Pierce County foreclosures are up in the past year, but February's numbers show something a little unexpected: They are down from the same month a year ago, from 467 to 422, according to Irvine real estate research firm RealtyTrac. (For the year ending in February, foreclosures in the county are up 51 percent over the previous 12 months.)

Maybe the tax man has been extra kind to homeowners this year. Yvonne Starks, vice president of counseling at Consumer Counseling Northwest in University Place, told me this Thursday afternoon: "A lot of time, people depend on their tax return to bail them out."

If your household earns $99,999 or more, you can afford a home costing between $270,000 and $359,996, according to an in-depth analysis of downtown Tacoma’s housing market. That’s assuming a 20 percent down payment and a mortgage at 7 percent interest, according to NewHomeTrends, which put together the stats as part of its study. I ran across the figures, which apply to Pierce County residents, while researching a story that ran Sunday on downtown condos.

One of the more interesting points comes out of those earning at least $150,000, the folks who can afford homes priced at $540,000 and up – a key price range because many of the newest condo projects include upscale units (cherry wood cabinets, granite counters, master bedroom suites, big water views) aimed at such a buyer. Just 5 percent of Pierce County households, according to the study, earns enough to afford such a piece of property.

Of course, just because the condos are built in Tacoma doesn't mean buyers will come from Pierce County. Real estate agents and people already living downtown say many of the newcomers hail from urban areas (San Francisco, Boston, Seattle) instead of other South Sound communities.

You can find the full report here.

If you hope to get your investment out of big remodel projects, here’s a look at some of what you could sink your cash into. Included are the cost and what percentage of the money you can expect to recoup, according to a report from Remodeling and Realtor magazines.

Small kitchen remodel ($19,366) – 106.4 percent
New sunroom ($55,813) – 70.6 percent
Home office remodel ($22,385) – 77.7 percent
Roof replacement ($17,060) – 88.9 percent
Remodeled bathroom ($14,889) – 103.2 percent
Master suite add on ($111,157) – 70.6 percent

For a full list of the projects, which include siding replacements, deck add ons and a breakdown between mid-range and upscale projects, go here(a link to a pdf of the list is at the bottom of the page).

I'm looking to talk to people who have experienced some impact from recent changes in home lending as banks pull back on high-risk loans (otherwise known as subprime lending). I’d like to find homeowners, prospective borrowers, real estate agents, loan officers or anyone else in the industry for a story I'm putting together for the weekend.

Call me at 253-597-8652 or email me.

Nationwide housing sales dropped in February following declines in January, according to an Associated Press story you can find here.

The numbers come courtesy of the Commerce Department, according to the story: The February decline followed an even larger 15.8 percent drop in sales in January, which had been the largest one-month plunge in 13 years. The back-to-back declines provided evidence that the housing market is continuing to struggle with lagging demand and a glut of unsold homes.

And a sentence from the story that brightens the local outlook:

All regions of the country except the West experienced weakness last month.

South Sound MLS numbers for March should be out next week.

Here’s some fodder for those who think housing prices have gone sky-high in the Tacoma area: A report by research firm Global Insight says Tacoma home prices were overvalued the last three months of 2006 by 38.2 percent. That’s higher than Seattle (31.7%), Bremerton (26.8%) or Olympia (31.4%).

“What you’re seeing is home prices going up faster than incomes,” said Jeannine Cataldi, senior economist at Global Insight.

Global Insight derives a value model for a certain area by looking at income levels, housing density and other factors, Cataldi said. The model value is then compared to actual sale prices, resulting in the percent an area’s prices are under or over valued.

Looking to try out an undervalued area? Check out Texas: Lubbock (-11.5%), Houston (-18.6) or San Antonio (-11.3%). Or New Orleans, which was undervalued by 38 percent, according to Global Insight.

And if you want to avoid even more overvalued areas of the country, skip California, where several cities bested Tacoma's overvaluation: Fresno (57%), Madera (71.6%), Santa Barbara (55.6%), Sacramento (41.2%), Stockton (62.2%) and Los Angeles (51.5%).

