Results tagged “housingmarket”

...depending on your subscription. Business Week is bullish about Seattle burning off its excess housing inventory, while Forbes says that foreclosures are gonna keep prices in the tank. Meanwhile, Seattle Bubble is building a Google map of construction projects that have stalled out. (The Weekly's Damon Agnos beat us to the "dueling national pubs" angle. We admit it. But what if you don't read the Weekly? What then?!)

Our first thought on reading that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation had granted $1 million to Seattle and Washington to preserve affordable house was of the first movie, where Dr. Evil tries to hold the world for ransom for the same amount of money. A million dollars, huh? Talk about a drop in the pond.

• The Rainier Valley Post lets Beacon Hill residents know that the water advisory has been lifted and you no longer need to boil your tap water.
• MyBallard thinks they may have found the most expensive piece of property in Ballard. A 325 square foot shack "condo alternative" selling for $199,999.
• The B-Town Blog is closely following Burien's annexation request.

Economic downturn? Recession? Job losses? Really? Sure, Seattle's housing market finally cooled a bit, but listening to business news this morning you'd be excused for thinking all this talk about a bad economy is a crock of shit, at least here in Seattle.

We're not actually gloating over WaMu's travails -- there are too many lives involved likely to be disrupted. But there's no denying the majesty with which its home loan mortgage unit steered into the subprime iceberg. The Seattle Times headline reads: "WaMu posts first quarterly loss in a decade," thanks to a $1.78 billion writedown by the home loaners.

's lead real estate reporter--writes an article about the state of the national housing market once a month when the industry standard Case-Shiller numbers are released. The Case-Shiller index (from S&P) tracks the changes in home prices for 20 US metropolitan areas each month as compared to a year prior and is the benchmark index for real estate performance.

Tonight, the nation's hardcore gamblers' eyes will be on Seattle as our fair burgh hosts Monday Night Football.

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so much free ink available?)

It’s been hard for us to admit this, greenie that we are, but a vote for Prop. 1 is in order, at least from this Seattlest's perspective.

It's a big, bad world out there, and there are plenty of reasons to be mad as hell. An undisclosed conflict of interest? Well, depends on the circumstances: whose conflict, whose interest?

If you're in the mood for some wide-eyed, Kool-Aid stained boosterism, look no further than this article in today's P-I. It's in response to the New York Times piece announcing a condo-sales slump. The tone is strictly "move along, nothing to see here."

The Post Intelligencer did the obligatory Boomerang Generation story today - You know the one, where they talk with a bunch of late-twentysomethings who moved back in with mom and dad to "catch up on bills" or whatever. The headline is, "You can go home again -- and in this housing market, many do."

We're glad we stuck around for the audience Q&A after the panel discussion on gentrification Thursday night, hosted by the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.

-Mercer Island was swallowed by the righteous sea today and no longer exists on any chart or map.