Whenever a month’s Olympia real estate activity ends on a Friday, the number-gatherers close up shop knowing there will be a longer than usual lapse until they can be sure of the Olympia real estate activity statistics.That creates a breather for those of us who keep abreast of Washington and Olympia real estate. It’s a perfect opening to turn to real estate doings around the country—to see what noteworthy happenings took place in the last month or so. September 2016 did produce a few news items—these three rate at least a quick glance (or a double-take).The lead item is one that rates a triple-take: it concerns a storage barn that sold for $1,800,000. Built in Little Compton, Rhode Island, the structure was originally erected as a storage barn by the Army in WWII. It was converted in... 10/06/2016

  You can find how-to books with strategies laying out do-it-yourself strategies for transforming a property into a “luxury” home. Likewise, there are scads of online lists of imaginative touches that imply they will do the same.The idea is certainly appealing (but so is anti-gravity and time travel). But of course, the fact is that authentic luxury doesn’t come cheap. A significant portion of the qualities of Olympia luxury homes distinctions are intractable: in Olympia, they involve a home’s location, size, and the architectural features of the overall facility. For instance, most upscale Olympia luxury homes have a spacious living room; today, many feature an inviting area set aside for viewing a gargantuan wall-mounted flat screen TV. That’s a plus—but those with separate, professio... 10/04/2016

   When you go house hunting in Olympia, you’re likely to share a lot of the same basic assumptions that most everybody does. Whether you have a lengthy list of hard-and-fast requirements or are in more of a “just seeing what’s out there” mindset, you’re probably assuming that you’ll “know it when you see it.” That’s not necessarily true—for a couple of logical reasons.First off, unless price is literally no object, your budget will dictate the segment of current Olympia listings that your house hunting will include. Among those candidate properties, it’s unlikely that all of them share the same features—the same positives and less-than-positives. You may find that you really get a great feeling about one home, only upon reflection to realize that some of its drawbacks are serious enoug... 10/02/2016

Search current inventory of Waterfront Homes for Sale in Olympia WashingtonListing DetailsWaterfront Homes For Sale in Olympia Washington7434 Puget Beach Road, Olympia WA, 98516Price: $1,499,997.00MLS number: 1019541Bedrooms: 5Bathrooms: 4.5Square Footage: 5584Call Wes Neal at 360-402-8130 to see if this property is still available and arrange a showing. You Will Love the Views of Sound & Mount Rainier from this Brick Cape Cod HomeWonderful opportunity to own a lovely home in the Olympia area. This waterfront home is truly an absolute paradise, with an old world charm, pristine salt water beach fronts around and a sweeping sound and Mount Rainier view throughout. The decks & the private boat house  makes you feel relaxed and entertained. Not to mention that this is a 3 level home with 3... 09/29/2016

3217 Horse Haven St SE, Olympia 98501 Beautiful 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath home in Chambers Creek Crossing. This home has recently been upgraded with new granite counter tops throughout, new tile in the kitchen and main bath and new kitchen cabinets. Carpet throughout the main floor. It has an open floor plan with plenty of room to entertain and a stunning river rock fireplace as the centerpiece. It is equipped with A/C to keep you cool in the summer. The backyard is fully fenced. It is located in the award winning Olympia school district  Gail Smith (360) 561-0852The Ben Kinney TeamKeller Williams Western Realty  09/29/2016

 5213 81st Ave, Olympia 98512 This is a spacious 4 bedroom, 2 bath home with a living room as well as a family room. Both open to the kitchen and dining area. Master bedroom is at the opposite end of the house from other 3 bedrooms. Fully fenced back yard and it sits on the corner lot of a dead end road. Quiet neighborhood, community has a private beach front access on Black Lake with a swimming pool, clubhouse, boat launch and play area.  Gail Smith(360) 561-0852Keller Williams Western Realty  (360) 561-0852 09/25/2016

   First, a word about these Things to Avoid when you’re in the process of buying a Olympia house: it’s a short list.The reason it’s so short is because of who you are—since you’re reading this, it means you’re someone who is taking the time to delve into what’s happening with Olympia real estate. That makes it unlikely that you will fall into any of the common-sense pitfalls that populate typical Top 10 Pitfalls lists. Most of them are pretty obvious to anyone who pays attention.Less obvious are these three. These touch on areas which can be overlooked when time is short, or emotions are high—or the Olympia house is just so darned attractive you can’t wait to pull the trigger:             Perfect house: no need to inspect! So sooooo wrong: the cost of an inspection in both time and mon... 09/23/2016