Here's a nationwide real estate perspective at U.S. News & World Report that asks this question: "Just how sick is the housing market? It's time to find out."

Donald Tomnitz, chief executive of D.R. Horton, which is building subdivisions in Fife, is quoted as saying this to an investor conference earlier this month:

"I don't want to be too sophisticated here, but '07 is going to suck, all 12 months of the calendar."

I'm told often that the South Sound real estate market nearly always bucks the national scene, but one point in the story got me wondering. It says a flattening of prices nationwide (median Pierce County prices were down from the previous month in January and up in February with a big jump in homes for sale) is causing move-up buyers to stay put. Anybody here sticking it out in a first home rather than buying a second and blaming it on a soft market?

A couple readers called or wrote after my story about the hundreds of new homes in Fife ran, complaining about traffic and the construction of houses on prime industrial/farm land.

Charles McDonald, a Fife resident for 49 years, had this to say:

New residents are getting a rude awakening to their new town. When the population of Fife was 500, we had 2 stores. An IGA and a Shop Rite. Now the population is about 5,000 and we have no store. Nice!!

Fife used to be a nice place to live. Would you like to live near a warehouse? How would you like to buy a brand new home, with a beautiful view of Mt. Rainier, and then 6 months later have a huge warehouse built and your view gone?

I wonder how others in and outside of Fife (lots drive through the city to get where they're going) feel about all the new subdivisions.

As expected, Rainforest Action Network members protested at a Bothell Quadrant Homes development this week. They chained themselves to the roof of a model home, resulting in two arrests, according to a release from the group.

Quadrant Homes is owned by Weyerhauser; the Rainforest Action Network says Quadrant uses Weyerhaeuser material culled from clear-cut logging on tribal land in Canada.

Weyerhaeuser spokesman Frank Mendizabal said earlier this week that the company doesn’t harvest logs from those forests but does buy logs from another timber company that does the logging. The protest followed talks this week between Weyerhaeuser and Rainforest Action Network.

Looking for a condo in downtown Tacoma? Could be a buyer’s market.

A sneak preview of a housing analysis commissioned by the City of Tacoma reveals just more than six to 15 months of supply from the Stadium District to the St. Helens neighborhood. Real estate experts say a seller's market for resale homes begins to shift to one favoring buyers at the six-month-supply point. But the six-month-mark doesn't necessarily apply to new construction, since developers are often pre-selling units not yet finished. J.J. McCament, a consultant on the city study, said condos tend to make the shift to a seller's market at the 12-month mark.

Here's a look at the amount of inventory per neighborhood, according to the study:
Stadium District: 6.2 months
St. Helens Neighborhood: 15 months
Mid Town, from S. 9th St. and S. 21st St. and A Street to S. I St.,: 8.4 months
Thea Foss Waterway: 14 months
South Downtown, from S. 21st St. to S. 27th St. and A Street to E. L St.: 14.8 months

Update: A story on the numbers ran Wednesday.

A closer look at the median home price in neighborhoods around the South Sound shows that the Gig Harbor area (including Purdy and Fox Island) appreciated very nicely in February -- 30.5 percent compared to the same month a year ago and a county increase of 12.5 percent, according to figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. (February's median home price in Gig Harbor was $423,500.) And talk about an apples to apples comparison: In February 2006, there were 72 homes sold in the Gig Harbor area. How many sold in Feb. 2007? 72.

University Place was not far behind, with 29 percent price appreciation year over year, from $286,000 to $368,813.

Some areas are seeing far fewer homes sold. Puyallup area sales slipped in February from 212 homes in the same month in 2006 to 166; Spanaway sales slipped from 72 to 60 and Parkland area sales decreased from 65 to 47.

If state Sen. Brian Weinstein, D-Mercer Island, gets his way, Washingtonians will get added protections by mid-2008 when buying a home. He’s pushing a Homeowner Bill of Rights that was approved today by the Senate (30-19) and heads to the House for a likely vote in April.

