It just wants a cuddle. Just like us, dear Reader, just like us... Come a little closer and drop something into the pool, won't you please? more ›

"Pending sales of single family homes in King County surged in April," reports the Seattle Times. "Pending sales...were up 25 percent from March." But what's this in the bottom half of the story: "But the number of closed single-family home sales in King County in April--1,004--represented just 60 percent of the pending sales reported in March, an unusually low share." Seattle Bubble breaks it down for you (with charts): "[P]ending sales are rapidly becoming a totally useless measure of actual market activity." Meanwhile, Aubrey Cohen notes that about 21 percent of Seattle homeowners are underwater. more ›

"Blue Lagoon" by Bill Bowdish more ›

That's the stat that jumped out at us from the Seattle Times story on our woozy real estate market; they went with "Nearly 30 percent of all homes sold at a loss at the end of 2008." So says Zillow's quarterly home value report. The King Country assessor's office data shows that "Most homes bought since mid-2005 and sold during the last three months of 2008 fetched lower prices than their owners paid." But that twenty percent underwater worries us because that's a sizable chunk who no longer have the recourse of being able to tap home equity in an emergency. more ›

Auto thieves of Clark County Washington: it is time to find a new place to ditch your stolen goods. A dive team sent to explore Lacamas Lake after reports of a spotted stolen vehicle, were astonished to find not one, but five stolen vehicles submerged in the lake. Below the surface, divers found two Hondas, two Acuras, and a Chevrolet SUV. This is not the first time multiple vehicles have ended up in Lacamas Lake; in 2003 five vehicles were also recovered from the lake--just not all at once. more ›