Recent Stories with tag house

"much can be said" courtesy of our Flickr pool's +Russ

How is the Seattle real estate market like an ice cream cone? It's frozen and it either is currently "clearly a double-dipper" or will be. (Once again, Portland gets there first.)

Hell may have frozen over as well as Seattle; the Seattle Bubble says this could be a good time to buy a home. Granted, they're talking about prepared buyers taking advantage of that below-market deal they've found. Anecdotally, this is echoed by Redfin's report on the Seattle area market, which notes that a few first-time home buyers are making their move. 

Otherwise, of the Seattle area homes pulled off the market in November, a full 60 percent were delisted by owners who plan to wait out the winter. Only 40 percent were sales. Of the city of Seattle 1,700-house November inventory (down 14 percent from October), 344 sold, while the time it took to close on a sale continued to lengthen thanks to difficulties finalizing financing.

Seattle condo sales remain way back in the deep freeze section, down a full 50 percent year over year. 137 sold, but 200 were delisted, to wait for spring. The Bubble warned that the home buying credit program was simply pulling demand from the future, and that once it ended, we'd see the frozen wasteland currently before us. But it is also true that many first-time buyers went the condo route, and now sit underwater, unable even to think of taking a short sale's loss; the average condo sale price per square foot is down just 1.2 percent from last November.

Meanwhile, bottom-callers have these home-price declines to stare at. (Here's the Bubble's latest Case-Schiller graphs.) It's not just Seattle, of course--Seattlepi.com reports that Seattle and ten other metro areas are seeing a "triple-dip," and analysts predict anywhere from another six to fifteen percent slide over 2011. (Nor is the problem limited to residential real estate--the Wall Street Journal reports that Beacon Capital Parters, owners of the Columbia Tower Center, are selling their best-performing asset to raise capital to meet debt obligations.)... (more)

Another Halloween here and gone, and now November is upon us. If you missed The SunBreak's roundtable of our picks for favorite scary movies, check out the discussion here. And now let's take a look at the most recent new releases on DVD, care of our good friends at Scarecrow.

There's a Halloween tie-in, as the biggest release last week was one of the scariest films of all time: Sex and City 2. Welcome to your post-post-post feminist hellscape. The other big release is neither scary, nor a new film, but the 25th anniversary edition of Back to the Future, the release of which led to the news that Eric Stoltz was set to play Marty McFly, before being replaced by Michael J. Fox five weeks into the film's production. Imagine how different the world would be now, had that less-traveled Stoltz road been taken. Truly, it would have made all the difference. I'm sure we'd all be time travelling by now with our hoverboards. 

Until we turn a car with winged doors into a time machine so that we can correct the mistakes of the past (and then post them on a blog), bide your time checking out the indie picks. There's Wild Grass, a romantic thriller from director Alain Resnais.  Going starker, it's Winter's Bone about a poor Ozarks teen trying to track down her deadbeat dad so that her family doesn't get evicted off their land. The situation is rough, and it's to director Debra Granik's credit, as well as the natural performance by lead Jennifer Lawrence, that the drama is so real, and won the film the Grand Jury Award at Sundance this year, as well as couple SIFF Space Needle awards.... (more)

"FREE HOMES" courtesy of our Flickr pool's photocoyote

What's it all mean? The latest concern over messy mortgage paperwork injects more uncertainty into people's already uncertain lives. The Seattle Bubble reports "foreclosure notices are still rising rapidly year-over-year." FBR Capital Markets analyst Paul Miller says foreclosure delay losses could range from six to ten billion dollars. Any delay in processing will simply drag out the larger real estate market reset.

But the burning question once again--as with the subprime loan meltdown--is what the size of the problem is. Are these errors that can be corrected, or have lenders fast-tracked themselves into writing unsecured loans?

When I first heard that banks were halting foreclosures, I thought, naively, that they were attempting some kind of homeowner assistance program. But it turned out that banks have been illegally foreclosing on homeowners, through what's known as "robo-signing"or otherwise cutting corners.

