BusinessWeek has compiled a list of 25 cities with houses you can buy and still furnish while affording dinner out now and then. Yes, they are far away and often located in smallish towns but perhaps alluring nonetheless. Many are well below Pierce County’s median home price, which in April was $274,950.

Here are some of the lower-priced locales with their median home prices, according to BusinessWeek and Sperling's BestPlaces in Portland:

Appleton, Wis.: $119,500
Evendale, Ohio: $259,900
Fargo, N.D.: $199,900
Green Bay, Wis.: $229,900
Noblesville, Ind.: $185,000
Waukesha, Wis.: $209,500
Wausau, Wis.: $149,900
West Lafayette, Ind.: $195,000
Wichita, Kan.: $127,900

Tempting?

Where lobster goes for $100 a pound, homes are selling and for huge prices. Have you been? It’s the Hamptons, that sought-after seaside collection of villages in New York.

The Associated Press story chronicling this real estate boomlet credits a hot stock market for the high-priced homes and lobster. (As a South Sound comparison, Maine lobsters were selling for $22.99 per pound this afternoon at Tacoma's Metropolitan Market.)

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) -- Forget window shopping the photos of million-dollar manses in the real estate shops on Southampton's Main Street. If you really want to know how the housing market in the Hamptons is faring as summer beckons, Steven Gaines suggests an unusual yardstick.

He says the best barometer of how people in the Hamptons are doing is the price of the lobster salad at the local gourmet shop in nearby Sagaponack. Right now, it's selling for $100 a pound.

"When you're spending $100 a pound for lobster salad, what's $15 million for a home?" says Gaines, a local author and aficionado of all things Hamptons.

With Wall Street booming and stock markets hitting record highs nearly every day, the real estate trade in the Hamptons couldn't be better. And money appears to be no obstacle.

Houses are routinely selling for $10 million to $15 million, and people don't think twice about shelling out $200,000 for a summer rental - that's Memorial Day to Labor Day.

=> Read more!

I see a good bit of real estate marketing that touts the proximity to one thing or another. Hospitals and parks seem to be clear winners. Then you start getting into certain restaurants, YMCAs, busy roads.

And what about retailers that could very well turn off some buyers. whether it’s because they don’t need a twice-weekly trip to Costco or the congestion that comes with it. Or maybe a buyer just doesn’t like Wal-Mart.

Here’s a sampling:
• Minutes from shopping, the YMCA, Costco, and the new hospital.
• Road extension from the Wal-Mart down to cross street makes it very fast and easy to get to Meridian, Wal-Mart, shopping and the new Applebee's.
• Close to shopping and town, freeway. New Costco and future YMCA coming close by.
• Enjoy the privacy of a gated community--and proximity to I-5, Costco and South Hill Mall.
• Near Wal-Mart, schools, buslines.
• Close to shopping: Fred Meyer shopping center, the new Wal-Mart, and Winco is coming soon!!

Is it risky to play up the proximity to any one thing? Or does such marketing appeal to the kind of buyer who would be looking in a typically more suburban area already?

(This is usually a Monday feature, but I figured you were all barbecuing and water skiing yesterday so decided to do it today instead.)

Attorneys are scheduled to be back in front of a City of Tacoma hearing examiner Tuesday at 9 a.m., sparring over a rejected application to close Northeast Tacoma’s North Shore Golf Course and build more than 800 houses.

The hearing -- an appeal of the city's finding that the application was incomplete -- had to be continued after it ran past its allotted two days last week. Called The Point at Northshore, the project has been criticized by residents worried about the potential for crowded streets and whether putting homes on the course will hurt their property values.

The city has yet to call some of its witnesses and both sides will give closing arguments. If it’s needed, a fourth hearing day has been scheduled for Wednesday.

A decision on the appeal is expected in a number of weeks.

Builders, developers, real estate agents and government folks got a series of housing pep talks Thursday morning: You can build green. Be brave. If Coeur d’Alene can go urban, so can you.

All were gathered at a Tacoma forum put on by the Master Builders Association of Pierce County.

Said Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research: “My bottom line is we don’t want to panic. We need to be brave. Real estate markets will see some softness, but they’re not going to disintegrate.”

Look for more on the forum in tomorrow’s News Tribune.

