Lake Chelan Washington Real Estate Blog

Technology for protecting your home and its contents has come a long ways.  Today, you can buy a kit to install an alarm on your home for a few hundred dollars.  For a few hundred more, you can buy everything you need to install your own video monitoring system. And then what?  Some Atlanta homeo...

One of the outstanding strategies I use when selling a home is to make a coffee table book of the home. A home has to be very unique, very stately or very luxurious to pull off a coffee table book, so we can't do this with every home we sell. But, where we can, the coffee table book works wonder...

That's the amount the National Association of Home Builders thinks it will cost for each additional new sale generated by extending the Home Buyer's Tax credit. They want to make it available to everybody except investors and vacation home buyers. They're lobbying feverishly to do it! According t...

These are the most exciting listings I have seen in Lake Chelan this year!  The Flying W Ranch is offering presales on homes on acreage and two of the homes are priced below $200k.  Plus, the Flying W Ranch includes 600 acres of conservation property that has been put under the care of the Land T...

The local association of Realtors sent out a link to an analysis from the Cato Institute titled How Urban Planners Caused the Housing Bubble.  Randall O'Toole does a thorough analysis of the data and provides a pretty severe indictment of Growth Managment as a driver of volatile housing prices. H...

The latest Building Industry Association of Washington newsletter has statistics of building permit activity in 2009.  Brett Lamar, of Lake Chelan Building Supply, pointed out some of the information you might find most interesting: I got my latest copy of the BIAW news letter today.  In the very...

For the third quarter, 52 homes were sold in the Lake Chelan area as compared with 35 in 2008.  That is still well below the levels of 2005 to 2007 which were all around 75 transactions for the third quarter.  But, things really ground to a halt in the fall of 2008 so I will go out on a limb and ...

The IRS will no longer allow a property owner to deduct the value of a building donated to the fire department for training.  Such donations have been a common way for the fire districts in the Lake Chelan area to train their firefighters.  This removes any financial incentive for those donations...

I spent some time on spreadsheets today looking at waterfront home sales.  If you are a buyer of waterfront property at Lake Chelan, you could make it easier to tell what is going on.  Buy MORE waterfront property and buy things similar to what was bought last year  The low number of sales and va...

In a post in Newgeography, the racial aspect of urban planning was examined.  The standard examples of urban areas that top the progressive  lists of media, academia and planning circles are Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New...