Did you know that Seattle has its very own Statue of Liberty? It’s at Alki Beach.

The Statue of Liberty, a small replica of the original “Liberty Enlightening the World” in New York City, was a gift from Reginald H. Parsons and the Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America in 1952. The statue has become such a symbol of liberty and courage that it became a place to mourn, to reflect, and to leave mementos after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

City of Seattle’s Alki Beach Park

The materials used for the Seattle Statue of Liberty prepared it poorly for fifty years of sand, salt spray, and vandalism, leaving it ready for replacement.
Northwest Programs for the Arts plan to recast the sculpture in bronze as soon as they have necessary funds and have an unveiling shortly thereafter, rededicating the statue.

Submitted by David Losh of Skyline Properties, 206-523-2733

An agent in my office asked me to help with a pre foreclosure. When we got
to the property the owner turned out to be the youngest brother of a good
friend from high school. The house was a mess with several remodel projects
that were ill conceived……

Story continued HERE…..

Several people pointed out to me that Clark Humphrey, former Seattle Dream Homes client, had this announcement on his blog Miscmedia a few days ago:

Sunday, March 26, 2006

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE WEEK #2: I’m working on another book.
The tentative title: Vanishing Seattle. It’ll be a picture book all about fondly remembered local bygones–restaurants, stores, TV/radio personalities, buildings, landmarks, tourist attractions, and more.

Was this before or after he viewed Roadside Seattle on Seattle Dream Homes, online since 2001?

Inman blog notes that about 56 percent of all single women own their own homes, and they are the fastest-growing group of homeowners, where only 11 percent of single men own their own homes. These are some pretty serious statistics. Women, getting tired of waiting for a man to come and play house, are setting up housekeeping on their own.

Belief that a woman’s place is in the home by cohort and education, 1977-94

Gender differences in household work

Inman Blog notes that a group of real estate professionals are competing in the latest “The Apprentice” series (which prominently features Donald Trump) and are hoping not to hear “The Donald” utter those two words “You’re Fired” in their general direction.

Among the cast members of this reality series are Leslie Bourgeois, 28, a Realtor for Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Boca Raton, Fla.; Bryce Gahagan, 28, a home builder who co-founded Gahagan-Eddy Building Co.; Charmaine Hunt, 27, an executive at First American Home Warranty in Nashville, Tenn.; and Brent Buckman, 30, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., lawyer who also handles real estate closings.

Marlow and Gang at Trump Tower

One of my favorite films is Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.

In the film, Mr. and Mrs. Blandings build a lovely house in the Conneticut countryside. Blandings, an “adman” suspects his wife of having an affair with an old flame, who happens to be the architect for the house….

To compare the costs of building then, in the 1930′s to today, CNN did a story on Prices in Old Movies. Sometimes, money references in classic movies provide the jolt that reminds us of how inflation has changed what we pay for things. For instance, after adjusting for inflation, $25 in 1941 is the equivalent of $332 today.

Damon Darlin in the Walk-Through, the New York Times real estate blog, comments that the article misses one point about inflation. While renovations have kept pace with the general inflation trend basic real estate costs have skyrocketed.

I’ve always enjoyed “Mr. Blanding’s Builds His Dream House” but, believe it or not, I also liked the remake, The Money Pit with Tom Hanks & Shelley Long. Other favorites include Pacific Heights, about a young couple who buys a duplex in San Francisco and almost loses it to a very scary Michael Keaton, and Duplex with Ben Stiller & Drew Barrymore.

Other real estate films on my list:

Poltergeist (Craig T. Nelson plays a real estate agent)
War of the Roses (Divorcing couple fights over their beautiful house)
American Beauty (Kevin Spacey’s wife (Annette Bening) is a real estate agent)
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (One of the main characters is a real estate agent)
Glen Garry Glen Ross (scary film about selling real estate in the old days)
Open House – The Movie
Life As A House (Kevin Kline)
My Architect (Director Nathaniel Kahn searches to understand his father, noted architect Louis Kahn, who died bankrupt and alone in 1974)
The Fountainhead (Gary Cooper as architect Howard Roark)

Next in the works, a Real Estate Movie Film Festival!

“Seattle, home of the 10,000 Microsoft millionaires, Costco, Amazon.com, Nordstrom and numerous other “trendy” shops and companies, will lead the country in home price growth in 2006.” Wow.

