We're stealing this real estate post almost directly from CHS, who discovered Redfin's cool graphs before we did. But we'll refine the focus to condos to avoid outright plagiarism. Redfin's numbers show that since October '06, the number of Capitol Hill condos on the market has ballooned from just over 100 to just under 250 currently. Meanwhile, the average list price has hovered around $475/sq. ft., while actual sales price has declined significantly since last......

Back in February (brrr!), we reported on the venerable Capitol Hill institution, B&O Espresso, being forced out of its longtime location at the corner of Belmont & Olive because the property owners had plans for a multi-story apartment building there. This weekend we stopped in and saw the B&O's owner Majid behind the pastry case, and asked how things were going. Turns out that he's still planning on moving up to Broadway to take over......

Today in two-newspaper town coincidences: real estate made the front page of both the Seattle Times and the P-I. "King County home sales edge up in June," says the Times, while the P-I makes a stronger claim for temperature-based sales, "Local housing market warming up with the weather." Both are referencing an insignificant increase from last month--compared to a year ago, sales are still down almost 34% and listings are up about 42%. That has......

"Home buyers, it's time to haggle," admits the P-I, going on to point out that King County's median house-sales price has dropped 6.2% from a year ago. Seattle is down 2.7%. [Caveat: Discussions of market valuation don't directly relate to the particular house you are thinking about buying. Any specific house can be over- or under-valued in a given market. So take all of this with a grain of salt.] On his blog, but not......

"Denny Triangle And First Hill" by Ryan Hadley A 13-acre, $600 million property in the Denny Triangle has been pulled back off the markets for now, thanks to an unfavorable debt economy thwarting similar development deals across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, the development of the Clise family-owned property was meant to catapult a $7 billion project in downtown Seattle and revitalize the area over the next twenty years. Apparently, the......

We see on Craigslist that the dry cleaners on the east side of 15th Ave, the cunningly named "Alterations and Dry Cleaning" are selling out with four years left on their lease. After 22 years in business, they look like they're giving up the whole kit 'n' caboodle:This opportunity is turn key – all equipment is provided. Technically we're part of their "steady flow of loyal customers," but only because we try to spread the......

"The Next Slum" is the name of the article in the March Atlantic (not online yet), and Seattle gets lots of mentions. Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that as demographics and energy use changes over the next 15-20 years, there will be a growing surplus of large-lot homes that no one wants, decaying on the market. While there should be about four million more households with kids in 2025......

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. Oddly, the bigger news -- "For the full year, WaMu reported a $67 million loss —......

The mass insanity of the housing bubble over the last few years has pretty fully revealed itself by now. One need only visit our good friends over at Seattle Bubble to read about the increasing devastation. On Jan. 15, Tim posted the big news: according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), King Co. finally posted negative year-over-year median closing prices on housing. According to the same report, active listings are up in the YOY......

How about opening your big yap in person for a change? Join the panel discussion about how to keep a healthy arts community on Capitol Hill. Meet up at CHAC next Wednesday, the 16th, at 5:30pm and plot next moves over a martini. As hosts the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce put it:In 2007, the Urban Land Institute named Seattle the #2 real estate market in the nation (after Manhattan), and Americans for the Arts......

When ever someone takes the time to type up an email to Seattlest we're prejudiced from the start to believe its contents (Seattlest readers being an unusually truthful and informed bunch), but this one is hard to swallow: I work next to the Sunset Bowl and just found out it's closing in April. The loss of yet another bowling alley is sad, but I won't miss their prices. Anyway, just thought I'd let you guys......

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

It's become fairly commonplace for the brighter real estate bloggers, like Timothy "The Tim" Ellis over at SeattleBubble, to mock P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen once a month. See Cohen--the P-I'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......

Are you a seasoned editor with online media know-how, management experience, a passion for the news, and an appreciation for life's absurdities? If so, Grist may be the place for you.... Grist.org is the country’s leading online source of environmental news and analysis, reporting daily on the events, issues, people, and trends that affect our planet. We shape the nation’s conversation around all things green, educating, informing, inspiring -- and eliciting guffaws -- from our......

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......

We recently asked friends and strangers if hosts of popular television shows “Devine Design”, “Flip This House” and “House Hunters” were real-life designers and real estate agents before network giants “discovered” them. We were starting to feel a moment of mental weakness on the subject when we, rather randomly, received a lovely note inviting us and you to see Than Merrill and Paul Esajian of A&E’s “Flip This House” during their real estate marketing tour.......

