The headline pretty much says it all. When Moe Batra saw the auction listing for a parcel of land near the Skagit River, he thought it would be the perfect place to build his retirement home. So Batra, 58, joined about 2,000 other people at a land auction in Lynnwood last month put on by…
Category: News
News, current events, etc.
High Seattle Prices Drive Rural Growth
How are people dealing with skyrocketing home prices in Seattle? Some just stay put, some use dangerous interest-only and adjustable-rate loans to afford a house, while others push further and further to the outskirts of the metro area. That last option is causing stress in some small towns as they experience record growth. A huge…
Local Radio Looks at the Bubble
AM Radio station 710 KIRO is in the middle of a 5-part series titled CloseUp: Housing Bubble. Here are some notable highlights from the first two parts: Brooks: When the bottom fell out in 1990 home prices in Seattle stayed flat, and in some places dropped, but eventually rebounded. He believes Seattle has some things…
Speculators Make Up ~23% of Sales
I just came across an article from back in May that I found interesting enough to post here. It covers the topic of the recent epidemic of people buying real estate as an investment: The National Association of Realtors in Washington, D.C., released survey results in March indicating that 23 percent of all residential real-estate…
Can Seattle’s Working Class Afford Housing?
Today’s Seattle P-I spotlights a class of people in Seattle that could easily (and I would argue will) grow in numbers if current housing cost trends continue. That would be the working homeless. People that actually put out an honest day’s work each day, only to find they don’t have enough money to afford rent….