For those of you too young or cultured to get that reference, don’t worry. It’s not germane to what we’re going to discuss here…Seattle real estate.

This holiday season I was talking about my view of where Seattle real estate prices were headed. Specifically, I was discussing West Seattle real estate, but my views can be used interchangeably for pretty much any moderately desirable Seattle neighborhood.

In a nutshell, even though the prices had come down a bit, I think Seattle real estate still needs to be HALVED to be considered a ‘good deal’ (by my standards).

To be perfectly clear, I actually meant that as of Christmas 2010, the prices needed to be chopped in half still.  And, to be perfectly honest, I just said, “HALF” cuz it was a nice round number, a little bit shocking, and easy to keep track of.  I might be interested at a 35 or 40 percent reduction as well…depending entirely on the property and the situation of course.

Rather than get into the ‘why’ (that will be several LONG posts) I just want to start looking at prices.

Before we get started, we can agree that prices PAID are the only prices that define the real market.  Unfortunately, with my tools, even paid prices are soiled, in that, prices paid by banks taking homes back through foreclosure sales are recorded as a sale and a price.

So, for now, I’m just going to start my investigation of prices by looking at the WISHING PRICES (asking prices) of different properties that haven’t moved yet….with the assumption that the market that clears these properties is either at or below these levels (for now — until we start seeing multiple bids over ask on properties again).

In West Seattle, there are 101 single family houses that have had their prices reduced in the last 30 days. Generally speaking, the further south (and east), the more aggressive the price cutting so far.  This follows the general pattern elsewhere that as the bubble has played out, prime areas go last.

Let’s look at a few:

West Seattle Property Price Reduction #1 (follow the link to see the complete Redfin listing)

Price History:

I’ll grant you this property looks anything but “PRIME” but lets do a little digging and cypherin’ here.  It sold in 89, for $45k, then again, 8 years later for more than 3x that price.  It’s unknown if it was updated or rebuilt between those two transactions, but for our purposes (it just so happens) that 1997 prices are about what I consider FAIR these days (in most cases).  With that in mind, let’s continue…

In the span of 9 years between my “fair” price of 166k, it goes to 386k when it is sold in June of 2006.

4.5 years later the bank forecloses on the property for 328,500 (presumably the unpaid portion of the 1st mortgage on the property).

The bank takes Christmas and another month to ensure that they’ve evicted any former home-loaners (and varmits hopefully) and put it on the market a month later for 324,900 — kind of them to whack a whopping 3,600 off their price.  Wow.  1.09% reduction.  Only 48.91% more to go to get me interested!

After 18 days of no takers, the bank wises up and reduces the price to $309,900

That’s a 15k reduction. $833.33 for each day you don’t buy and put up with the indignity of not being able to paint the walls in your rental.

20 days later, another $15k.

Another 18 days, another $10k.

At this point, the asking price is a full 43,600 below the price from Christmastime 2010.

That’s a 13.27% reduction, and what I would call, “A START”

I imagine that even with continued disinterest in this property the price reductions will slow since the quarterly reduction of 13.27% is a 43.5% reduction when annualized (1-13.27% to the fourth power).

As the real estate crash has hit other regions, it typically moves from the bad neighborhoods, and works its way into the better ones, so by way of comparison I decide to check out my old hometown, Longview, WA.

Before I get to the killer listing I found however, I need to share an enormous amount of background with those of you unfamiliar with Longview, WA — and those of you who’ve repressed the memories.

While it’s true that Longview has some nice older/established neighborhoods with tree lined streets and some McMansion developments in the hills that overlook this gritty industrial town, there are also some very modest blue collar dwellings built around the paper mills in the late 20’s (when the town was founded) and into the  30’s, 40’s and 50’s to house the growing population which was brought in to work in the timber and paper industry.

The planned community was built with a very distinct blue collar neighborhood, and a very distinct white collar neighborhood.  As the mills have fallen on hard times financially, the blue collar neighborhoods have turned into a section 8, welfare, meth-riddled, sketchy area of town (for the most part) with pockets of young families desperate for affordable housing attempting gentrification in certain pockets.

