Tag Archives: Seattle Real Estate

Seattle Real Estate

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I left December out, since most of the month end closings aren’t posted yet, and month end could be a large percentage of a month’s sales.  But we want to start off 2008 with some kind of benchmark and expectation for the year in front of us.

I could have called this “and then came September…”, but the single family market actually had a double whammy.

Condo sales in 2007 actually started out UP 3.8% over 2006 until we hit September closings.  (that’s units sold, not pricing)

Single Family Homes were conversely DOWN by 9.4% under 2006 when we hit September closings. (again, # of units sold and not pricing)

So first we had people priced out of the Single Family Market moreso than the condo market, and then the Mortgage Crisis hit both markets in August which reflects in the September and subsequent month closings. 

I posted most of the data for King County for 2005, 2006 and 2007 over at my blog, for those who want to pull the data and draw their own conclusions. 

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[photopress:2007_condo.jpg,full,aligncenter]

I’ll come back to this topic, and include inventory issues, after December closings for 2007 are posted.

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…. 🙂

To Landlords and sellers in City of Seattle – new rules w/ fines… Get up to speed!

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Important Fair Housing Notice for Seattle

The City of Seattle has recently adopted a new ordinance that requires all real estate professionals (including brokers and property managers) within the city limits to prominently display a fair housing poster in their place of business. The poster is available at http://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/outreach.htm under the link for “Housing Issues.

My funniest ever sale

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[photopress:legs.jpg,thumb,alignright]Talking about “covering for another agent” reminded me of my funniest ever sale of a house.  I was getting my first ever leg waxing when the phone rang and an agent asked me to show a house to one of his buyer clients.  He was “down the shore” (Jersey) with his family.  I said no problem.

I rushed to the house to meet his clients straight from my first ever leg waxing appointment.  Apparently I rushed the leg waxing lady so much that she didn’t get all of the wax off of my legs.

Jim’s buyer clients wanted to write an offer, so off to the office we went.  It is no easy feat to write an offer for people you barely know, by the way.  But I had them laughing so hard, that we got through it in great humor.

My legs kept sticking together!  I crossed my legs, and when I tried to stand up to go to the copy machine, one of my legs was wax stuck on to my other leg and I couldn’t move.  Except to hop on one leg.  I had to take my hands and pull one leg off the other which really hurt!  Writing the contract took forever, many addendums, etc… and I kept forgetting NOT to cross my legs!  So every time I stood up to get something or go to the copy machine…the hilarious ripping my legs apart from one another kept repeating.

Finally I was so sore from ripping my legs apart, I just hopped around till we got finished, which had the buyers rolling on the floor.  Honestly, if they were my clients, I probably would have been humiliated.  But what the hell…they were Jim’s clients…I wasn’t getting paid a dime and the buyers were happy as pie.  So, it’s just a funny memory and not an embarassing one.

Every single time Jim went on vacation and I covered for him, I sold a house for him.  He decided to take vacations more often 🙂