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…
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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…
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….
Think niche deals can be found? Think again.
Let’s go over what we’ve learned about the Seattle real estate market. Single family homes: cost increasing, supply decreasing. Condos: cost increasing, supply decreasing. Geographic range of Seattle’s bubble: north to Mount Vernon, south to Olympia. Today we learn that the bubble’s effects stretch even to the obscure niche markets, such as houseboats. “At one…