The town has two middle schools & two high schools, and two little leagues (baseball) for the kids roughly drawn between the old/sketchy part of town and the newer/shiny more expensive homes (with a few exceptions for some more rural kids).  My home and fate would find me on the border of those two worlds, but marginally in the ’sketchy’ middle school & high school, and more importantly (for this story) within the sketchy little league.

I was perhaps the least gifted little league player in modern history and my career spanned one full season (at the age of 10), but I remember it well….that far north, early season games were often scheduled to allow parents to attend.  While kids, struggling to find the strikezone would ‘walk’ the bases full, and subsequent runs would be forced in by additional wildness, the little league coaches were not keen on using relievers — perhaps because none of the other kids could do better (?)

Six inning games would become marathon events as 3rd and 4th graders milled about in the field waiting hours for their once a game chance to boot the ball and extend an inning for another 8 batters.

This far north, early season games would stretch well into twilight and a bike ride home through the ‘highlands’ (ironically the lowest part in town and some feet below sea level in many parts) would creep a kid like me out.

As I whisked past dilapidated clapboard depression era rental home after rental home, I would get especially creeped out feeling when passing by stretches of the ‘hood where no one had bothered to mow the lawn in months and the grass was growing chest high…I would start out riding casually trying to feign indifference, and as my adrenaline took over, I would be riding faster faster, lungs burning, until I reached the fringes of what I considered a ’safe’ neighborhood.

Sketchy characters with shockingly low tooth to tattoo ratios would sit on old sofas and upholstered chairs left out in the pacific northwest rain all winter, on their front porches, drinking Lucky Lager, Malt Liquor, or the occasional Rainier (for the very discerning tastes).

The occasional industrious soul would work on one of the muscle cars or broken down ford/chevy pickups parked in their front yard in the prerequisite wife-beater.

I imagined marginalized intoxicated pedophile drifters sitting in their yard watching all the kids stream by after a late game, like a so many bears watching a salmon run in a mountain stream.

It’s with that background that I found this fabulous deal.  For the sad day that link goes dead, I decided to embed a few pics:

Nice Curb Appeal, Huh?

I love the curb appeal of this place. In some weird way it reminds me of these places in South America where they are taxed based on what the assessor can see from the street. Everyone puts up these very dated, unpainted fronts (facades) to their home, hiding the opulence, luxury, and ‘old world charm’ within.

To get an idea of what the highlands was like in the late 70’s, imagine the whole house looking like the front. I love the description on this listing touting the ‘covered porch’…brings up visions of southern mansions, rocking chairs and mint juleps.

So, where is this gem located? Here is the view off of that front porch:

beautiful view of the baseball fields

Your typical ‘park-view’ home in Longview, WA .

I hope you enjoyed this post, and the definition of the true meaning of ‘Fubarrio’.

Well, I’ve had quite the lapse in posting anything on this blog.

I was looking at it this afternoon, and was amazing by how disorganized and chaotic this thing is.

Hilarious.

I *may* make an attempt to clean it up and categorize some things better.

I already heard from two of the three people that have seen this blog, that they were having a hard time making heads or tails of things up here.

In the meantime, here is a link to a hilarious article for your amusement.

Unmanned Wikileaks Drone Destroys Afghan Village

I have a negative bias going into the next week of trading, but it remains to be seen whether or not that will play out as predicted.

The EU’s bailout plan seems like a lot of bluff and talk so far and not a lot of action. They have however opted to carry out their market operations (buying of bonds on the market) in secret. So that has to have a lot of the speculative shorts spooked. You never know when the big bad boogeyman will swoop in with bags of your tax money to bankrupt you by manipulating the market in an ‘irrational’ manner. The initial reaction in the markets was of course a rocket shot in the Euro and the indices that track the eurozone equity complexes — and some tightening of blow out bond spreads, but the luster seems to be wearing off of that polished turd already.

In other news, gold is trading at an all time high in electronic trading after hours after closing at 1220 in the pits. Of course this will probably get it a mention in even the mainstream news sources and it’s rapidly moving back to a page 2 or page 3 story.