With the first homes at Cascadia more than a year away, many details on the makeup of the massive housing-biz park-golf course-retail development have yet to be filled in. But I got a few this afternoon on a dirt-road tour of the property with Chuck Lappenbusch, director of development for Cascadia Development Corp.

Model homes should be open next spring with houses ready for move-in by September 2008. Three builders – Centex Homes, Shea Homes and Bennett Homes – have bought the first 500 or so lots. And though Lappenbusch wasn’t sure about pricing, he said homes on lots with views of both Mt. Rainier and the Olympics would likely go for between $500,000 and $700,000, if sold today.

Being planned since 1999, Cascadia is expected to be complete in 20 years with more than 6,000 places to live, 9,000 jobs and 1,200 acres of parks. It’s located south of Bonney Lake on the plateau above Orting.

Expect at least some of the houses to be close together and condos and town homes to be part of the later mix. Original plans, Lappenbusch said, were for four units per acre but that has since grown to an average of six per acre.

Lappenbusch showed off efforts to make the development friendly to the eye – a major road that aligns with Mt. Rainier and buffers of trees that shield the view of homes from the valley below.

When asked about whether the slowing housing market is of concern, Lappenbusch said: “In the Puget Sound region, relative to other parts of the country, we’re doing pretty good.”

What it looks like now.

I discovered a new Web site today, after seeing it plugged at Rain City, that pits condo project against condo project on just about every stat you’d want to see. It’s called CondoCompare.

Here’s how it works: You select two or three condo buildings, hit "compare" and up pops a list that includes the low, high and average price per unit, price per square foot, number of listings, etc. It also breaks down pricing by number of bedrooms per unit and the size of the condos.

I don’t know how comprehensive the listings are, but when I searched Pierce County I got 175 buildings, though I was only given the first 35 to view, because my search was too broad.

According to the CondoCompare site, the company’s based in Seattle. And it's not all about handing out handy stats. Besides the listings, the site says CondoCompare has agents ready to chat online or meet you in as little as 30 minutes should you want to buy or sell.

Like the overall housing market in Pierce County, condo price appreciation slowed in April, according to the monthly Northwest Multiple Listing Service numbers.

April's median price for condominiums climbed 3.5 percent to $228,500 (it was 4.8 percent in March) over the same month a year ago, compared to a 3.2 percent gain for houses and condos combined.

Some nearby counties out shined Pierce, to say the least. Here are some more condominium price numbers:

King: Up 19 percent to $295,000
Snohomish: Up 21 percent to $242,500
Kitsap: Up 86 percent to $300,750

And while condo appreciation was lagging here, listings skyrocketed. Here are the increases and number of condos, by county:

Pierce: 114 percent to 804
King: 74 percent to 2,221
Snohomish: 89 percent to 712
Kitsap: 30 percent to 263

Every now and then you’ll find a South Sound home with a flaky exterior and sweet, creamy middle. These are what are advertised as “cream puffs.”

Look today and you’ll find one in Puyallup, Tacoma and Auburn. A sampling: "This one is a creampuff! A must see!" These three range in price from $174,999 to $299,950.

While I can appreciate the desire for creative language that makes a listing stand out, I’m not sure what image I’m supposed to take from the “cream puffs.” A synonym for sweet or adorable? Maybe. One of these homes, however, did not rate very high on the attractiveness scale from the outside, at least according to the pictures.

Any thoughts?

Seattle’s Redfin is discontinuing reviews of properties on its Sweet Digs blog that for months were posted online and sent via e-mail.

The Northwest Multiple Listing Service apparently wasn’t a fan and after months of talks fined Redfin $50,000. According to a Redfin press release, the MLS says the reviews “violated its regulations against advertising other brokers’ listings.”

Redfin spokeswoman Cynthia Pang said the company will contest the fine: “50,000 to Redfin is a lot of money. We’re a start up. Every dollar counts.”

All this comes on the heels of Redfin's big Sunday splash on “60 Minutes,” which riled real estate agents for championing the online discount model over traditional home sales.

No word yet from the MLS, which I called this afternoon.

Devona is down at city hall listening to the hearing on a proposed housing development on the North Shore Golf Course.

This is what she reports:

Today's North Shore Golf Course hearing got off to a slow start this morning after it was discovered that a key witness was missing: Peter Katich, land use administrator.

