Your Seattle real estate/gentrification update

"Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo" (thetomselleck)
02/09/2018 at 15:07 • Filed to: Houses

Also quite bigly

I just finished walking through these six - admittedly very nice — detached townhomes off of Rainier Ave South. For those of you not familiar with the area, it’s one of the least desireable places in the city. Wall to wall graffiti. Tents blocking sidewalks. Homeless camps not carefully tucked away like other parts of Seattle. Also known for where marginalized minorities have been forced to move to in order to find affordable housing in Seattle, which has been a thing for over 20 years now.

Anywho. These towhomes? Starting at $820,000.

DISCUSSION (49)

His Stigness > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:11

So is the new American Dream just being permanently fucked?

CalzoneGolem > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:15

These buildings are straight up ugly.

VajazzleMcDildertits - read carefully, respond politely > His Stigness
02/09/2018 at 15:17

In the high land value portions of America, pretty much yes. You have a shot in places where industry is growing and communities but land value hasn’t caught up yet, or if you’re working in an industry with high demand and payout.

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > VajazzleMcDildertits - read carefully, respond politely
02/09/2018 at 15:21

Or you can live an hour out of the city and experience a soul crushing commute on a daily basis.

fintail > His Stigness
02/09/2018 at 15:21

Already done in some areas, Seattle being one.

fintail > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:23

Ah Seattle and its clunky mcmodern “townhome” “architecture” (glorified apartments).

Soon to sell to tech types with more money than sense, trust fund transplants, or money laundering speculators (sometimes the developer is also in on that, see Bellevue).

Spanfeller is a twat > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:25

Gentrification is hitting Mexico City too... Hard. It’s a shame how divided it has becomed and it is the same as in seattle, they develop poor lands with expensive ass houses.... but here it’s inside private communities with barb wire fencing.

In fact, there’s a Yuge tower next to one of the building sites I work at, they did all the pre-sale events 5 years ago (all the units sold) and they had a lot of permits issues since so they’re still finishing it.

But the thing is, since those presale events, the land values skyrocketed by a factor of 30% or more, (its all grey really because those values don’t reflect tax evasion and illegal buildings) so analysts are saying that most of the buyers will put their apartments for rent or for sale and flood the market so badly they will bankrupt every other realtor.

Isn’t capitalism fun?

VajazzleMcDildertits - read carefully, respond politely > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:25

Only a single hour out? I can’t afford that, I’m not a millionaire!

Ash78, voting early and often > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:27

I appreciate changing tastes in aesthetics, but do it with your decor, not the fundamental architecture of the house. That’s a nice way of saying these are terrible looking.

Also, if I were an urban developer in Seattle, my company would be Sir Mixed-Use-A-Lot, LLC.

It’s the CRE in the CPT — on a building spree!

OPPOsaurus WRX > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:29

yea.... I mean granite counters and stainless steel and fancy chandeliers might make it ‘nice’, but that exterior, eh

just-a-scratch > Ash78, voting early and often
02/09/2018 at 15:36

Why not build an ambitious development with a friendly name like “Sound Gardens” funded by The Ventures Capital LLC?

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > OPPOsaurus WRX
02/09/2018 at 15:39

No one cares about exteriors in Seattle, they’ll buy anything. People only care about the insides. Save builders a lot of moolah making the exterior look inoffensive as possible.

fintail > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:40

An hour from Seattle, so Renton or Lynnwood?

not for canada - australian in disguise > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:46

So basically, Seattle is Vancouver but they spell colour wrong.

For Sweden > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 15:52

Reasons to live in Seattle instead of Olympia: None

Mid Engine > For Sweden
02/09/2018 at 15:56

Jobs, Commuting to jobs.

facw > fintail
02/09/2018 at 16:00

Nothing wrong with apartments. That said, I find all detached townhouses pretty bad, but these are awful. Real townhouses or condos would be preferable (though please make sure to actually have good solid soundproof walls between units, I’m sure most new construction just does whatever the minimum that will pass fire code is).

someassemblyrequired > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:01

I can’t believe what stuff in the CD and Columbia City go for these days.

They’re suckers though, the town was a hell of a lot more fun when it wasn’t all tech nerds. Glad I was there for the good times and cheap living costs.

fintail > facw
02/09/2018 at 16:04

I have nothig against apartments, they might be the most logical thing for singles anyway, usually not pretending to be something they aren’t.

