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News Links: February 8

Lots of fun things to take a gander at over the last week.

My favorite is this article about the new Pac-Man street park in Capitol Hill.  It’s just a few blocks from where I keep my main desk, so I’ve been appreciating it since its installation.

Finding out that Seattle (actually, the greater Seattle Metro area) is ranked as the 6th best place to live in the U.S. is pretty great news, too.

The Seattle Bubble stat report for December‘s data is out and it confirms what we already know: inventory is even lower, prices are still going up, and that looks likely to be the case for some time.

 

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Bussing Broker: Week 21

This week has been super busy the good way.  Lots of time with clients, lots of time out and doing showings.  Today’s been the first day where things have been slow enough for me to get some time in at my desk, which I really need.  Nevertheless, I took some time to slip away for a short tour today.  I ducked out to three different condos in Capitol Hill.  They were all fairly near each other, and did a really great job of showing off the spread of options available in established condo buildings in the neighborhood.  It was a fun tour!

I’m a cook, so when I’m touring like this, I pay a lot of attention to how the kitchens are laid out.  This can wind up telling you a lot about a unit, too, since kitchens are both fairly expensive to update and also the most effective in terms of increasing a unit’s marketability.  People want modern kitchens, even when they generally favor a more vintage or historic look.

One of the units today managed to really impress me with its kitchen layout.  It was a small one bedroom in an older building – arched doorways, old hardwood floors, plastered walls.  It had an eat-in kitchen with a galley layout which means small but, if well done, extremely functional.  They crammed in a ton of cabinet space, and by choosing their appliances really carefully, got in a fridge/freezer unit and a dishwasher.  Both were small, but they were there.  I don’t normally wax on about a given property I see when I’m touring, but that impressed me enough I had to share.  Getting to see that was, on its own, enough to call today’s tour a win.

Location: Capitol Hill
Time: 45 minutes
Transit modes: Foot
Cost: $0
Cats petted: 0
Tea consumed: Assam Black Tea
Properties Viewed: 3