I’ve been a big believer in deflation and something that is called the ‘priceless dollar theory’ — or at least a variation of it. That said, I’ve been telling people privately for at least 6 months that I thought the dollar AND gold could perform quite well at the same time given what is going on. That’s obviously played out — but there may actually still be more room to the upside for both. We’ll just have to see just how far the Fed is willing to go to defend the euro (and likewise debase the usd).

Back to Greece for a second: it’s been reported that there will be more riots, er, i mean demonstrations tomorrow. This HAS to be factored into the markets already, right? right? Well, we’ll see.

So, this is not financial advice, cuz I’m not qualified to do that sorta thing. But, I would suggest that all long term investor types (the buy and hold stocks, not traders) calmly get out of the water at this point. We just saw some people get sucked under, and I think I saw a fin circling the wading pool.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

He’s an AUDITOR for a local UNIVERSITY….so first off, his employment solid, and second off he should have KNOWN better that he was taking a risk with buying his house.

One’s left to wonder what kind of self-importance these clowns would have if their prices had doubled. That said, walking away in a non-recourse state when you’re dramatically underwater is in almost every case the right thing to do

If the S&P can’t bounce up to the 1150ish area by the close, all eyes will be on 1105.

Ok, that got a lot crazier than even I thought it would today. As you can see from a cursory view of the news or my post above, the S&P sliced though 1150, dissected 1105 and plunged to 1065 in a wink before finally rebounding up to 1127 to close.

The amount of violence and the % moves were enough to rip your head off if you were playing with any leverage, and the moves in the forex market were even more outrageous.

See my post up above for more…

The recent fubars in Greece and the EU’s predictable response is as good a catalyst as any to get back into the swing of things.

Today looks like it might get interesting.

More commentary at the close.

so, why embed this piece of art in my blog?  so next time i want to see some brilliance, i don’t have to go searching on youtube for it of course! enjoy.

It was published in 2009, and I guess the reason I hadn’t really been exposed to it is because I’ve been down here.

Neil is/was a writer for Rolling Stone and the New York Times and details his personal journey from a timid, shy, inept, city slicker who laughs at the ‘end of the world’ crowd in 1999 at the turn of the millennium into a full-fledged doom and gloomer, tin foil hat wearing, chicken little and how and why he got that way.

His metamorphosis takes place over a period of nearly 10 years and all the while he is either taking meticulous notes and photos with the intent on writing this book, he has a fantastic memory and is a shutter bug or he recreated everything in excruciating (often very humorous) detail once he had talked his publisher into doing the book.

He learns how to hunt, fish, track, fight, live off the land, urban evasion, stunt driving, etc. etc. etc. He travels to special schools setup to train wilderness nuts and military men and turns his Los Angeles backyard into a training ground for outdoorsmanship- much to the dismay of his girlfriend, and his neighbors I’m sure.

All the while he is working on a “bug out” plan where he just gets “out of dodge” and expatriates to a small Caribbean island called St Kitts or St Kitts and Nevis fame.

Second Passport

Along with an offshore bank account, his pursuit of a second passport seems to be one of the costliest extravagances in his disaster preparedness plans and the one probably furthest out of reach of his average reader. After searching far and wide, including brushes with the Sovereign Society at their annual gathering at an offshore conference in Mexico, he runs into a guy from St Kitts who convinces him that the real estate investment exemption — put in place supposedly to help to support the islands’ displaced sugar cane workers — is the way to go.

This was back during the real estate boom, so apparently pulling a cool 300,000 out of a Los Angeles area home was no big ‘to-do’ to pay for the condo in St Kitts.

Even at that, he’s a year and a half into paying for the real estate and the outrageously expensive legal bill — some 60k plus and he still doesn’t have his passport yet, although with 50 pages left in the book he is told by a swarmy lawyer that makes him very nervous he is being scammed that he has been approved.