In Washington state, Attorney General Rob McKenna says that investigators responding to complaints have found "inaccurate documents, conflicts-of-interest, faulty chains of title and failures to provide the disclosures and conduct mediations required by law." He's asked 52 Washington foreclosure trustees to suspend action on any "questionable" foreclosures.... (more)

Windermere has a Capitol Hill condo selling for $149,000 down the street from The SunBreak offices, at 1125 E Olive (at 12th Avenue). It's 436 sq. ft., hardwood floors, forced air, HOA is $200. It's the lowest-priced condo on my email update by far, with $40,000 between that and the next listed price. But if it's snapped up before you can put down an offer, stay cool.

Whether you call it depreciation or affordability, Goldman Sachs says the next two years should bring more of it; Seattle Bubble (naturally) spotted their prediction that Seattle home prices would lead other major U.S. urban areas with a 22 percent decline over the next two years.

Goldman Sachs calls our situation a "back-loaded price decline," which has a familiar ring to anyone familiar with Seattle Bubble's time-adjusting housing price graphs. Las Vegas and Portland join us in home devaluation "due to high homeowner vacancy rates and/or rising mortgage delinquencies," but Seattle is way out down in front, losing ten percent more in value than Portland over the next eight quarters.... (more)

"Rainier on Tap" courtesy of troyjmorris

In point of fact, it's estimated that the proposed tax on large brewers would raise about $58 million. Which sounds like real money, but the budget hole is $2.8 billion, so to revise my joke, we're gonna need a bigger beer barrel. (Our consumption is a fairly steady 28 gallons per person each year, says the Beer Institute. Per capita, Oregon and Idaho chug more than we do.)

This is one of the few tax increases that it seems the House and Senate can agree on. The Beer Blog says: "The plan calls for a tax of 50 cents per gallon, which translates to about 43 cents per six-pack. Those numbers apply to the producer and not necessarily to the consumer." But Economics 101 will tell you that taxes on producers tend to make their way to retail prices.

You might think the Washington Brewers Guild would cheer this move, since micro-brewers are exempted (I can't find a final determination on what's a micro-brewery; I've seen estimates of 15,000 to 60,000 barrels per year). But they're coming out against it, on the theory that they'll be next. Sudsy slopes, and all.

Over at Sound Politics, they're gleeful at the Democrats coming out against the Bud-drinkin' working man. Publicola did a quick check to see if higher beer taxes affected consumption significantly, and the initial results would seem reassuring. In terms of price at the tap, if producers decided to pass the whole cost along, it would be about six cents more per pint. Our mythical 28-gallon-per-year Washingtonian would have to ante up an extra $14.

Part of the outrage is due to citizens' death by a thousand tax cuts; no one is really that wild-eyed about $0.50 per gallon except distributors trying to make it on margins. But one thing I've never fully understood about the broad use of sin taxes in fighting a recessionary deficit is, What happens if it works? The idea is to get people to do less "sinning"--but if they actually reform thanks to economic pressure, the government goes broke.

In this case, if people do switch to micro-brews, *poof* goes that $58 million the state so desperately needs. Go ahead, and try it, I guess. But I'm not convinced that this way, deficit-free government lies.

Flickr pool member abosco adds a sense of mystery to real estate.

February's MLS report shows Seattle residential real estate has got a little tiger back in its tank, with pending sales up 35 percent from February '09. (I direct you to the Seattle Bubble for a grain of pending sales salt.) More convincingly, closed sales are up 34 percent as well, with 459 closed compared to 342 same month last year.

The safe conclusion we can draw from this is that some people want to sell and some people want to buy (though total "activity" was actually down almost eight percent). But speculating about the health of the market seems premature. It might be good news that the median price jumped $10,000, to $390,000, but then again it might not.

For one thing, that's very much in the ballpark of the $8,000 homebuyer credit. For another, the median doesn't tell you about short sales.

