Perhaps if we didn’t have our manufacturing sector hollowed out by globalism, we could get jobs making things, rather than jobs schlepping bubble related commodities.

This next recession is going to be one that people read about in 200 years. RE agents are going to be on the first wave of pain.

Poor bastards…