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Contributors
Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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Home prices in the Puget Sound area continue to decline, according to a national home price tracking index.
The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index released Tuesday said prices were down 16.6 percent in May from year-earlier prices and down 0.3 percent from April.
Meanwhile much of the rest of the country showed signs of stabilization. Home prices in May increased for the first time since the summer of 2006, according to the index. Prices rose from April in 13 of the cities that make up the index.
The 20-city home price index rose 0.5 percent from April to a reading of 139.8, but was still 17.1 percent below the reading of 168.6 in May a year ago. It was the fourth consecutive month the index indicated prices have turned the corner and are heading back toward positive territory, according to The Associated Press.
In the Puget Sound area, prices fell for 12 of the last 13 months. In April, the index showed a slight uptick. This area tends to lag the rest of the country. We entered the recession after most other states and likely will exit it after them as well.
More from AP: The news follows upbeat reports showing sales of newly built and existing homes rose in June for the third straight month. And new home construction, while still weak, is the best it’s been since the fall.
The 20-city index has lost more than 32 percent since its peak reading of 206.52 three years ago. That means home prices are back to mid-2003 levels.
The Case-Shiller index measures home price increases and decreases relative to prices in January 2000. The base reading is 100; so a reading of 150 would mean that home prices increased 50 percent since the beginning of the index.
Here's more from my q-and-a with Tully's CEO Carl Pennington, which ran in this morning's paper.
Starbucks has taken a few of their stores and rebranded them so they're named after the neighborhood, instead of the chain. What do you make of that?
I think it's a great idea. I'm really impressed with what they've done on that. It's good neighborhood marketing, and I think it's excellent.
Is this something that Tulley's would ever think of doing?
We like to think now, we try to do that now. When Tom started the company in '92, I think he was looking at some of that. If you go out and look at our stores, we've got different – we've got in-town city stores and the outside metropolitan stores, so I think we've done a lot of that. Tully’s has always been committed to the neighborhoods we share with our customers. In Tacoma, each store is different and meant to reflect the individuality of the neighborhood.
Without having to remove the logo.
Is Starbucks removing their logo? I'm not certain on that. ... We did some of that when I was at Albertsons. When we opened a store we'd use the street name but we never ever took our name off of it.
