Rain City Guide

Hmmmm, the Seattle Times article in today’s business section talks about HouseValues reducing staff because they’re moving out of selling leads to mortgage brokers and they had also overestimated where they’d be financially at this time on top of the fact that sites like Zillow.com have taken over part of their target site user. HV [...]

I’ve been heavily hit by a spammer for the last few days and I figured I’d share the story…
Despite the fact that the spammer is using the same one line text and always links back to the same website, Akismet is having a hard time picking up this spam and has let 150 [...]

I feel very lucky that for my final interview of the season, one of my favorite bloggers in the world has agreed to answer my questions. One of my Seattle real estate blogging failures has been that I’ve never managed to convince her to start blogging on Rain City Guide and instead she’s gone [...]

This subject totally irks me…it is just so completely wrong. The three major credit bureaus are selling personal information to hundreds of mortgage companies throughout the country as soon as a credit report is pulled from a mortgage lender. You visit your preferred lender to get preapproved for a mortgage, and whammo…within hours [...]

Insurance companies sometimes cancel policies of homeowners who have trampolines in their yards. If only they knew about human slingshots.

Nathan of nPost just did a great interview with Galen on Shackprices… Lots of gold including some indication of Galen’s vision for the future for Shackprices!

What is your long-term plan for ShackPrices?
I would really like ShackPrices to be a national real-estate search website. Our goal is to make it for anyone in America to [...]

Scenario: buyer says that they will be buying in 3 months. You say, perfect, let’s get you pre-approved so you’ll be ready by then. You believe the buyer until they call you 5 days later with the great news that they just bought new construction from a site agent! Aren’t you happy for them? 
But before [...]

The local NWMLS has posted a notice to its members that I’ve pasted in below:

Snohomish County Copper Pipe Thefts
January 19, 2007. NWMLS has received reports that copper piping has been cut away and stolen from the crawl spaces under several vacant homes in the Everett vicinity. Many of these crawl spaces were not secure, allowing [...]

The Dumb Little Man (who is anything but…) just listed 10 questions he asked real estate agents along with the answers he got and the answers he wanted to hear.
How are you going to advertise my home?
Why are you saying my home is worth $400K when I think its worth $325K?
Is your realty [...]

This past weekend I attended a three hour class on staging. I was motivated to take the class because, as a real estate photographer, it helps to understand something about staging a property as agents frequently defer to me over last minute details of the home staging when I am on site doing the shoot. [...]