 Spring cleaning season remains the time of year for Olympia’s most rigorous home improvement efforts, but fall is also an opportune time to dig into some preventive home maintenance chores. Homes that get their owners’ attention on a regular basis don’t just hold more of their value with less expense—they also add some extra value: peace of mind.These six top-level maintenance tasks may consume a weekend day or two, but will ultimately pay off by eliminating preventable deterioration:               If your Olympia roof has gutters, now is a time to clear them. It’s only “a” time because there should be a second round. After fall winds have deposited nature’s bounty of tree leaves and pine needles and everything else that could possibly pile up in them, it will be time to do a final cle... 09/19/2016

Good news for residents of Olympia WA - our local Providence St. Peter Hospital was ranked #3 out of all the hospitals in Washington State by US News and World Report. And they ranked High Performing in eight specialties: Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Repair COPD Colon Cancer Surgery Heart Bypass Surgery Heart Failure Hip Replacement Knee Replacement Lung Cancer Surgery In this evaluation, US News and World Report looked at 4,667 hospitals around the country.  The evaluation was based on four elements:  reputation, patient survival, patient safety and care-related factors such as nurse staffing.From my own perspective and as a resident of Olympia, this doesn't surprise me. When my mom needed medical care, I was truly impressed with the quality of health care.  Coming from a larger city, I w... 09/15/2016

  Ever tried to pin down the most popular house style in the U.S.? Turns out—you can’t.Last week it almost seemed as if the answer was at hand. Olympia readers could have come across the ad link that promised to reveal “The Most Popular House Styles.” The come-hither promise read, “Browse our photo gallery for the most popular housing styles and types in America.”The most likely reason for clicking would have been for Olympia homeowners to find out how popular their own home’s style is considered to be. If it’s the Most Popular of all, when it came time to sell, herds of popularity-seeking American buyers could come rushing over for a showing! If that were the goal, the first mouse click would have dashed the hope, for it showed a photo of an unadorned two-windowed center-chimneyed home... 09/14/2016

   The legendary figure of The Wanderer has different connotations in different cultures. English teachers in Olympia high school classrooms have always taught some of the most famous parts of Homer’s Odyssey—the heroic story of Ulysses, the most famous wanderer. Ulysses wandered in and out of a lot of trouble…Planets are wanderers, too. During ancient night times, ancient shepherds looked up and watched them meandering restlessly among the stars, so they called them planets (“wanderers”). Dion (of Dion and the Belmonts) was the most celebrated wanderer of the 60s—at least his hit song claimed that he roamed “around around around around”).In today’s Olympia culture, though, wandering is a lot less glamorous than it’s been through most of history. A modern definition includes the bit abo... 09/11/2016

  Whenever you’re in the planning stages for your next Olympia real estate venture, the best available Olympia mortgage rate is a number you look for. Whether you are thinking of a purchase of a new Olympia home or simply refinancing your existing property, that rate determines how much you will pay each month.You would think that getting a good idea of what that number is should be pretty easy. Certainly you would be encouraged by what you find on the web. That number—the mortgage rate—is available online almost everywhere you turn. It’s in TV ads. It’s on the radio. It’s almost looking for you.But as everyone soon learns, those numbers aren’t exactly the ones that you need. What appears in the ads and pop-ups isn’t necessarily that number (if by “that number” you mean the mortgage rat... 09/03/2016

  It was tucked away in a backwater of The Wall Street Journal’s online Design tab, which is actually just a sub-section of their Real Estate section. “The Rise of the Colorful Bathroom” was like a conceptual hand grenade tossed into the placid lagoon of home decor orthodoxy.As far as design insights likely to affect Olympia’s home resale market, the pointers found in Design lately haven’t been particularly noteworthy. Earlier this month, there had been a piece about metal versions of “The Classic Peacock Chair.” That might have had some impact in Rangoon, but here in Olympia, where peacock chairs are few and far in between, it scarcely ruffled a feather. Similarly, there had appeared “A Décor Lesson in Subtle Patriotism” with marginally subtle red, white and blue illustrations—but espe... 08/31/2016