It seems Puget Sound Business Journal writer Jeanne Lang Jones might be a bit upset as she writes, “Now there's a further blow to Seattle fashionistas. The Bellevue Square Nordstrom is getting Prada (designer clothes as part of its remodel; the Seattle flagship store is not).” Jimmy Choo and Neiman Marcus will also be squatting in Bellevue, Jones notes. Honestly, do Prada, Jimmy Choo and Neiman Marcus really feel like Seattle brands? Does Seattle want......

Real estate search engine Rotten Neighbor promises to help you "find bad neighbors before you move." What evils have users uncovered behind the closed doors of the Emerald City? Near Carkeek Park: Grouchy Old Man w/ Loud Music The grouchy old man who lives here likes to play his radio very loudly in his backyard. Lately he has begun playing it in the middle of the night and the cops have been called several times.......

When you become as popular on the local music scene as "Awesome", it’s good to give back to the community, and do a little something for the kids. Hence Here's What Happened, which the band describes as a children’s show with an adult brain. We asked to the band members to pass along some advice to the children-- who will always be our future. John Ackerman—"Keep playing no matter how old you get." "You......

So, yeah, there's been this Russian-Turkish style "urban spa" called Banya5 on Ninth for, like, three years now. It's kind of a giant community sauna, with a central oven providing both wet and dry heat, surrounded by a bunch of fresh- and salt-water pools. The guy who built it, Seattle-born real estate developer John Goodfellow, isn't even Russian; he got hooked on the concept in New Yawk City. You have to know where it is,......

Yesterday, when a reader informed Seattlest of an enclosure going up at Gas Works park for a private event, we posted some smart assey thing about the park's recent unfriendliness towards private events. We were aghast that public property could be employed as someone's personal party space, but, you know, not really. We pictured a dog run-like chain link fence enclosure near the back of the park, maybe in that newish area that no one......

Brian Robinson is Director of Save Our Sonics & Storm. (He also runs a real estate company and owns the two Firehouse Coffees in Ballard). Robinson, along with longtime stadium opponent Chris Van Dyk, recently announced an initiative campaign to force the Sonics to stay in Seattle until their lease is up after the '09-'10 season. We emailed Brian questions, he emailed back answers. I think it's amazing that you've joined forces with Chris Van......

Last night around midnight a Seattlest contributor witnessed a lot of weird stuff going on around the sliver of I-5 under Freeway Park that's visible from his kitchen window: * A car with its lights on was pulled over to the side of Hubble Place by the guard rail separating the freeway from the street and sat there for a few minutes until its occupants got back in and drove off. Were they pissing? What......

Saturday we ran into Philip Dawdy sitting in front of Liberty. We were all blah blah affordable housing, blah blah CHHIP, but Dawdy was unimpressed. "What is that, 40 units?" he asked. "Why aren't you talking about what's happening with the Alaska Building?" Alaska Building? We looked up Dawdy's 2005 Seattle Weekly story:The mayor pointed due west of his City Hall office to the city-owned Alaska and Loman buildings. The Alaska Building currently houses some......

On Saturday, Frank Hughes of the Tacoma News-Tribune reported that local real estate developer Dave Sabey had offered to buy the Sonics from Clay Bennett and make them the centerpiece of a development he's planning south of Boeing Field. By Sunday, Percy Allen of the Seattle Times had interviewed Clay Bennett, who said "I am a friend of Dave Sabey and I respect him as a businessman ... but there's nothing there." Now, today, Gary......

Gary Washburn Frank Hughes of the Tacoma News Tribune reports that real estate developer David Sabey (at right) has offered to buy the Sonics from an increasingly disillusioned Clay Bennett. Last month, Sabey bought a 55-acre parcel south of Boeing Field from Associated Grocers (you know the land, it's that depot with all those container trucks that's just before I-5 makes a right turn toward the airport). He offered that land to Bennett for an......

When a Californian real estate developer announced this week that he was determined to bring a Major League Soccer team to the Pacific Northwest it was good news for some and bad news for others. Fans of the game in Seattle and Portland, where Michael Keston is proposing to set up the MLS expansion team, should welcome the chance at entry into the U.S.'s highest league. MLS in Seattle has always been a long-shot with......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

Over at newbie blog Crosscut, Knute "Mossback" Berger has slipped right back into his prickly, contrarian stream of things with a post about "density (the horror, the horror)." In it he calls out Sightline, Mayor Nickels, greens and progressives, and San Francisco as skipping merrily toward a density Rapture. We're a little freaked out to admit this, but he's got a point when he asks what's the rush. (Some statements, like "We know that......