I guess I will watch this show.
oh good lord, this house sold for $670,000.
and now I hear that the house across the street (which is an eyesore as no one has lived in it for decades)
will be torn down & a very modern, probably mega house will be built there.
At least the zoning does not permit multi family units.( on my street- a few blocks away there are building podaments which share kitchens)
the mayor, who I doubt has been ON a bicycle since he was eleven, thinks everyone will be riding a bike & will not even OWN a car.
The single family homes next to my physical therapist, are going to be torn down and a 5 -story building with ground level retail and 128 housing units will be built there, with ZERO parking.
this is not a neighborhood with street parking or easy( or even reasonable) bus access from my part of the city.
I have a bike, but I don’t think anyone, including people with small children, the elderly, or the disabled, should be obligated to ride their bike everywhere.
I guess the people who can’t afford Seattle anymore are going to move to Portland. Those who can’t afford Portland are going to move to Spokane or Eugene.
Eugene & Spokane lack job opportunities like Portland/Vancouver and Seattle.
What will be continuing to happen will be that traffic will increase as people have to commute 50 or more miles in order to have affordable housing.
Or they will live in a cracker box, with a shared kitchen, no parking and hope they hook up with one of the techies that can afford a bigger place.
I do not live in a chi-chi neighborhood.
It’s blue collar light industrial.
I think what folks are doing is buying homes to be listed under VBRO.
We have several around already.
Seattle proper, is a Mecca for techies and people on vacation.
We don’t really have that many nice hotels, and you could easily rent your house for a couple weeks every month to pay the mortgage, for more than you could get as a rental.
In Michigan, houses are selling faster, but not for that much more money.
Emeraldkity, wow.
That is crazy. We do not live in a chi chi neighbirhood, either. One of the surprises we had was realizing that the Sounder train that sounds like a great idea in theory only services so many areas on a regular schedule and does not run around the clock. And not everyone’s schedule works with the limited departures they make each day. Most people I know south of Seattle commute 30+ miles to work around here.
It is only going to get worse with people moving further and further away from their work locations.
There are still some very commutable and reasonably priced housing areas near Seattle, if someone is working downtown. They just don’t have to live in the hot real estate spots. Up north, Bothell, Lynnwood, Shoreline, Kenmore, Brier, Mountlake Terrace. You might just have to get an older, smaller house with the power lines not buried, and not exactly where you want it. But still a reasonable drive to Bellevue, downtown Seattle, or the University. Don’t think the highly paid tech workers are going to move to Portland, as more tech companies are located in Seattle, plus they don’t want to get hit with massive Oregon State taxes.
The couple we just bought from in San Diego are moving to a condo in Portland. So they’re leaving us the outdoor furniture and yard tools.
My husband works with someone in south Seattle( Boeing) who lives in Ellensburg.
True, he does live there out of choice, because he also manages his family ranch, but still, if he could find work closer to home, I’m sure he would take it.
Not an engineer, so doesn’t have flex time, hard to telecommute when you work on the factory floor.
We bought our house in the mid 1980’s. When most people our age were buying in the suburbs of Seattle, because you not only could get a much bigger/newer house, but the schools were perceived to be better, and the area was considered a little " nicer". ( when our most of our family & friends heard we were buying in Seattle, they were like * why?* )
But honestly, I grew up on the Eastside, H & I lived there together for about six years, and we wanted to raise our kids in the city. Also liked craftsman homes better than mid- century. Now I like them both.
H also worked at the shipyards, and while we were living close to the I-90 bridge in Bellevue, living close to the viaduct in Seattle, would make his commute even faster.
We didn’t anticipate that soon after we bought our house, the shipyards lost multiple contracts and he was laid off.
It took almost two years before he could find a comparable job, but we managed to keep the house, mostly because the house payments were so low.
We also didn’t anticipate that the money we weren’t paying for housing, we would be paying ( and more) for private schools.
Seattle doesn’t have many kids compared to other cities, and I expect it is influenced by the dearth of affordable single family housing, compounded by a school district that can’t predict enrollment.
So we’ve gone through the expense of closing schools, and then gone through the even greater expense of reopening them a few years later. What makes it so expensive? Well, for one thing, the district doesn’t secure the buildings, so opportunistic folk have stripped it of copper to resell.
( sorry, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but I grew up in a suburban district, and had never witnessed for myself the level of not just incompetence, but fraud, in an organization that was supposed to serve the public.)
Take two big companies, for example, Boeing and CenturyLink.
It used to be, that you could work at a large company, for decades, especially one that was getting huge perks from the state to stay put.
But we have quite a few friends and family, who have worked there for decades, but still ten or so yrs away from retirement, who have been recently told that their whole dept is now moving to Alabama,(Boeing), or Idaho( CenturyLink). They are not so pleased. They really don’t want to move- and in at least one case, they * cant* move.
I don’t know where these people work, who are buying these old homes with tiny yards for 3/4 million dollars.
Some people are even paying cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/business/in-suburban-seattle-new-nests-for-chinas-rich.html?_r=0
Kent is where people are moving to now. But I don’t know what their commute looks like.
[Just doing my part for lesser Seattle](http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/morning_call/2015/03/overturned-salmon-truck-reveals-seattles-serious.html?page=all)
Boy, Emmett Watson is probably rolling in his grave.
Hello everyone. I’ve been tasked with (very preliminary) online “shopping” / looking for houses in the near-coastal NC area. Does anyone know websites where I should start looking? I don’t have a target location, but am more interested presently with just general web browsing. I’d appreciate it if someone could direct me to such a site or two.
Your topic is certainly on-point for this thread, but I wonder if you’d get more help by starting a new thread (maybe in the morning to be sure it’s on the front page) titled something like, “Searching for a home in near-coastal North Carolina”. It might catch the eye of a reader with knowledge about the NC real estate situation who hasn’t been following this more wide-ranging thread. I’ve noticed that CCers are often eager to help with advice about their own neck of the woods. Good luck to you!
AttorneyMother, you should probably begin by checking Trulia. From there, you will be able to see what RE companies operate locally in the areas you find interesting.
Thanks, @BunsenBurner 
@Zipyourlips , it’s such a preliminary thing presently that I’ll just browse online. Thanks for the suggestion.
Also, realtor.com has a robust search feature.
Cbreeze, my friend only made 15 percent on the San Jose deal. There were two other partners. One made a higher return for doing more work.
The project went way over budget. San Jose real estate prices are up more than 15 percent over two years. So…this peoject was too big. They could have sat on the house and made the same return.
My friend says he is nt going to do this again. This means he won’t do this… For awhile.
The common online sites have been redfin, trulia, realtor, homesnap and zillow (don’t pay much attention to zillow’s numbers). There are probably some locals NC sites as well. Good luck!!
dstark
some times mess around a total reno project is not a good idea, yes, in most recent upturn in our market, sit on a house is better to mess around it.
I sold one of my house for 200K of which I bought for 130K in 2012 and I thought I made a killing, all I did was to evict the prior owner and clean it up. I made about 50K. Well, had I rent it out to a house sitter, I could have sold it for 380k today.
50k is pretty damn good return.
An extra 180k would have been nice, but I am sure you bought something else after selling the house for 200k.
That was my point.
I turned around and bought a house for 150K, put in 70k for reno and the value now? around 420K, So, I actually lost money by mess around the reno on the new purchase. (420-70=350<380)
The redeem value of the renovated house is renting 3200/mo whereas the original house could be only rented for less than 2000, some thing like 1800.
Ok…