Second passports in Uruguay are pretty common as many of the locals here have ancestry somewhere in the EU they can trace back to and many of them carry EU passports from Germany, Italy, and Spain. There is also a lot of interest in second passports for the expats who are here as an Uruguayan passport will let them travel visa free to a number of countries — especially in south america — that would have been previously costly to enter. In addition, there is also the desire to obtain a second passport in order to thumb their nose at the US for good, or just to give them a ‘just in case’ plan if things continue to deteriorate between the US and the rest of the world on the diplomatic front.

A Bug Out Plans and Bug In Plans

Neil’s preparedness makes him classify a ‘bug out’ and a ‘bug in’ plan. First, he wants to be a prepared survivalist in case he is unable to get away to bug out retreat in the Caribbean. In addition, he is worried that a true global catastrophe will take down a small Caribbean island even faster than the US.

His bug out plan involves going to St Kitts with all manner of secondary thoughts put into his head by his wealthy survivalist friends — submarines, gyrocopters, pilot licenses, offroad military grade motorcycles for getting out of the city unscathed. He also decides to (eventually) work within the system and become a member of the civilian disaster preparedness teams and a qualified EMT.

He thinks first of all, it’s good training, and second of all, it will help him have the credentials he needs to get past roadblocks or other official inconveniences should he need to put his bug out plan to work.

Overall, this guy is a great writer. One should read the book for the chapter titles alone which have such intriguing title as “Tips on Death Cult Etiquette”

Just a great read and although he may have colored up some of the stories, a lot of the appeal is in how honest and up front most of this tell-all appears to be.

Some miss friends and family, some miss the traditions and the particularities of celebrating ‘back home”.  For me, it’s simply the dreading of trying to find appropriate gifts for friends and family when I am so far away and so out of touch.

Since Uruguay, in particular, makes so little that wouldn’t spoil in shipping, and we are so far away from friends and family the best gifts are those things that can be purchased, and shipped, online.  I also try to put some thought into the gift and not just send a default ‘gift card’.

Among those things that seemed to work, and were generally appreciated in the past, seemed to be movies and DVDs.  For example:

For a couple of years, I bought my parents a subscription to Netflix — the company that lets people in the US build up lists of movies they want to watch and the company sends DVDs via mail, you keep it for as long as you want, then return it via US post in a handy envelope that comes with your DVD.  Basically, DVDs delivered to your door — no late fees.  Yes, I realize if you haven’t been living under a rock or expatriated for the last 5 years you know what netflix is, but I have some international readers where this doesn’t exist – yet.

For a couple of years before this, I bought my parents DVD sets of popular TV shows that I’d enjoyed on cable, like the Sopranos.  They didn’t have HBO and I realized they probably never would and would certainly enjoy the series.  Fortunately, for the rest of the cable challenged world A&E released the Sopranos on basic cable, but the edited version seemed to cut some of the meat out of the story line — nudity was blurred out in the strip club which wasn’t so bad (you get the idea), but some scenes involving some of the more graphic violence, drug use, and colorful language (swearing, cursing, etc) actually effected some of the character development — and some of the edits taking out the swearing take out some of the comedy of the original edit.

For my boy, I bought him the complete set (at the time) of the Star Wars series (less episode 3).  He of course had already watched them in the theater, but loved them so much he could watch the DVDs over and over.  During some family viewing time with him I was subjected to the horror of jar-jar-binks in Episode I, but fortunately was quick enough to so some of my own post production edits by muting that obnoxious character each time he appeared on screen — to my son’s dismay.

For the last couple of holidays my immediate family has agreed that presents are for the children only, following a growing national trend I believe, however, I had some extended family and friends that I also wanted to find a gift for.

The two most challenging families (for me), included my Aunt & Uncle (and their immediate family — LOTS of cousins and nieces and nephews) and my friend who served as best man at my wedding.

The reason is, our immediate interests are so different.  As you have seen, fubarrio, is not one to shy away from talking about, writing or advocating

• Violence, be it graphic or gratuitous,
• Vulgarity – curse words, cussing, colorful language,
• Lewd Behaviour
• Adult Situations
• Sexual Content, or
• General Nastiness.

