It is important that consumers who are buying homes or refinancing understand that until a fiduciary relationship (one where the loan officer is working in the best interest of the borrower) becomes law, you are on notice that by not shopping you could be paying hundreds of dollars more per month than need be and…
January Reporting Roundup
It’s time for another reporting roundup. Let’s see what the local newspapers have to say about January’s not-so-positive numbers from the NWMLS. Will they claim that the market “bottoming out” and about to jump into full recovery mode? Or maybe they have finally come to accept the fact that Seattle will not avoid the downturn,…
NWMLS Stats: Market Still Crumbling, Sorry.
Wow, January stats from the NWMLS are already here. When the press release with pdf links is released I’ll post it here. (Update: Here it is.) For now, here’s the summary along with the usual graphs and other updates. Now with bigger chart thumbnails! Here’s your King County SFH summary: January 2008 Active Listings: up…
Time for an Announcement (or: What’s with the ads?)
Observant readers of Seattle Bubble have noticed that the last few weeks have brought some fairly major changes—a new, cleaner layout for the blog, avatars in the comments, a redesign of the forum to match the blog, a fancy new sidebar section: “Recent Forum Posts,” the addition of tags to stories, and oh yeah… ads….
Falling Lumber Prices Shutting Local Sawmills
Remember how when prices were going up, up, up, one of the reasons it was allegedly justified was “high construction costs”? See this post for a lengthy example of a local real estate professional making that argument. Well, luckily for us, it would seem that construction costs are dropping like a rock. Or, perhaps not…