Tag Archives: seattle-bubble

The Tim of Seattle Bubble Buys a House

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bath towelsIt’s “YAY DAY” over at Seattle Bubble today, as “The Tim” reveals to his readership that now was HIS “time to buy”, for his own good reasons.

In his post this morning titled “Guess What?”The Tim has a cute picture of him in “Domestic Mode” jokingly cooking up some “Top Ramen”.

His parting line?

“Sympathy cards may be mailed to 3601 Wetmore Avenue, Everett, WA”

I wanted to send The Spa Collection of bath towels vs a “sympathy card”, but opted to follow Tim of Legacy Escrow’s lead and just put the money in The Tim’s Tip Jar via Google Checkout and let him pick out his own House Warming gift.

Also of note, The Tim used our fellow RCG writer Craig’s firm to purchase the home, as noted by The Tim in the comments.

” We used attorneys Marc Holmes & Craig Blackmon with WaLaw Realty…”

The Tim will be following up in the days to come with the details of his home buying process, so be sure to tune in as he reveals all from a “1st Time Homebuyer” perspective.

Congratulations to The Tim and his lovely wife from RCG! May you enjoy your home for many years to come.

Ruin Sity Gaide

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I love this comment posted by David Losh over on Seattle Bubble.  I decided to give it it’s own post before it faded away into oblivion. 🙂

“If you do come to the internet for information about a home purchase or sale you are in the wrong place. This site (Seattle Bubble)  has excellent financial crisis dialog, but is very short on Real Estate information. It does provide much more information than a Ruin Sity Gaide, but still this is just entertainment.  The internet Real Estate sales business model is a very long way off if it will ever be viable. radfun hired the expodia.com sales person to push the Real Estate sales agenda on line. Sellers with problems flock to the online Real Estate sites along with the week end warrior home shoppers. It’s a mish mash of confusion that radfun happily collects fees for. In time it will be obvious this was just a continuation of a problem rather than a solution. Be very careful of what you think you will learn about Real Estate online. These are sales people looking to collect your money for doing nothing, that’s the business model.”

Tim Ellis of Seattle Bubble on 710 KIRO

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I’m listening to Tim Ellis of Seattle Bubble on the Dave Ross show on 710 KIRO with David Goldstein sitting in for Dave Ross.

There’s a link to the show in this post and it is well worth the time to listen.

Tim did a fabulous job and I highly recommend that you listen to “the voice” of Seattle Bubble’s founder in this radio program.

I did a quick check while listening to the program regarding the conversation in the latter part of the show regarding Eastside and Seattle. My stats support Tim’s statement that Seattle Downtown and within City Limits North of Downtown are doing better than the Eastside. Kirkland, Bellevue Redmond median price being up from $600,000 to $610,000 while North Seattle was up from $533,000 to $549,000 for the same six month period. Days on market Eastside being up from 36 days to 46 days vs. North Seattle being up from 26 days to 30 days. Number of homes sold down 22% in North Seattle vs down 26% on the Eastside.

While I am not seeing prices down in those samplings, I am seeing short sales that are selling for less than the owner paid, and not just for less than the amount owed. So the number of short sales in the mix in any neighborhood will continue to impact area pricing.

There is a significant increase in the number of sales that are contingent on the sale of another house. More and more people are including a house sale contingency with their offer to purchase. It is wise not to depend on a certain sale price when buying, only to find that your best hope is not going to pan out as you had thought it would.

Generally speaking the numbers are still pretty strong as to price, and so I’m not seeing the same price picture as Tim seems to be seeing. I agree with Tim that you are not likely going to see owners running into the assessor’s office to prove their home is worth less anytime soon.

In any event, take the time to listen to the radio program and hear the voice of Seattle Bubble. If you liked him before…you’ll like him even more. If you didn’t like him before…I’m sure you will find that your perception was not reality. He doesn’t sound ANYTHING like Chicken Little and he offers a well reasoned perspective.