To me, though, these townhouses/landless houses are more like apartments than actual houses, with all the expense of a house, and almost none of the benefit.

Soundproof walls LOL, these are plywood and compressed oatmeal, not concrete.

CaptDale - is secretly British > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:10

I noticed a lot of the in SF last up there. Really just odd.

Ash78, voting early and often > just-a-scratch
02/09/2018 at 16:12

HUDmoney, LP

RPM esq. > For Sweden
02/09/2018 at 16:18

This might be true if the only things you like to do take place within the four walls of your home, but otherwise...holy shit what a bad take. I know a lot of people who work in Olympia for various reasons, and not one of them lives there. Several of them commute from Seattle.

punkgoose17 > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:27

I would just say move away from the area, but we moved away from our friends and family and found it difficult.

BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:28

Are people really earning enough in the PNW to afford 3, 4, 5,000/mth mortgages???

imadick > His Stigness
02/09/2018 at 16:31

In cities with jobs? Yes, been that way for awhile.

Pistol Whipped Cream > For Sweden
02/09/2018 at 16:35

Proximity to Mariners games is about it.

OmerCarrothers333 > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:44

Damn, it looks like Southern California is actually cheaper. And I’m saying that as someone who couldn’t afford to live in San Diego County.

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
02/09/2018 at 16:50

I’m not sure. Lots of cash buyers from out of the country, though. Locals? Ain’t nobody got time fo dat.

wkiernan > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 16:56

I’ll bet that when they sell them all, they’ll still be more than half empty. People don’t buy those horribly overpriced things to live in them, they buy them to flip them.

However, when the economy collapses, if you have any cash you’ll be able to buy all kinds of properties for half or a third of what they’re going for today in these bubble times.

fintail > BrianGriffin thinks “reliable” is just a state of mind
02/09/2018 at 17:01

Lots of imported money here, some of it more on the up and up than others.

As crabby guy mentioned, these people pay cash. I suspect most of these boxes will be cash sales too.

For Sweden > Pistol Whipped Cream
02/09/2018 at 17:41

The only good Mariners are the Tacoma Rainiers.

wafflesnfalafel > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/09/2018 at 22:02

My father was a biology teacher at Franklin High School during the race riots, now Paul Allen is buying up the valley - time changes everything.

fintail > wkiernan
02/10/2018 at 14:28

The problem with that around Seattle is so much offshore cash is in the mix. It would take armageddon to see a 50% drop. Even if domestic demand falters, there is enough money laundering from a few places to keep the insanity alive, if maybe at a more tepid pace.

fintail > someassemblyrequired
02/10/2018 at 14:29

A co-worker of mine lost in a bidding war for a 50s era house in Columbia City. His bid was nearly 700K. I can’t find words for this.

someassemblyrequired > fintail
02/10/2018 at 15:29

Friend just sold his garbage condo in Issaquah, 1200 sqft, 550/mo condo dues. Bought a 3000sqft house with 3 car garage in a nice area of Boise and pocketed six figures. Plus his HOA fees are $5000 less a year.

Things are insane right now, there’s still some deals renting but they are dissappearing.

fintail > someassemblyrequired
02/10/2018 at 15:40

If my job somehow relocated east of the mountains, I’d move over in a heartbeat, especially if my salary was relatively the same. But for some reason, a lot of people wouldn’t, and are dead-set on sticking it out. I think that’s one thing keeping some employers here.

I’ve seen condos in Bellevue where HOA + tax is 2 grand a month. That’s a lot of carrying cost.

If someone doesn’t have that 17 years of savings (or whatever was the latest figure) for a down payment, a huge salary, or significant help from the bank of mommy and daddy, renting might be an easier decision.

someassemblyrequired > fintail
02/10/2018 at 17:44

Yeah, Seattle is great, but the real prize of Washington State is once you’re well clear of Seattle. The smart money is probably buying up huge swaths of Wenatchee and Ellensburg.

I lived in Seattle for almost a decade in a couple of stints- and saw the market tank twice. Don’t lose sleep over getting priced out.

fintail > someassemblyrequired
02/10/2018 at 19:53

I think Wenatchee is already attracting boomer retirees - I’ve heard property there is inflating already. But no doubt still some relative bargains to be had. I also like the area around Walla Walla (another retiree haven so not the cheapest, but not bad) and Spokane, which is expensive for eastern WA but a bargain compared to anywhere from Bellingham to Olympia. Moses Lake is can be cheap too, but the seasons there can be severe, and some areas are sketchy, which might limit attraction in the near term. My mom lives out on the coast, which is also eastern WA cheap, but less employment - you have to be into beach stuff and the dreary weather.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the Puget Sound market tanking hard here again, at least not in the foreseeable future. Seattle has become Vancouver Junior, with a real estate market strongly impacted by offshore money, and money laundering. When over half the sales in some areas are to offshore cash buyers, it’ll take a cataclysm to really change things.

someassemblyrequired > fintail
02/10/2018 at 20:37

Yeah there are a lot of nice areas in WA, I’m surprised a lot of the big employers haven’t started to shift some operations out of the Seattle area, just to make the calculus of working make sense. $60K in Seattle right now is pretty much like 20-25 in a lot of areas just considering housing costs. When a 2BD apartment is 2K/month, you have not a lot of margin.

I think you’re onto something with the money laundering, the market really started to go ballistic when Canadian money laundering laws tightened up and BC started to crack down on offshore buyers.

fintail > someassemblyrequired
02/10/2018 at 21:00

It’d be something if they did. The region would be just fine if a few moved east. But a lot of employees, especially older ones who lucked out in the housing casino, would protest.

Unfortunately, a lot of other cost of living factors don’t deflate along with housing costs. A friend of mine took a job in suburban Atlanta - super cheap housing, even with reduced salary he was easily able to afford a house, but the salary and benefits were so much lower, that a house was all he had - still paid about the same for food, fuel, medical, and had less perks.

Vancouver implemented a marginal offshore buyer tax, but these people have so much money, I don’t think it did more than marginally reduce the inflation rate. I haven’t seen much real crackdown on money laundering - those dependent on property tax revenue are dependent on this stuff for their meal ticket and often insane retirement bennies. And in the US, when son of a conman son in law of a conman Jared is out selling the pay-for-play residency scheme that has existed for too long and certainly won’t change with this regime, I doubt the US will really perform vetting on the origins of money either.

wkiernan > fintail
02/10/2018 at 21:17

You could be right. I looked up the King County GIS and clicked on a few random sites. Here’s one, a house very similar to mine in Clearwater, Florida (1,060 square feet wood frame) on a lot about half the size of mine (30' x 128') where the lot and house were appraised at $464,000 in 2008, $355,000 in 2012, and $582,000 in 2017. That’s almost five times my house’s appraisal value (and keep in mind, I’m sixty feet above sea level and a ten minute ride from the glorious Gulf Beaches!), but while this house increased in value by 64% between ‘12 and ‘17, mine, in a more volatile market, increased in value 145% over the same interval.

Here’s another, 770 s.f. on 6,000 s.f., $436K/’08, $300K/’12, $485K/’17. And here’s a third, a fawncy 3,300 s.f two-story house on 5,000 s.f of land, that barely lost any value during the recession and appreciated wildly in the recovery: $699K/’08, $614K/’12, $1,385K/’17.

That’s a pretty resilient real estate market! No wonder investors are willing to pay the big bucks.

fintail > wkiernan
02/10/2018 at 22:54

The best part is the county, like most, has tax values a bit under real world values. It’s insane here. Median value for King County is 608K now, and includes a lot of outlying areas. Median in Bellevue is 849K, and in 98004 (the location of my shoebox) is 1.25MM.

Many areas felt pressure from the 2007 era crash. There was a low point in maybe 2011-12, I think a lot of areas have nearly doubled since. I kind of kick myself, but really, anything I would have really wanted wasn’t attainable then, either - I hope banks weren’t accepting 8:1 mortage to income ratios (now the same house is probably 14:1).

And now with some areas having 50% or more volume to offshore cash buyers, I think it will take a lot to cool things off. And even if it happens, things won’t be reasonable, just marginally less insane, but still a pipe dream for the normal worker even with a decent income.

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo
02/12/2018 at 09:46

Last year, we bought a very nice 4 year old, 4000+ sq ft home, with a pool, on ten acres with a pond, 35 mins from downtown Tulsa, for just a little over half that...

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > fintail
02/28/2018 at 06:15

Even those are getting pricey and can be a longer drive at the wrong times. 405 from Renton to Bellevue in the morning is an absolutely unreal slog. Worse than the famous 405 in the South Bay of Los Angeles.

Most of the younger people I know spent $450-550k to live in Auburn or the Black Diamond-Maple Valley area, or a little less for Marysville-Lake Stevens. The best deal I can recall in the last 4 years was bought in 2014 for $320k in Monroe. Even out there houses are getting ridiculous - the latest in my circles to buy in Monroe (just over the line from Sultan) paid over $500k for a thoroughly mediocre new construction house that is about 20 minutes from downtown Monroe. For reference, the downtown Monroe is 1.5-2 hours to Seattle at rush hour...

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > For Sweden
02/28/2018 at 06:29

I’m not a fan of Seattle, but I wouldn’t want to live in Olympia. It is the confluence of so many negative effects all compressed into one rough little isolated city. For entertainment you pretty much have to drive through JBLM, be addicted to drugs, and/or be a total redneck. It has all the shittiest aspects of living in Bremerton without the sound views and the benefit of being a mere 1-hour ferry ride from Seattle.

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > fintail
02/28/2018 at 06:47

What I can’t figure out is why traffic is so bad with so many empty houses traded sight-unseen by the foreign buyers. You’d think the would be fewer cars as a result. The only thing I can come up with is that many are in the closer neighborhoods, which is exacerbating prices and commute distances.

I used to live about 5 minutes from the Microsoft campus in Bellevue and there were houses in my neighborhood that sat vacant for years with curious sales histories. You could tell because many were lightly boarded, the driveways were overgrown with moss/weeds in the cracks, and the NFG lawn services just trimmed the weeds down on the dead lawns (because nobody watered them in the summer). It was depressing because these were in great locations that people would love to live in if the houses were sold to people that would occupy them.

Three places sold on my old street there recently. One has been turned into another of these vacant houses (next door). Across the street has had a for rent sign since it sold around Sept-Oct last year, but mysteriously no takers yet (it is a very outdated higher-end 1980s-era SFH that I believe sold for close to $1M, but they are asking more than my mortgage payment a month and those that can afford that are rare).

Eric @ opposite-lock.com > OmerCarrothers333
02/28/2018 at 07:37

What’s funny is that I left San Diego in 2013 because I could see that even renting another place wasn’t happening if my geriatric landlord kicked the bucket and my place got sold out from under me. It was just too expensive by then and my rent was relatively low because I got in back in 2007 (even then, I don’t think my landlady knew how much she could ask and she listed it in the paper (not online) where nobody would see it)... I moved to an isolated exurb west of Seattle for a job paying roughly the same but with no income tax, cheap rent, and houses that were half the price (based on 2012 sales), I figured I couldn’t lose. Plus I like the weather up here better...

The market shot up out of my reach on my income at the time by late-2013, and housing has been scarce (and prices constantly rising at 10+% every year) ever since. Today, I am in an exurb on the opposite side of Seattle because it was all we could afford in spite of doubling my income. The Seattle area is rapidly approaching a Bay Area situation, with jobs clustered in core regions and supercommutes required for most average people to afford housing.

fintail > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
02/28/2018 at 09:36

I have a co-worker who lives in Renton, just east of Fairwood (she wanted land). Her commute to Bellevue is sometimes 2 hours plus. It is almost exactly 15 miles from her driveway to the office.

A friend of mine paid 340K for a small 80s tract house on a tiny lot in a crowded subdivision in the most remote part of Bothell, back in 2006. We thought he was insane, especially as it sank to around 250K at the bottom of the market. Now it it might bring 500K or more. This is the real insanity. I’d rather rent a shoebox in the city than spend more than half a million dollars for a cardboard ‘n plywood domicile on the outskirts of Monroe 2 hours from civilization.

fintail > Eric @ opposite-lock.com
02/28/2018 at 09:42

I think a lot of it is volume, and driving skill. Too many here new to first world driving, and the locals aren’t always so great either. Even with the empty houses, there are high density developments everywhere - and as this area has a transit system fitting for a place 1/10th the size, everyone drives.

I live in downtown Bellevue. Come here in the evening, and witness all of the dark windows in “sold out” condo highrises. Vancouver enacted a tax on offshore buyers - we need a similar tax (but much higher, say, 50%), along with a similar tax on vacant properties - enacted yearly. If we are going to be the destination for pay for play via money laundering, we should fund infrastructure with it. Let the embezzlers with pay for play residency end up buying the places 5 times over, and maybe something good will come of their money rather than just benefiting the local prior generations who were able to buy when it was attainable for all.

We’re in a legitimate affordable housing crisis here, and so many properties sit vacant, both SFH and condo/apartment. It is criminal.