The PI had an interesting article this weekend about how flipping real estate can backfire for the less experienced… The crux of their argument has been said many times before, but is worth repeating: “if you’re not careful with your real estate flips, your investment strategy could produce a sizable payoff for an unintended partner: the Internal Revenue Service.”
I’ve made a few changes to the site recently and it seems like a good time to give some updates…
I think I’m done with tweaking the site for a while. Now it is time for me to get back to providing updates on the Seattle real estate market!
I had someone email me the other day with an interesting question, and I thought I would share my response… and then see if anyone in the community could improve upon it.
Question: I’m moving to Seattle and interested in finding a neighborhood where I can bike to my work at the University of Washington (UW). Where should I be looking?
My Answer: There are a bunch of great places to live in North Seattle that are within biking distance to the UW. I would stay away from the south part of Seattle because there are not a lot of good north-south bike route through the downtown… (too many hills and not enough dedicated bike lanes).
Seeing as how I live in North Seattle and I bike a lot, I end up referencing the bike map put out by the City of Seattle quite often. Here is a direct link to the bike map of North Seattle (*.pdf), but note that this is a large file (1.5 MB). If you download the map, you’ll notice that the Burke-Gilman trail (a solid red line) goes through the UW campus. The Burke-Gilman is a wonderful commuting trail and has been recently expanded to the north-west all the way to the Golden Gardens Park. If you can find a place to live within a short ride to the Burke-Gilman, then you will have an easy ride to work!
By the way, if you follow this link, you can order a free hard-copy of the bike map: http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemapform.htm
Do you have a better answer for this question? Are there any neighborhoods that are particularly attractive for bicyclists? Please share your knowledge in the comments section!
Diane and Stephen of the Sip and Ship store/cafe in Ballard are organizing a donation drive for Katrina Victims and have offered to ship all appropriate donated items for free through the end of September.
What constitutes an appropriate item was not immediately appearent to me, so I emailed them to find out. Here is the response directly from the source:
We are looking for toiletries, diapers/wipes, baby formula, bottles, baby cereal/food, flashlights, batteries, and first aid kits.
Thank you for your support.
Kind regards,
Diana
Thank you Diana and Stephen for making it particularily easy for people to donate items.
If you don’t have any of these items, you can always donate money directly to the Red Cross.
The Seattle Times analyzed loan applications for single-family, owner-occupied homes in 2004 from 25 of the nation’s largest lenders and concluded that minorities are paying more for loans in Seattle. The numbers show that black people in Seattle are more than four times likely to carry a high-rate mortgage than white people (13.2% vs 3.1%). However, the data also shows that black people in the rest of the country are even worse off as they are more than twice as likely to carry a high-rate mortgage than in Seattle (26.6% vs. 13.2%).
Also interesting is that the rates are not due to income differences as “low-income whites are far less likely than high-income blacks to wind up with high-interest mortgages (3.9 percent vs. 11.3 percent).” In looking for answers to why, the times speculates that differences “may be due to a variety of factors, ranging from the financial savvy of loan customers with differing backgrounds, to which lenders operate in which parts of town.”
I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this blog is aware that it is illegal for lenders to discriminate based on race and/or to discriminate against a neighborhood known as “redlining”. And I’m positive that all lenders are aware that this is illegal, so it makes me think that the difference must have something to do with the financial savvy of the loan customers.
What is the solution to this problem? It seems like educating the consumers of high-rate loans. Along those lines, here are some helpful links and organizations that I’m aware of:
If anyone is aware of any other local programs, I’d definitely be interested in hearing about them. In particular, I’d be interested in hearing about mortgage brokers that are working to educate minorities.
Thanks to Todd at Lendorama for highlighting the Seattle Times article.
Gotta love the Onion’s real estate reporting…
Galen over at shackprices alerted me to a new google maps search by Windermere. I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that Windermere updated their search since their VP of technology told me they would be releasing something soon… None the less, it is always interesting to see what gets produced. My initial reaction is that they’ve built a really clean home search tool (note that they still consider this a BETA site).
Out of the sites that I’ve seen, this is currently the best home search (MLS search) site. Some features I like:
If you are looking for a home in Seattle, I’d highly recommend the Windermere tool. Although there is some good news for all the other people building home search sites. The Beta site that Windermere has published does not do anything really innovative, so there is still plenty of room for someone to break the field wide open. I’m still waiting for someone to use the power of the web to improve search results.
Andy over at MyEastBayAgent recently posted an article on how to use blog aggregators (and in particular bloglines) to keep track of your favorite blogs. I’ve wanted to post something similar for a while, but rather than repeat his good information, I’ll just second his opinion that bloglines is an excellent web application and give some background on how I use it.
I’ve tried out a few other blog aggregators, but I keep going back to bloglines because it is simple to use and offers some compelling features. In particular, the web-based nature of the service means that it automatically keeps track of the blogs I’ve read regardless of the computer that I read them on…
Here’s how you can get started with bloglines.
Are you looking for some blogs to subscribe to? Please feel free to browse the blogs that I follow. If you like any of them, then while you are browsing that blog on bloglines, you should see a “subscribe” text near the top right of the page. Click on that link and follow the instructions to add that blog to your bloglines’ blogroll.
If you are looking to add my blog, it is as simple as clicking on this button:
However, I’m well aware that not everyone uses bloglines, so here are some easy buttons to add Rain City Guide to many more of the blogs aggregators that you may be using:
By the way, as far as I know, all of these buttons work. However, if you find an issue with any of them, I’d definitely be interested in hearing about it!
And on a side note, I recently had a chat with a friend (who also happens to be a technology evangelist) about the fact that we both had 9 people subscribed to our blogs via Bloglines… We’re both very interested in bumping our numbers up, but it is going to take readers like you to make that happen! 🙂
If you’re looking to satisfy a Zillow fix, the Inman blog was kind enough to give us some more background on Zillow’s management…
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has been fighting a losing battle to allow real estate agents to restrict where their home listings are shown. In essence, many agents are worried that if discount brokers have access to their listings, then the commissions for all agents will drop. After being officially sued by the Justice Department yesterday, NAR released this press release that all but reversed their policy:
The National Association of Realtors® announced today it has adopted a new policy that ensures that all members of Realtor® multiple listing services will receive exactly the same MLS property listings for display on their Web sites as their competitors.
The policy will bring consumers more points of access to real estate information from multiple listing services than they have ever had before, NAR said.
On a related topic… I’ve been fascinated to watch the growth of a new blog that is put out by a splinter group within NAR called the Center for Realtor Technology (CRT). CRT has been putting out some very interesting open source software products that help agents to develop advanced websites. Reading their blog, it makes me think that NAR has chosen to keep these people inside the tent peeing out rather than outside the tent peeing in… For example, on the same day that NAR made the public release mentioned above, CRT staff wrote a blog entry titled “Does ‘Data want to be free’?” In the post, the author makes some excellent observations on how organizations tend to control data (while carefully not mentioning the NAR press release). The CRT staff seem to be working on technologies (open source, wikis, etc.) that seem way more enlightened than the typical NAR approach to solving problems.
I’m going to continue to closely follow the CRT blog, and once I get a chance to try out some of the software, I’ll definitely follow it up with a blog entry!