City of Tacoma staff said Katich was unavailable, though he was on the witness list. So hearing examiner pro-tem Philip W. Dufford issued a verbal subpoena at 9:20 a.m. requiring he testify. Twenty-five minutes later, Katich was in council chambers.

"I did not know that I was expected to be here to testify today. I typically don't on these matters," Katich said, after he arrived.

By noon, Katich was still fielding questions from Aaron Laing, attorney for Northshore Investors LLC.

Look for a roundup of the hearing, an appeal of the city's decision to reject the application to replace the golf course with hundreds of homes, in tomorrow's News Tribune.

New numbers this week from RealtyTrac put Pierce County at No. 6 in Washington state for April foreclosures, down from first place in March. Others in the top 10: Mason (2), Skagit (3), Thurston (4), Kitsap (7).

In other foreclosure news, I reached Pat Maddock in D.C. this afternoon while he said he was waiting in Sen. Patty Murray's office to chat about legislation floating around the House on short sales. (Maddock is president of the Tacoma-Pierce County Association of Realtors.)

A short sale allows a homeowner to escape foreclosure while getting the property back to the bank for an agreed-upon amount but one that's less than what's owed on the mortgage. Apparently, such homeowners are still taxed on the portion forgiven by the bank – a tax that businesses skip out on, Maddock said. “We need to change that,” he said.

Remember that proposal to replace the North Shore Golf Course with more than 800 homes? It hasn't gone away, just underground for a bit while Northshore Investors LLC, which is buying the land, and Tacoma city officials awaited tomorrow's session with the city hearing examiner.

Northshore Investors appealed the city's rejection of its application. (SBI Developing, a subsidiary of Soundbuilt Homes, is the developer.) At the hearing, expected to last up to two days, look for claims that city planners assured the developer that its application was complete but then changed their minds. City officials have said SBI was informed of what would be required in the application.

The hearing should look something like a mini-trial with witness testimony, cross examination, etc.

It's scheduled to start at 9 a.m. in City Council chambers on the first floor of City Hall, 747 Market St.

Saw this at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, as reported by Reuters: Countrywide Financial Corp., the largest U.S. mortgage lender, plans to add 2,000 sales jobs this year as a housing slowdown batters weaker rivals, Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo said on Monday.

Of particular interest and a bit surprising: The company is also rolling out new products such as 50-year subprime loans to pick up market share.

"The market is undergoing very turbulent times," Mozilo said. "Our competition continues to consolidate, and consolidate rapidly."

Countrywide makes more than one-sixth of U.S. home loans, slightly ahead of Wells Fargo & Co. Most Countrywide loans are higher-quality, though it also makes subprime loans to people with weaker credit histories, according to Reuters.

Anyone out there in the market for a 50-year mortgage? What about loan officers – is there a market in the South Sound for such a product?

After watching “60 Minutes” last night, I assumed the champagne must have been flowing at Redfin, considering the exposure generated by a 13-minute, Lesley Stahl story. (Turns out it was Mexican beer not champagne, according to the P-I.)

The segment tried to tackle online vs. traditional real estate as represented by Redfin and a Seattle RE/MAX agent. It came complete with a happy young couple who sat amid their moving boxes and told Stahl they saved $26,000 when buying a house through online brokerage Redfin.

Other highlights
Best quote: “I felt like I was going to get caught.” From Redfin agent Kelly Engel, who said she felt guilty as a traditional agent earning a $12,000 commission for five hours of work.
Attempt at skepticism: “Are you spinning me?” Stahl said to Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. This after he told her one of his agents closes eight sales per week.
Best B-roll: Kelman shown riding his bike to work, helmet and all, which he reportedly does regularly from Queen Anne to his Pioneer Square office.
Best graphic: Stahl using a white board and stick figures to illustrate that Redfin charges a flat fee to sell houses.

Kelman blogged about watching the show (his mom wishes he would have got a better haircut) and the taping.

Go here
for a transcript of the “60 Minutes” story.

We all know location is among the most important attributes of a home up for sale. Usually, it seems that the location plays one way or the other – favorable or not.

But I’m sensing something of a love-hate relationship with Meridian, the road lined with retail and often clogged with traffic that runs through Puyallup and, importantly, to the South Hill Mall.