The building industry, however, opposes such legislation. “It’s one more thing that will raise the price of housing,” Mike Crowley, executive vice president of the Master Builders Association of Pierce County, said Thursday afternoon.

Weinstein says he wants to protect homeowners who have little to no recourse when a builder sells them a substandard product. “This bill gives the purchaser of a new home a warranty by law,” he said.

If approved by the Senate and signed by the governor, the new law would take effect in July 2008, Weinstein said.

Said Crowley: “We would be happy to sit down with a group of people over the next year and address concerns and see if there’s a way we can work together.”

You can find more info on the bill here.

Home buyers and those looking to refinance are taking out more loan applications despite the buzz surrounding subprime and interest-only mortgages, according to weekly figures released Wednesday by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Application volume increased 7.3 percent from last week, according to seasonally adjusted numbers from the association.

And here’s what the group had to say about mortgage rates: The average for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped to 6.04 percent (from 6.16 percent), with points increasing to 1.27 (from 1.05).

I wanted to let you all know that the first sentence from today's home price story was cut off in print and online.

It should have read:

Pierce County’s median home price hit a record high of $282,000 in February as sales activity cooled.

Followed by:

New figures released Wednesday by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service show more than 6,000 homes were for sale in February – an increase of 45 percent from the same month a year ago. The crush of listings hit elsewhere too, with double-digit percentage increases in all but two of the 19 counties tracked by the MLS.

The TNT was having major technical difficulties yesterday afternoon and into the evening, which also prevented me from posting to the blog. So while embarrassing and unfortunate, the story has been fixed online.

On top of Redfin’s correction last week: The Northwest Multiple Listing Service has corrected its year-end list price/sale price ratios.

Redfin spokeswoman Cynthia Pang said the MLS changed its numbers and then removed them altogether from its year-end report after Redfin, a Seattle company, crunched the stats and pointed out the MLS error. A spokeswoman for the MLS said by e-mail that corrections have been made to the report, available to MLS subscribers, though she wasn't sure if Redfin prompted them. (The corrected Pierce County ratio is 100.32 percent, with the sale price coming in at $270,812 compared to the list price of $269,950.)

“They’re not loving us,” said Redfin’s Pang. Pang said the MLS has also been getting complaints from real estate agents unhappy with what Redfin calls "Sweet Digs," an e-mail newsletter staffed by bloggers who write up details on houses listed for sale. My contact for the MLS didn't know if agents had been complaining or not about the Seattle company.

Coming Wednesday: Home-price numbers for February from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Last month showed Pierce County house prices (median of $272,500) continued to slip from last spring as condo prices (median of $224,000) gained.

I can’t make any predictions for what we'll find in Wednesday's February numbers, but I’d be interested in knowing yours.

Less than a week after a press release that drew lots of blog scrutiny for touting the superiority of its King County services, Redfin released a corrected press release today. Seattle-based Redfin offers online real estate services, including in Pierce County.

The release doesn't specify what's been corrected, but I could see that a few numbers were tweaked. The differences I picked up on (a commission refund changed from $14,134 to $14,080) were nominal. But I have a call into the company and will let you know if anything else significant was corrected.

Numbers released Thursday show the Tacoma metropolitan area ranked No. 16 in the country last year in home-price appreciation, higher than the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area (#18) and the Bremerton-Silverdale area (#20).

The figures come courtesy of the Office of Federal Housing, which bases the price-change averages on data from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Wenatchee, Longview and Mount Vernon-Anacortes also landed on the list, making Washington by far the most represented state.

Here's a look at the regions and their rate of appreciation in 2006 over 2005:
1. Bend, Or 21.39
2. Wenatchee 20.94
8. Mount Vernon-Anacortes 16.18
13. Miami 15.3
15. Salem 14.73
16. Tacoma 14.67
18. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett 14.5
20. Bremerton-Silverdale 14.4