Realtor.org forecast by economist Lawrence Yun

For a completely different point of view, Seattle Real Estate Bubble Blog

A California builder established a “Thomas Kinkade themed community” near San Francisco called The Village at Hiddenbrooke. This housing development was conceived in an attempt to make the nostalgic, soft-focus world of the paintings a reality for fans. I pictured thatched cottages, soft-focus towns glowing like Jack-o-lanterns, ivy-covered arbors, dells and fields of flowers. What it was, however, was just a standard tract-home housing development as described by Janelle Brown in her story -Ticky-Tacky Houses from “The Painter of Lightâ„¢” In it, Brown points out that it ain’t exactly Olde Quainte Village….

Boing Boing notes the LA Times just printed a character-assassinating cover story on Thomas Kinkade, self-professed “Painter of Light”.

Kinkade is one of the most successful “artists” painting today, selling millions of dollars worth of kitschy cottages and lighthouses to unsophisticated buyers. He’s sold his soul to marketing and his paintings now grace potholders, calendars and tissue covers. He has a “factory” where giclee’s and prints are touched-up by hand to add highlights to his thatched cottages, arbors, and flower-laden gardens.

To read the story in the LA Times, you have to register, but it’s worth it.

When RoqlaRue had it’s parody show “Painters of Blight” , curated by Kipling West, Erin Norlin and David Miller, they documented it on the blog, Painters of Blight. It’s hilarious.

Thomas Kinkade and The Future of Architecture

The Future of Branded Living Space : Megachurch as Minitown

Jesus Has a Summer Cottage? Inside Thomas Kinkade’s Blinding Gazebo

Reuben Kinkade — Painter of Stuff

The Real Estate Bloggers noted an interesting trend of buying real estate online, sight-unseen. They reference a New York Times article entitled “Some finding perils in online real estate”, about people being duped after buying homes on Ebay and the internet. The online sites have become perfect places for unscrupulous sellers who have bought dilapidated houses at, say, foreclosure auctions, to resell, or flip, them quickly for inflated prices.

The Walk-Through, the New York Times blog, also discusses the growing popularity of real estate auctions.

This comes with the announcement in yesterday’s News Tribune on their blog “Open House” that breaks the news that our area will be having an Ebay-type auction for condos. In today’s Seattle P.I., Deborah Bach covered the story of the Madison Lofts holding an auction . Potential buyers must register on the development’s Web site, Madison Lofts and attend informational meetings starting March 22, at which they will be able to see renderings of the building and receive a CD with an electronic “fly-through” tour of the development, slated for completion around the end of the year.

Redfin, of course, has tried to lure people into buying homes online, but so far, has had very limited success. Let’s see if the Madison Lofts auction can do better.

Is it wise to buy a second vacation home? According to The Real Estate Bloggers, a second home is not always a good investment. But some people, making an emotional decision rather than perhaps an investment-driven choice, own three homes. According to this article in the Seattle Times, a confluence of demographic and economic factors makes owning two homes verging on the commonplace, and some people own more.

Does it make sense? Jeff Brown of the Sun Herald has done some numbers that make it less appealing and shows a negative profit under many circumstances.

But it does work for some, especially if the house is rented out occasionally or during the off-season. Rentals can cover your second-home costs if you’re careful when you buy and you follow these 3 simple rules.

Ten tips for happy second-home owners

Top ten places to buy a second home

According to Forbes Magazine, Bill Gates is the World’s Richest Man Alive.

Forbes list of world’s richest

Bill Gate’s House

The admirable philanthropic endeavors of the Gates Foundation

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of American’s Wealthy

Forget all that mean stuff I said about Trulia. Here’s a great rebuttal from Pete Flint, co-founder and CEO of Trulia, to the editors of The New York Times regarding last Sunday’s article on “Endangered Species: Why Real Estate Agents Are On The Way Out.”

I wanted to post it here, as I wasn’t sure the Times would actually print it. My good friends over at Rain City Guide help me post it for everyone to read:

Letter to The New York Times in PDF.

And you can read the letter in it’s entirety here.

Bag Borrow or Steal, just received a $8.25 million dollar cash infusion from Madrona Partners.

Bag Borrow or Steal is an online business that rents high-end designer handbags to women. Is this an incredible concept or what? I’m sure this could only succeed in America.