  The “5-Year Rule” as it applies to Olympia homes listed for sale is a pretty good one, as far as real estate rules-of-thumb go. It’s part of the family of truisms that have been around long enough that you’d figure they have to be reliable—like the rule that you should plan on maintenance costing 1% of a listed home’s selling price per year; or the one the government often quotes that housing costs should be no more than 30% of income.The 5-Year Rule has it that if you don’t know you will remain in a new home for at least 5 years, you’d be better off not buying. The reasons are the oft-cited dollars and cents issues. In addition to the closing costs, commissions, and costs of moving your household, emotional issues are often cited: as in the familiar “moving is one of the most stressf... 08/30/2016

  When the name “Deloitte” is attached to futuristic predictions about any kind of industrial matters, most Olympia readers grow less skeptical than would otherwise be the case. After all, Deloitte’s quarter-million financial services professionals earn their keep by accurately advising enterprises worldwide on which way the commercial wind is going to be blowing five, ten, or 20 years hence. The folks in charge of the worldwide enterprises are keen that their capital expenditure planning won’t look stupid five, ten, or 20 years hence.So when a Deloitte Center for Financial Services blog describes the excitement a typical child will display when, in 2030, he’s about to “take his first trip to the moon”—well, that’s a blog that’s bound to get any Olympia readers’ attention. It got mine b... 08/26/2016

    If you keep track of the ebb and flow of U.S. economic news, you might also be aware of how it relates to some things that happen here. Particularly in the way Olympia’s mortgage rates have been responding to the ups and downs of announcements from Washington, the cause and effect relationship has settled into a fairly predictable tango. The week of August 10 was no exception, with a dip from afar leading to some more good news here.The less-than-buoyant news from Washington came in the form of what CNBC called a “weak” Gross Domestic Product reading for the second quarter. That news caused a drop in mortgage interest rates, which triggered an increase in home purchase applications (now 13% higher than a year ago) and a 10% increase in refinance activity from the previous week. Any ... 08/22/2016

   If you happened upon the Weather Channel’s site last week and were greeted with headlines like, “Massive Heat Dome Inbound” and “Excessive Heat in the East and West,” it could have let you feel better about Olympia’s own weather. After all, what do you expect from August in Olympia? At least we weren’t under a massive heat dome… (or were we)?The fact is, no matter how uncomfortable the warmup was here, the Weather Channel reported that “Russia and the Southern Ocean” reportedly had the worst of it. In Russia, fires were said to have broken out because of the heat spell. An anthrax outbreak was blamed on it. Since the “Southern Ocean” isn’t a country, it complained less than Russia. And with no anthrax at all, we here in Olympia should probably count our blessings.When it comes to hol... 08/18/2016

  Sometimes the experts who project trends in residential housing and real estate find that they have to correct their predictions. Once the final statistics are in, if they consistently reveal errors as wide of the mark as 50%, it’s just embarrassing. Such was recently the case with Harvard’s LIRA remodeling project—and for those of us who represent buyers and sellers in the Olympia home market, the resulting revisions were meaningful.Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ statistical barometer for home improvement activity is known as “LIRA”—its Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity. And as their research analyst Abbe Will wrote recently, it had become evident that “the quality and reliability of the LIRA’s benchmark data series declined markedly.”When your benchmarks are no l... 08/14/2016

 If you are a house hunter who isn’t reluctant to dig in and roll up your sleeves, it could be worth your while to take a look at Olympia “bank-owned” offerings. Deciding to do that is less popular than you’d think.Bank-owned is a word that can summon up all sorts of negative connotations, causing even people who usually think of themselves as unemotional to hang back. Like “REO” (short for real estate-owned, a synonym for bank-owned), it is applied to Olympia homes whose ownership has been reclaimed by the lender. Foreclosures and real estate auctions that follow are never jolly circumstances, so many don’t even consider looking at the subject residences.It is partly because of the inauspicious histories that such properties can carry with them that the majority of Olympia home seekers... 08/10/2016

Rio isn’t the only place where Olympic records will broken; our “Olympian,” WA real estate market continues to deliver a gold medal performance!  The Gold goes to……..Pending Sales.  Pending home sales in April through June achieved levels never before seen in our market.  Each month had more than 600 sales with an average of 618.  The previous best for any of those months was set in May 2015, when we had 545 sales.      The Silver goes to……Home Prices.  Homes prices are nearly back to top levels with prices up 10.7% over the past year.  The Bronze goes to…...Days on Market.  With more buyers than sellers, buyers are acting faster than ever in this competitive market.  Well-priced homes—those that did not require a price reduction before receiving an acceptable offer—are going under cont... 08/03/2016