Found in our Theo Chocolates promotional newsletter this morning: "Sales of existing houses dropped more in Washington than anywhere else in the nation last quarter, compared with a year earlier, according to a new report. King County's median sale price also dropped roughly 10 percent from a year earlier." Who was saying that Seattle wasn't immune to, but typically lagged the national trends? With the drop, 57 percent of the state's first-time buyers have enough......

This morning, Cindy Zetts, the Seattle Times real estate editor, decided to head for greener pastures, which seems to say something not good about both the real estate market and the Seattle Times. It's a kind of Black Friday Remix over there, as reporters make long walks into management offices. At the Times, the involuntary staff exodus shows no signs of abating--management keeps talking about belt-tightening but without giving any sense of where the last......

(...if by "all" you mean the housing crisis.) We'd love to make some sort of pithy comment about the state of the economy or the proposed bailout, but truth is, we can't keep up: McCain's "heroic" suspension of his campaign to photo-op and take credit for the bailout appears to be going belly-up, again, after the markets bounced up before close a couple hours ago assuming a bailout was agreed upon, but that was before......

The P-I is running an AP story with the headline: "Seattle home sales plummet 41% from a year ago," (lede: "Seattle and Portland were among the top 10 metro areas in the nation with the most pronounced drop in sales") while the Seattle Times counters with "Record U.S. home-price decline in August attracts buyers." So there's an upside? "...sales are sluggish in formerly stable markets like the Pacific Northwest and Charlotte." Oh. At least we've......

"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......

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......

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......

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." It begins: Seattle's market was not to blame for a recent decision to change a planned 34-story downtown building from condominiums to apartments. Rather, the slumping condo markets in cities such......

The Post Intelligencer has an article today on the pesky old buildings that dot Seattle and the heroes who have been swooping in to convert them to condos. No need to tear down a perfectly good old building, necessarily, although that sometimes works too, but you can only wring so much out of renters before you shuffle them off to Kent or something where they belong and get some buyers in there. "We can offer......

-Rep. Dave Reichert-Clouseau continues to "investigate" whether the earth revolves around the sun whether global warming is caused by humans. -Was The Stranger wrong about that whole urban archipelago thing? Maybe, says The Stranger. -How many times does Defective Yeti have to say it? He's not into yetis. He's not into cute yetis and he's certainly not into cute wampas, so knock it off already. -Now is your chance to help the Capitol Hill......