However, my Aunt, Uncle and their entire family are all Mormons.  They belong to the Church of Latter Day Saints. And, the best man at my wedding — well his whole family is very religious conservative Pentecostal Christians.  When I inevitably absent mindedly curse in front of them, I can see their ears curly up inside their heads.

Well, both of these families have been taught that exposing themselves and their families to R-rated — and even PG-13 rated films is bad for their spiritual energy….in short something to be avoided.

I remember hanging out with my friend and his wife in my boring hometown where there is nothing to do but rent videos on a Friday night.  We’d go to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video to rent film and looking at the stacks of DVDs….His wife would invariably recommend a light hearted comedy or family oriented PG film, while I was looking for some Drama, Suspense or Horror films which invariably contained content which was seen as “objectionable”.  She doesn’t even allow her kids to play a lot of what I consider pretty tame video games for the same reason.

So, in short, I was pretty certain that a DVD set of Deadwood wasn’t going to be all that much appreciated.

Family Films

So how about if I just buy these families a Disney DVD compilation or something — all the classics or the Pixar stuff (?)  My biggest concern was that given their interest in family friendly films, and the fact that they wouldn’t buy most of what Hollywood produced for the rest of us, the chances are they already had these movies and had watched them 100 times together.

Then, I had a flash of inspiration.  I’d heard that there were some people, Mormons I believe who had had a church elder explain as far back as the 1970’s that R-rated movies were generally something best to be avoided. (of course, the problem is, there are some really great movies — with great moral or historical lessons — that got branded with R Ratings for violence, nudity, adult situations, etc.)  Some of the really great movies that have a little bit of undesirable content include Glory &  Titanic.

Well, there was great demand from Conservative Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Families with Minors, Dentists (for their young patients), Teachers, Prison Wardens, and Religious Leaders for feature film quality content that had been “cleaned” or otherwise edited for content — like they do for broadcast television or on long flights — but in DVD form so you can watch when the family is ready to watch — Or, be able to deliver it on demand to your classroom, congregation, or passengers, or whatever.

Edited Movies

The demand created a cottage industry around selling and renting edited movies to this market thirsty for clean family-friendly films.  If I had been smart enough to do this several years ago there were still a couple of companies who where renting out edited DVDs with the Netflix model — where subscribers could choose a program to deliver them edited DVDs by mail and no late fees.

Unfortunately, a court case between Hollywood and companies who edited and sold or rented the DVDs had given the studios the power to put all these guys out of business.

There was a separate company that had created a DVD player, ClearPlay, that would take an original CD, as long as someone at ClearPlay had edited it and created a file in their library, and take out the naughty parts.  The problem was, to make this work you had to have a special player, a USB drive, a PC with a connection, and you had to pay a monthly subscription — basically forever.

If I got them ‘hooked’ on this service I’d be basically adding another bill to the monthly nut of these young families, or obligating me to continue paying their monthly — and the monthly nut was outside of my xmas budget for gift giving if I had to cover the whole year.

Edited DVDs

There used to be quite a few sites that sell Edited DVDs — or DVDs with the objectionable content removed, but most of these are out of business when you do google searches or have shifted their business model to selling “family friendly” previously viewed and reviewed and rated films.  Giving them membership with one of the companies like CleanFlicks which does the reviewing and recommendations seemed like a decent idea, but there was that monthly membership fee again.

I finally found a site that would allow me to buy online edited DVDs.  I could buy here and have them shipped to my friends and family.  I managed to catch one of their sales, liquidating some inventory.  I’m not sure if they are in danger of being put out of business as well, but I managed to snag some nice new releases of blockbuster films like the Spider Man Series, 3:10 to Yuma, and GI Joe, Star Trek, and Angels and Demons.

I know DVDs and movies just get consumed, but most of my family seemed to enjoy the gift of entertainment.  As it pertains to these edited movies, hopefully, they can appreciate and enjoy the relaxed family time of having a movie they can watch and enjoy without worrying about a gratuitous sex scene, or some profanity popping up in front of their five year old…”mommy, what does fubar stand for?”