Hey, it looks like somebody on the P-I editorial board is a secret fan of Seattle Bubble (or at the very least, they read Thursday’s post). Check out yesterday’s “P-I Editorial”: Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a comprehensive look at loan data for what it called, “The United States of Subprime.” The newspaper…
Tag: Seattle_PI
September Reporting Roundup: Let the Games Begin
Okay, the biggest real story this month: plummeting sales, resulting in a record-high “months of supply.” The fake story: dropping median prices—which is most likely at least partly an illusion (so far), which can be largely attributed to… you guessed it: the plummeting sales. Let’s see what the news outlets chose to focus on… There…
Rents Reverting to Mean, Condos Repartmenting
I should at least mention the local news reports about the latest Dupre + Scott rental survey. Here’s the meat of the report, courtesy of Aubrey Cohen at the P-I: The King County vacancy rate hit 3.8 percent this month, down from 3.9 percent in March and 4.2 percent in September 2006, according to Dupre…
Lenders’ Tightening Standards Even Hit Seattle
Here’s the latest from Aubrey Cohen over at the P-I: Mortgages harder to get for local borrowers Lenders who previously approved mortgages to people with bad credit, no down payment and little or no documentation of income now are refusing loans if even one of those three factors is questionable. This is true even in…
Zoning to Blame… Yeah, That’s the Ticket.
What’s to blame for the Seattle area’s out of control housing prices? If you read the local papers, you’ll hear all kinds of reasons. Booming local economy, running out of land, super-extra desirable climate, Microsoft/Boeing, you name it, they’ve claimed it (almost). The latest scapegoat: local zoning. “Local zoning is the No. 1 enemy of…