SEATTLE AVENUE

If you follow national news you’ve undoubtedly heard the housing market is either a URB (unidentified real- estate bubble), hot as Hades, or crumbling into a powdery mess. Well let’s not panic, well, unless you own property in Detroit maybe. There is a national slow down and there are a few geographic pockets showing swings; however, locally the latest numbers continue to support my prediction of a soft landing to the real estate boom in this area.

There’s an increase in available inventory and this will no doubt lead to a slow down in price increases and appreciation, but if you’re waiting for an astronomical correction, I don’t see that happening. The outlook on job growth and continued low interest rates suggest we’re far from crashing.

With Boeing more robust than it has been in a long time and Microsoft adding 20,000 new jobs in the next five years, our real estate market and local economy are doing great. To boot, Boeing and Microsoft success and the impact on the economy can’t only be measured simply by their internal growth. We must also look at the jobs created externally. With the increase in internal employees they will also be adding many contractors, small suppliers, new companies and employees that support the new jobs such as Bankers, Real Estate Agents, restaurants, retail, auto dealerships, builders, and such. The impact could mean hundreds of thousands of new jobs in our economy in the next five years.