But that's Seattle--Seattle Bubble points out that except for Seattle and the Eastside, home prices around King County took a dive, year-over-year. And even so, while Seattle's median price for homes was up almost four percent, the condo median was down over six percent. UPDATE: The Bubble gets granular, and finds the median affected most by sales of Eastside homes.

Washington's House of Representatives has responded to a Senate bill making cell phone use a primary offense (that is, you could be ticketed just for that) by reassuring teens that their status as second-class citizens is secure. The Seattle Times summarizes the House bill, saying it:

...makes texting a primary offense, but use of a handheld phone by a driver 18 or over would remain a secondary offense. Teens would be barred from any phone use.

Now, it's true, teens are in general terrible drivers. For one thing, they're sleepy all the time. On NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that "young adults are involved in 55% of the 100,000 fall-asleep crashes annually, even though they aren't even close to being half of the driving population."

Rep. Dan Roach

But one thing you don't see in legislators' quotes is a reference to data showing teens are any worse at driving while on the phone than terrible adult drivers. (They may use the phone more often.) What you get is Rep. Dan Roach proclaiming, "The libertarian in me comes out with these types of issues." That's the adult libertarian, I guess. Because creating a law that applies only to a minority would give strict libertarians pause.

Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt said, "I don't like the government being in all aspects of our business." Just teens' business. That is fine. Now the House and Senate have to come together on either the Senate's "That's it, no one gets to hold the cell phone!" ban or the House's "Meddling teenagers!" version.

It's tough out there for a teen. They're sleep-deprived, and they're broke. As Jon Talton points out, teenage unemployment has risen to a "scary 25 percent." Now they might have to sit in the car and watch mom and dad yap away on the cell phone, knowing if they did the same thing, it'd be one more thing that they could get busted for.

Go on. Guess how many are on cellphones.

SB 6345--the Senate bill that would make (non-handsfree) cell phone use while driving a $124 ticket and a primary offense--was placed on second reading by the Rules Committee yesterday. (I have no idea what that means, outside of a sense of progress. There's no lyric about "second reading by Rules Committee" in Schoolhouse Rock's "How a Bill Becomes a Law.") With eleven senators sponsoring, it may have enough momentum to pass.

Its House counterpart, HB 2365, had a public hearing by the House transportation committee on the 18th, with no doings reported since then.

But the Highway Loss Data Institute--an insurer-funded nonprofit organization--has just released a study showing that anti-cell phone laws have had no effect on the number of collisions. As KING TV reports, the study compares "insurance claims for crash damage in four jurisdictions before and after bans were enacted in California, New York, Connecticut, and Washington, DC."... (more)

 

House (Hausu) is a Japanese art house horror flick finally getting an American bow 32 years after its Japanese release.  Under domestic distribution by Janus Films, it's the story of a group of seven high school girls (each with their own personality-defining nickname like Prof, Kung Fu, and Sweet) who decide to spend the summer together at Gorgeous' aunt's house in the country.  And of course, it's a haunted house, complete with a freaky cat, dancing skeleton, a possessed piano, and your basic demonic pillows and duvet covers. 

I expected House to be campy, but it was also a lot of wackadoodle fun.  Director Nobuhiko Obayahshi based the script of his debut feature on his eleven-year-old daughter's surreal stories, and it shows in the best possible way--from the girl's character tics to the truly psychedelic animation and editing.  It comes as no surprise that there's some inventive deaths and good use of spurting blood.  Because nothing says Thanksgiving like Asian gore.

 

• House is showing at Central Cinema November 27-December 1 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., December 2 at 9:30 p.m.  Tickets are $6.  7 p.m. screenings all ages, 9:30 p.m. 21+. 

Here are my pics from the weekend.  You can view more pics in the Decibel Festival 2009 Flickr Pool.

From a weekend so filled with wonderful moments it's hard to pick any particular set of highlights, but if I had to pick a top three, I'd have to call out the following: