Housing, Real Estate & Residential Location

National (&International) Real Estate Resources:

• Real-Estate (and related) Associations and Societies [Cincinnati]
• National Association of Realtors
• Real Estate Links (global)
• Internet Real Estate Digest (IRED)
• Real Property Development & Finance [Planning & Architecture Internet Resource Center]
• Real Estate Department (Wharton School) [University of Pennsylvania]

Seattle Area Housing & Real Estate Resources:

• Washington State's Housing: A Supply and Demand Assesment (Executive Summaries) [Washington Center for Real Estate Research Washington State University]
  Other Linked Websites
• Yahoo Real Estate Guide for Seattle Area
• Washington State Information Network
• Seattle-King County Association of Realtors
• Seattle Real Estate Resource Guide
• Cyber Homes: On-Line Real Estate Search Service
• Seattle Times Classified / Real Estate
• Real Estate Companies:
  • John L. Scott
  • Windermere Real Estate
    • Debra Sinick, [Yarrow Bay Office; specialist for Microsoft neighborhood]
• Financing:
  • American Finance
  • Redmond Mortgage

• Industrial & Commercial Real Estate:
  • Colliers International
    • Offices by Region

  • Grubb and Ellis [Gregory A. Laycock, CCIM Investment Properties Division, Seattle] "the largest publicly traded (NYSE) real estate information and services company in the U.S., has developed effective alliances with many clients throughout the world. Offering brokerage, leasing, appraisal, consulting, tax appeal, mortgage brokerage, property management, banking services, auctions, facilities management and construction management, let us help you with your commercial real estate needs."

Clippings:

• Rents rise, despite city's efforts: 2000 summit produced some changes that have helped, others that haven't SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, Monday, June 10, 2002; By PHUONG CAT LE Two years ago, rents in the region were skyrocketing, talk of a renters' revolt was in the air and many lamented Seattle would lose its soul without affordable housing.

• Reality hits once-sizzling home market, Seattle Times, January 27, 2002 By Bill Kossen and Justin Mayo In some ways, it was a year that defied logic. Despite a recession and massive layoffs at Boeing and local high-tech companies, median price-per-square-foot values went up in about four out of every five King County neighborhoods. Real-estate experts attributed the strength to some of the lowest interest rates in history, which have allowed many apartment dwellers to buy homes and homeowners to trade up.

• Sticker Shocked? The real story behind the real estate boom Seattle Times, Seattle Area Housing Series of Articles, starting March 5, 2000.

  ".... behind those anecdotes of the torrid Seattle-area housing market are mountains of hard data - data The Seattle Times spent months accumulating and analyzing. The result, the most extensive analysis ever of housing prices in this region, will be published all this week in The Times."

• Central Area blooms and booms, Seattle PI, Originally published Saturday, November 1, 1997

  Restless forces are now at play in the Central Area, long Seattle's traditional black neighborhood but now a neighborhood in flux. Whites are moving back -- young professionals, gay couples with financial means to renovate, and families looking for bigger, affordable homes with early century charm.

• Housing Affordability in Puget Sound Region
  • More proof: Area's homes are not all that expensive, Seattle Times, June 14, 1999; by James Vesely / Times Staff Columnist

    ...in what seems an impossible housing market, I turn again to economic forecasters Dick Conway and Doug Pedersen, ... (who) have been almost alone in examining the true cost of housing based, not on sticker shock, but on real income. In their May, 1999 newsletter, "The Puget Sound Economic Forecaster," Conway and Pedersen show that housing costs are relatively unaffected by urban density caused by the Growth Management Act - and that for the non-home buyer, apartment rents should be coming down - two assertions that simply defy the region's conventional wisdom. Their premise ... is that increases in home prices ... have been more than offset by increases in incomes and a relative decline in interest rates... "As a result, .. homes are more affordable today - and by a wide margin - than they were in 1990..."

  • Seattle faces crisis of affordable housing, Seattle Times, June 13, 1999 by Elizabeth Rhodes

    What's the Seattle area going to be like if your kids grow up and can't afford to live here? What's it going to be like if your employees or coworkers can't afford homes? What will become of the area if tomorrow's teachers, police officers, health-care and retail workers take stock - and pass in favor of towns where they're not forever destined to be the working poor?

  • Pricey homes join sale frenzy in Seattle area, Seattle Times, June 9, 1999 by Keith Ervin

    Demand for homes priced under $200,000 has been fierce during the Seattle area's three-year real-estate boom. Now owners of some multimillion-dollar homes are also receiving multiple offers, real-estate brokers say.

  • How to purchase a house in Seattle's grim market, Seattle Times, June 9, 1999 by John Fairchild Special to The Times - Guest columnist

    An inevitable product of our vibrant economy and full employment, the housing market we face here now can be grim, particularly for first-time buyers. Prices have skyrocketed in the Puget Sound area. ... People have to look farther away from their jobs to find affordable houses, meaning that increased vehicle traffic and longer commute distances are additional signs of a worsening housing problem.

  • Easing the urban housing crunch; Seattle Times, January 10, 1999. by Steven Wayne AS THE supply of Northwest housing for typical wage earners disappears, we'll be left with a community of extremes, where the only people who can live here are the very wealthy or those who are poor enough to qualify for public housing. We're already seeing families flee King County for more reasonably priced housing to the north, south, east and west.
  • For sale sign goes up, bidding begins Seattle Times, Friday, March 20, 1998; by Susan Byrnes "... a 20-page report called the Seattle Housing Action Agenda, a compilation of suggestions by the mayor, housing experts and citizens. The premise of the plan is simple: The only way to calm the market is to dramatically increase the supply of all types of housing. What's complicated is how to do it. Seattle's housing market has historically fluctuated with its job market, and it's hard to separate sizzling housing prices from the red-hot regional economy."
  • The year in real estate: hot, hot hot! Seattle Times, Sunday, Dec. 28, 1997, by Elizabeth Rhodes It's estimated that for every two jobs created, an additional housing unit is required. However, new construction is falling far short of the 35,000 units needed, and so the result - escalating prices tied to a tight market - is predictable.
• Company teaches owner-builders how to construct their own homes, Seattle Times, Saturday, November 14, 1998, by Kerry Webster "... he runs a Kirkland-based company called U Build It, which specializes in helping owner-builders run their own construction projects. There are perhaps a dozen companies like it across the country, part of an emerging category called "construction consultants."
• Pitching in for home ownership Seattle Times, Saturday, Dec. 20, 1997; by Linda Shaw Northwest Housing is one of about 70 groups across the nation that help families who are priced out of the regular housing market become homeowners. The organization finds and buys property, helps families qualify for loans, arranges for all the materials and then teaches them step-by-step, mistake-by-mistake how to build.
• Cost of incorporation is affordable housing ; Seattle Times, Tuesday, Dec. 16, 1997. WHAT should the young city of Newcastle do? A community of only 4 square miles made up largely of homes built to high-end subdivision standards cannot possibly make more room for affordable housing. So says the current Newcastle city government, and it's wrong."
• Comparing Home Costs Nationwide (Relocation Journal, Nov. 1997)
• Costco branching out into real-estate services Seattle Times, Sunday, Sept. 7, 1997 by Elizabeth Rhodes Costco ... will unveil a pioneering real-estate program that industry insiders are predicting will - for good or ill - forever change the home-selling business.
• Web sites offer lots of information, Seattle Times, May 18, 1997.
• Netting a house online, Seattle Times, May 18, 1997.
• Seattle must rise to meet housing challenges Seattle Times, Sunday, April 20, 1997; by Doug Kelbaugh, "Seattle is blessed with good housing. Beautiful, leafy neighborhoods with street after street of well-crafted, well-maintained single-family homes are one of the city's most pervasive assets and distinctive characteristics." ... "Though Seattle offers a higher quality of life than most American cities, it faces three challenges: housing affordability for the middle class, housing the poor and accommodating growth."
• Eastside business: Bellevue is the No.1 office-space market Seattle Times, Business News : Friday, April 18, 1997 by Keith Ervin Move over, Boston. Get back, San Francisco. The hottest office real-estate market in the United States for the first three months of this year was Bellevue, according to a new survey by New York-based Cushman & Wakefield, a major commercial real-estate brokerage firm. .....
• Home Forum: Information for low-income home buyers Seattle Times, Sunday, March 23, 1997

Literature:

Basic Housing-Economics Bibliography [Forum der Wohnungswirtschaft im Internet]

Adams, J. Housing America in the 1980s. 1987. [HD7293.A625]

Adams, John S., Housing Submarkets in an American Metropolis," in: John Fraser Hart, ed., Our Changing Cities. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp.108ff. [HT123 O87/1991]

Arnott, Richard, Braid, Ralph, Davidson, Russell and Pines, David. A General Equilibrium Spatial Model of Housing Quality and Quantity. Regional Science and Urban Economics, May 1999, 29(3), p. 283. [Abstract]

Badcock, Blair. "Urban and Regional Restructuring and Spatial Transfers of Housing Wealth," Progress in Human Geography. 18(3), 1994, 279-97.

Barlow, J. and Duncan, S. (1994) Success and Failure in Housing Provision: European Systems Compared, (Pergamon, Oxford).

Bourne, L. Geography of Housing. 1981. [HD7287.B67]

(David Hodge et al.,), Seattle Displacement Study. Seattle Office of Policy Planning. October 1979.

Kaplan, David H., What is measured in Measuring the Mortgage Market," Professional Geographer, 48(4), Nov. 1996, 356-367.

Kleit RG, Neighborhood relations in suburban scattered-site and clustered public housing, JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, 23 (3-4): 409-430 2001

Leven, Charles. Neighborhood Change. Praeger, 1976. [HD7293.N43]

Mayo, Stephen K., "The Housing Indicators Program: A Model for Evaluation Research and Policy Analysis?", in: Picciotto, Robert and Ray C. Rist, eds., Evaluating Country Development Policies and Programs: New Approaches for a New Agenda. Jossey-Bass Publ. 1995 [HD75.9.E82]

Richard L. Morrill, The Negro Ghetto: Problems and Alternatives, Geographcial Review, 55 (1965) 339-361. Bobbs-Merrill reprint and in several books of readings.

Muth, Richard. Cities and Housing: The Spatial Pattern of Urban Residential Land Use. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969.

Nenno, Mary K., Ending the Stalemate: Moving Housing and Urban Development into the Mainstream of America's Future. University Press of America. 1996.

South, Scott J. and Crowder, Kyle D. Housing Discrimination and Residential Mobility: Impacts for Blacks and Whites. Population Research and Policy Review, August 1998, 17(4), pp. 369ff.

Timmermans, H.; Borgers, A.; Van-Dijk, J.; Oppewal, H. Residential choice behaviour of dual earner households: a decompositional joint choice model. Environment-and-Planning-A. 1992. 24(4), pp 517-533.

Ward, Peter. A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home, University of British Columbia Press. 199?.

Wieand, K. The urban homeowner's residential location decision in an asset-pricing context, REAL ESTATE ECON 27 (4): 649-667 WIN 1999