Category: News

It’s getting more and more expensive—twice as fast as the national average—to live around the Puget Sound: Consumer prices in the Puget Sound area increased 1.3 percent over January and February – almost double the rate of inflation nationally. Housing prices, up 2.4 percent, led the increases in the Tacoma-Bremerton-Seattle area, the Labor Department reported…

In a column in yesterday’s Olympian, an investment advisor gave some advice that I suspect is followed by very few people in the Seattle area: Avoid being ‘house poor’ due to high payments While there are some rules of thumb by which lenders gauge the reasonableness of your housing costs, the valuation of your property…

Here are a few real estate related anecdotes I have come across in the last few weeks. I’m not relating them to make any particular point, they’re just all of the real estate happenings that I’ve personally encountered recently. A coworker of mine recently moved from the Northgate area up to Bothell. Commuting across the…

If you live in Seattle and don’t own a home, you probably think that the real estate bubble is nothing but trouble. Well it’s about time that the bubble did something for you. A hot real-estate market is going to help Seattle residents cut their losses as the city shakes off the collapse of the…

The Seattle P-I shares the tale of a local flipper who does more than the buy, sit, flip that has become popular with the real estate explosion. “Buy, fix, flip” actually sounds like an understatement for this guy: The living room of the old Ballard house is redolent with the scent of freshly laid oak…