Seattle Housing Buzz

Buyers, sellers and real estate enthusiasts can now receive up-to-date sold property information via email. John L. Scott Real Estate, the first company to publish sold property data, has added a sold email feature.

Users can now easily keep track of Seattle’s housing activity. Whether you’re a buyer or seller you can sign-up to receive notification when a property has closed and at what price it sold for. Since the information comes directly from the NWMLS it’s the most up-to-date available.

To utilize the feature, sign up for a John L Scott’s Property Tracker account and create a search using the Interactive Map search option.

Related:
Improved search information on John L Scott
Neighborhood Wizard search feature

Tags: John L Scott, Seattle Real Estate

Apparently, the blogoshpere is getting heated, especially in our small Northwest neck of the woods. Recently, I found myself at the receiving end of another agent’s deceptive Google Adwords campaign.

In respects to blogging, my primary focus is The Seattle Condo Blog. The condo blog has risen to become one of the top condo websites in Seattle - it’s #1 in Google’s organic search results for a myriad of condo related keywords and receives the most visitor traffic (per Compete, Alexa and Quantcast metrics) among Seattle-based condo blogs and websites. And, the exclusive partnership with King5.com is a testament to the blog’s reputation. Admittedly, it’s a nice position to be in.

Well, it appears an agent with a competing condo blog got a little envious and started to play dirty. The agent bought Google Adwords with my name as the keyword search term as well as the title of the ads themselves. Thus, if someone googled my name, the other agent’s ads would show up on the right hand side of the page with my name. As users click on my name thinking they were going to my site, they were instead directed to the other agent’s site. Here’s a screen print:

When confronted the agent removed the ads. Of course, this agent claims no knowledge of this pathetic and unethical attempt to steal traffic and use my name to mislead the public. The agent blames the webmaster, who wouldn’t…but then the agent is closely related to the webmaster.

Our industry has a bad public image and it doesn’t help when a “respected” colleague resorts to this sort of tactic.

Tags: Seattle Real Estate

This isn’t housing news. But, it’ll likely impact employment in Seattle, so who knows. Locally-based Safeco Insurance is being sold to Liberty Mutual for $6 billion. As a former Safeco employee, I have to say this was expected with the sale of its long-time headquarters in the U-District and the campus in Redmond, significant reduction in staffing and poor performance results for most of the decade.

According to an AP report, Safeco shares shot up $21.02, or more than 46 percent, to $66.25, in morning trading on Wednesday. Dang, I sold my remaining Safeco shares two weeks ago!

More from the Seattle PI.

Well…not really lies. More of a mistake, but a serious one. The published March 2008 condo closed sales median price data for Areas 700, 701, 705, 710, 715 and 720, in the King County Breakout PDF are incorrect. The PDF is published by the NWMLS on its public site - www.nwrealestate.com and its member site. As a result, the reported condo sales figures for Seattle are skewed and have been republished incorrectly by local media.

I’ve reported the error and am waiting for the revised data.

Update: They actually sent me the corrected report fairly quickly. It doesn’t look like they’ve updated the public site yet, though.

Tags: NWMLS, Seattle Condos