Rain City Guide

…instead of the price going up over time, it goes down.” ~Bothell home owner
Trend?

I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve always put the clients best interest first…it’s just something I naturally have to do in order to be able to sleep at night. There has been a time or two when a real estate agent has told me that my job is solely to provide mortgages and not [...]

When WaMU decided that most of Washington State zip codes are soft, they let Loan Originators know via email giving us just hours to submit loans under the old guidelines (pre-soft haircut of 5% or what ever the value is). I have another example of how little time we are given as LO’s to [...]

Each year, we at Team Reba hold a clothing drive for Treehouse, a non-profit that helps to provide foster children with clothing and other supplies to help make their lives more normal. Most people don’t realize that the State of Washington only provides about $300 per year for clothing for these kids, which barely [...]

Recently, I wrote about new case law in Washington that was making it more difficult for buyers of real property to make post-closing claims against the seller for property condition related matters. The Washington legislature has just amended the state’s residential property condition disclosure law to put additional burdens on sellers and will soon [...]

This New Year brought significant changes to the mortgage industry. Loan Originators who provide residential loans in Washington State are now required to be licensed. This legislature applies primarily to Mortgage Brokers and not LOs who are employed by banks or credit unions. As I am employed by a Mortgage Broker (technically, we [...]

Yesterday, Russ Cofano and I gave another blogging seminar, this time in Seattle as part of Ed.con 2006 put on by the Washington Realtor Association.
I thought the day went over really well and considering it was the first seminar we’d given to the “home town” crowd, I found it to be especially fun. Marlow [...]

This past week, Top Producer quietly rolled out a home valuation tool, called HomeInsight, for a few markets in California and Washington*. I was not part of developing the tool, but I like it enough to pass along the link to Rain City Guide readers before the local media picks it up.
What differentiates [...]

I recently returned from my almost annual vacation in beautiful California to visit my family and a few famous real estate bloggers (Dustin & Andy). And it was interesting to note what I learned about real estate in the Golden State during my two weeks down there…
Non surprises 
Bay Area real estate is still expensive. That wasn’t surprising at all. It’s [...]