TJ, what amazes me is that between the Real Estate “Propaganda” section in the Paper and of course the ads of homes and condos for sale, by both weight and page volume, there are apparently more homes and condos for sale in Seattle than there is International, National, and State/Local News COMBINED! ;-)

This house was a crappy rambler built in the fifties and last updated in the seventies. The deck out back was rotting to hell, given the leaky corrugated opaque fiberglass roof overhead. The whole thing needed to be junked. But the kicker is that the old lady that lived there for 30 years kept all six of her cats in one of the three bedrooms. The cats used the entire room as their own private litter box. The smell of 20 year old cat urine permeated the entire house. It was disgusting.

This charming POS was listed for $239K. Our Realtor, who was growing increasingly impatient with our reluctance to jump onto the crazy train, was pushing us hard on this house. He told us he was an expert on aggressive bidding, that all we needed to was to waive inspections and everything else a sane person would want before they start renting from a bank for 30 years. And to boot, he knew a guy who could easily get the cat smell out of the house.

We told him no thanks, and please don’t call us again. We threw in the towel then and there.

The house sold for nearly $270K after about 48 hours on the market. Insane.

But we’re different, we know about incentives, so our market will stablize this coming spring. I just know it!

“We’ve enjoyed a pretty high standard of living without having to really do things differently, and I think those days are over,” she said. “We all have to really work for our money now.”