Taking on KING/KONG…

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Yesterday I was interviewed by a KING-5 reporter, Kim Holcomb, and which I had written about on my blog at this post.  I had jokingly referred to taking on King Kong but only because the news segment was shown on KING-5 and KONG-6 last night.

King Kong

The news story was about how the market here is changing just a bit to more of a stabilized market.  At the beginning of the report a seller talks about it being a “buyer’s market” but I wouldn’t necessarily agree with him completely.  We’ve still got room to move before that happens and if anything we’re more balanced than the past 5 years.  The segment did run on both KING and KONG stations and, from what my business partner tells me, it is one of the most viewed and forwarded links from the KING-5 website today.  Here is a link the actual news story about the Seattle real estate marketplace along with pieces of my interview.

It seems we’re (Team Reba) getting a lot of press lately.  I was interviewed in July for a story on blogging for the RE/MAX Times back in July (released in September) and just last week I was interviewed for a real estate investment magazine which will be printed in the November/December time frame.  Now, if I could just get the interviewers to pronounce my name correctly…. 🙂

Puget Sound's Market Conditions Update

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Every New Year, my husband’s family makes a trip to Ocean Shores with most of his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews. It is a tradition that we look forward to which includes as much bowl games you can cram into a weekend, razor clamming, go karts and I get to read the newspaper from front to back while everyone else in our hotel room is still sleeping.

To my delight in the Dec. 30, 2006 issue of The Seattle Times, there is an article forecasting the local 2007 real estate market called “Looking ahead: The sky isn’t falling for the Puget Sound market

10 things I learned from my stats tonight

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It’s been a long while since I posted about traffic on RCG. Two reasons come to mind… One, I’ve been swamped in starting my new job and never got around to updating my excel sheet and two, I knew we weren’t seeing much growth, so what’s the point 🙂

However, I took a little time out tonight to play around with RCG stats and I was actually surprised (in a good way!).

First I’ll give two charts and then I’ll explain what I learned from my research. The first chart looks at visitors and the search engines that they are coming from, while the second chart compares the growth in unique visitors to the total visitors to give an idea of how many people are returning to the site on a regular basis…

[photopress:unique_visitors.png,full,centered]

[photopress:visitors_per_month.png,full,centered]

  1. While traffic may not be growing exponentially any more, we’re still gaining new unique visitors at a relatively healthy clip. (If you take out all the Zillow-hype related traffic in February of this year, then the chart would look a lot more like exponential growth! 🙂 )
  2. Google provides a majority of our unique visitors (almost 15K hits last month alone) and far outweighs any other traffic source (it is all organic traffic as I don’t spend any money on AdSense).
  3. MSN and Yahoo still have not figured out how to parse through the glut of Seattle real estate content in order to drive more traffic to RCG! 🙂
  4. The ratio of total visitors to unique visitors has always hovered between 3.0 and 4.0. This tells me a fair number of people continue to return to RCG and it increases as we attract more unique visitors. It also tells me we haven’t found the viral “secret sauce” that causes either a ton of unique visitors (who could care less about a majority of our content) or a super sticky feature that causes new visitors to come back at a higher rate.
  5. 61% are using Internet Explorer, 23% are using Firefox. The rest go using “Unknown” (8%), Safari (4%), and others…
  6. The top 10 search phrases (like [Seattle Real Estate] and [real estate blog] account for a combined 7.2 of all search engine traffic. The other 92.8% of search engine traffic comes from more obscure phrases. (Think Long Tail!)
  7. Traffic is highest around lunch (between 11am and 2pm).
  8. Mondays get hit the hardest while Saturdays are the slowest days on RCG.
  9. Seattle Bubble (404 hits), Ardell (399), and Bloodhound (384) are the three blogs that sent the most traffic to RCG in August!
  10. Google analytics tells me that of all the unique visitors in August, 1,333 had been to RCG more than 200 times!!! (4,710 unique visitors have been to the site over 25 times).