Seattle Bubble

I’m seeing 30 yr fixed rates under 5%. If you are considering refinancing, please contact your loan officer. If you are considering a purchase, contact your agent. It is impossible to know how long these rates will remain this low.

If you need resources, please let me know off-line. (tim@legacyescrow.net)

S-Crow

Haven’t seen this one mentioned on the other local real estate blogs, but it’s definitely of interest to anyone out there that already owns a home (or a home loan, as the case may be). Depending on who you believe, a new bill floating around down in Olympia may either help home owners reduce their property taxes, or saddle them with hundreds of millions more.

It’s an election-year, no-new-taxes, fiscal-responsibility legislative session, but that’s not stopping lawmakers from contemplating a bill that could ultimately saddle homeowners with the largest property tax increase in state history.

House Bill 2977 and Senate Bill 6517 would make it easier to dispute local property tax assessments — an easy sell in a region that has seen property taxes increase as real estate values have gone through the roof.
…
But King County Assessor Scott Noble said the real impact is buried beneath the stated good intentions, and it would amount to a tax break for big business paid for by the state’s homeowners, because the burden would simply shift.
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“In our budget-based property tax system, reductions of valuations will produce tax shifts onto other taxpayers, and my experience with advocates from our large commercial taxpayers suggests a large increase of appeals and lawsuits from these property owners who have sizable resources,” Noble said in the e-mail.

Homeowners have historically been much less likely to appeal property value assessments because they have less to gain, he said.

If you’re a home buyer in Washington State, or intend to become one in the not-too-distant future, it would be to your benefit to pay attention to issues like this. Despite the supposed benefits of home buyers having “fixed payments” (vs. increasing rent), the ‘T’ in the PITI increases rather steadily, and is at the mercy of new legislation such as this, written by politicians that rarely have your budget in mind when making their decisions.

(Chris McGann, Seattle P-I, 01.21.2008)

Here’s a minor roundup post for you, with a few stories from the last few days that are worth a brief mention:

After selling just 17 out of 114 units, an in-progress condo complex near Seattle Center will instead be completed as “luxury apartments.”

In recent months, developers have shelved plans to convert several Seattle apartment buildings to condos and changed some new projects from condos to apartments. Another example of a new apartment project that was once condos is Aspira, a 37-story tower at Stewart Street and Terry Avenue, by Los Angeles developer Urban Partners.

Developers have attributed the shift to a glut of announced condominium projects, skittishness among the investors who fund condo towers, and an apartment supply that’s shrinking because of conversions and a lack of new construction since the dot-com meltdown in 2001.

Apparently, the Skagit County real estate market is even more special than Seattle, because up there, real estate agents claim that the worst is already over.

Despite continued fallout from the subprime mortgage markets and growing talk of a recession, local real estate professionals believe that the worst may already be over for the Skagit County housing market.

Looking back, the low point came sometime in spring 2007.

And also entertaining is this one from today’s New York Times: Feeling Misled on Home Price, Buyers Sue Agent (also reprinted in the P-I).

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Marty Ummel believes she paid too much for her house. So do millions of other people who bought at the peak of the housing boom.

What makes Ummel different is that she is suing her agent, saying it was all his fault.

Ummel claims that the agent hid the information that similar homes in the neighborhood were selling for less because he feared she would back out and he would lose his $30,000 commission.

They’re also talking about this one over at the Seattle Real Estate Professionals blog today.

Theory: Seattle is special, and thanks to our strong local economy anchored by such heavyweights as Boeing and Microsoft, any economic or housing pain will affect us far less than other parts of the country.

Reality:

Conclusion: Er… Um… Jobs! Population Growth! Mountains! Lakes! Pretty Pretty Pink Ponies!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Just a quick, informal poll: How many of you would be interested in some sort of Seattle Bubble meetup? I’m not thinking of anything fancy or extravagant like the swank Urbnlivn shindig, just getting together at a coffee house or pub to hang out and put some faces to names.

Of course, I don’t want to go to a bunch of effort to plan something if nobody would even really be interested in showing up. So I’m posting this to gauge your interest in this sort of thing. If you would be so kind, I’d appreciate it if you would leave a comment stating whether you would come to a Seattle Bubble meetup, what day of the week / time works best for you, and any location suggestions you might have.

Depending on how much interest there is, I’ll try to throw something together for next month.

Please vote in this poll using the sidebar.