The reason this news caught my eye is because Madrona Partners are the same venture capitalists who gave Redfin $1.25 million last month.

Both businesses were founded by men. Madrona Partners are all men.

Women own about 40 percent of all businesses in the U.S. but receive only 2.3 percent of the available equity capital needed for growth. Male-owned companies receive the other 97.7. percent.

In 2001 in the U.S. women held only 2.5 percent of the top jobs at American companies and only 10.9 percent of the board of directors’ seats at Fortune 1000 companies.

This not about men. This is about women and what makes them afraid, unwilling and unable to make the decisions about their lives that would get them into these kind of positions.

Women often don’t know the market value of their work. According to Linda Babcock in “Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide” , women report salary expectations between 3 and 32 percent lower than those of men for the same jobs; men expect to earn 13 percent more than women during their first year of full-time work and 32 percent more at their career peaks.

39 Jobs Where Women Make More than Men

Quotations on Women’s Issues

There’s lots of buzz about Steven D. Levitt and Stephan Dubner’s article in the NYTimes entitled “Endangered Species”: Why Real Estate Agents Are on the Way Out”.

Their premise is that there are too many real estate agents, they charge too much for their services and, thanks to various market pressures and especially some recent online innovations, the real-estate agent will soon join a list of endangered service-worker species.

Jonathan J. Miller in Matrix points out that this is an overly simplistic comparison simply due to the importance of the dollar amount of the transaction.

Inman Blog notes “While comparing real estate agents with travel agents is convenient for argument sake, buying a home is quite different from organizing a family trip to Maui” and invites readers to comment on the article.

I take particular issue with the hostility shown by Levitt and Dubner. Either they had a bad experience, they’ve found something “meaty” to grab on to further their book sales, or they truly resent the career choices and salaries made by real estate agents.

I can point to a few phrases the two use to convey their contempt, but the article taken as a whole, has more power than the few examples I can give. However, the first sentence starts out by setting the tone for the entire article: “It is hard to think of an occupation that garners less goodwill these days than the real-estate agent. More often than not, agents are portrayed as hustlers or sharks, unimaginative opportunists who, for not all that much effort, pocket a significant chunk of the sale price of your home.”

Funny, I never felt any lack of goodwill from anyone… until I read this!

Their piece in the New York Times is just one in a series of increasingly hostile and bitter articles from commentators and writers criticizing real estate agents. Reading Damon Darlin’s blog entries and the comments he incites on The Walk-Through makes me wonder what prompts such hostility.

Story Continued Here…..

Today’s Seattle Times has a front page real estate article entitled “Agents Feel Squeezed by New Sites”.

Upon reading the entire article, the headline seems to have nothing to do with the story, but does make a cute tag for the (also unrelated) accompanying illustration. And it does make for “compelling” journalism.

Like other blogs have noted, hits go up when we write about Zillow, so I guess in order to keep my traffic up, I’ll have to do that again.

Zillow is a new real estate portal, now making money by selling advertising. What’s “threatening” about that? Good luck to them.

Redfin is an older real estate brokerage founded in October 2002. The company launched its real estate search site in October 2004 and they raised its first venture capital in September 2005.

They’re a little more “threatening”, but I’d have to say its because of their historical hostility to real estate agents rather than their current business model.

“Squeezed” continued here……

The Seattle Times published a story about Kirkland-based HouseValues’ stock plunging last week, one day after the Kirkland company forecasted 2006 financial results that were far below Wall Street expectations.

Shares of the online real-estate services company sank $3.79, or 28.1 percent, closing at $9.71 on trading volume almost 10 times the recent daily average.

John Cook of the Seattle PI, in his Venture Blog, asks if it’s because of new competitor of online house valuations, Zillow.

Robbie Paplin at Rain City Guide asked some good questions and provides a link to this great website, The Rip-Off Report. Robbie asks : “Does management think an upcoming war with Zillow is going to hurt HouseValues earnings? Is the slowing housing market at fault? Have enough people seen Ardell’s “Bottom feeder post” to cause this market cap hemorrhaging? Can TheLoanPage.com mount a credible threat to LendingTree.com? Can Batman & Robin save us?”

I think the answer may lie in their business model, how they currently generate income, and the possibilities for continuing to do this in the future.

House Values Stock Tumbles continued here……