Take a look at these snippets, all taken from recent listings:
“Easy to get to Meridian”
“NO Meridian traffic”
“Avoid the Meridian mess”
“Located near Meridian”
“Why live any further down Meridian?”
“Keeps you away from that infamous Meridian traffic”
“Easy access to Meridian and 176th”

So knowing there’s a split between whether it’s better to easily get to Meridian or avoid it, how wise is it to play up or down a home’s proximity to the busy road? Are sellers going to turn buyers off from Puyallup/South Hill by reminding them what a mess Meridian can be? What about the rest of the South Sound – any other local hot spots buyers and sellers can’t agree on?

Industry sources are reporting that this Sunday’s “60 Minutes” will feature an investigative piece on traditional vs. online real estate models.

The InmanNews blog posted a publicity alert from the National Association of Realtors to its members detailing what the organization expects to see: interviews with Seattle agents, a lengthy interview with Glenn Kelman, CEO of online brokerage Redfin, and footage from the group’s annual meeting.

The CBS show has apparently been working the story for a year.

From the NAR release:

Bottom line is that we don’t expect that the segment will make Realtors happy but it could have been much, much worse. Be glad that it’s Mother’s Day and the show will probably draw fewer than its average 14 million viewers.

Should real estate agents get calls from the media after the story runs, the group helpfully outlines some talking points.

Some excerpts:
“NAR and many brokerages worked for the past 12 months with ‘60 Minutes’ producers to educate them about the industry and to correct misconceptions created by the Justice Department and our critics. The fact is that the segment represents a very small part of the issues ‘60 Minutes’ explored and the segment that aired could have been much worse.”

“The real estate industry has harnessed technology … for the benefit of consumers and will continue to do so. Real estate is both high tech and high touch.”

Here’s The Wall Street Journal’s take on housing markets, such as Seattle’s, where housing prices remain strong despite drooping in other markets:

The housing news isn’t all grim. Even as prices sag nationwide, there are several cities in the country where home values are climbing smartly.

Portland, Ore., Boise, Idaho, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Houston, Austin, and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., are among the cities bucking the national trend. Homes’ appreciation there between the fourth quarters of 2005 and 2006 far exceeded the national average of 5.9 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

In some markets, like Boise and Seattle, the appreciation jumped well into the double digits.

“All real estate is local, despite the headlines,” says Lawrence Yun, the senior economist for the National Association of Realtors. Nationwide, the median existing-home price fell 1.3 percent, to $212,800 in February from $215,700 in February 2006, according to preliminary NAR statistics.

There’s no single secret of these cities’ apparent success, but many of them missed the housing boom of the past five years.

=> Read more!

I got my hands on the Pierce County breakdown of April median prices this afternoon, courtesy of the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, for a closer look at how areas from Orting to Central Tacoma and Lakewood are performing.

Countywide, the median sale price grew year-over-year by 3.2 percent – good considering some parts of the country are struggling to stay flat. But not great when compared to the much higher appreciation seen year-over-year in King, Snohomish, Kitsap and Thurston counties.

The MLS breaks Pierce County into 104 areas and then puts those into 17 groups. So the most detailed stats are for those 17 groupings, which translates to one stat for North Tacoma but also one stat for areas as diverse as Tillicum, DuPont, Steilacoom and Ketron Island.

Six saw monthly median prices decline compared to the previous April, but when looking at prices for the first four months of the year, the same six areas all were up.

They were (April 2007/April 2006):
Lake Tapps/Orting: $300,000/$303,452
Anderson Island (just one home sold last month): $180,250/$199,750
North Tacoma: $289,950/$295,000
Lakewood: $240,000/$249,999
Parkland: $219,725/$224,675
Browns Point: $310,000/$324,975

For the county, closed sales in April were down 20.4 percent. But there were areas that saw increased sales: Central Tacoma, University Place, Southeast Tacoma and, interestingly, Lakewood (considering its monthly decrease in median sale price).

The biggest drops in sales activity came out of Puyallup (down 49 percent) and the Lake Tapps/Orting area (down 61.2 percent).

Stay tuned for May numbers, expected the first full week of June.

Perhaps you can help us settle a newsroom disagreement over a real estate marketing ploy.

It all started with a letter (below) mailed to the home of a reporter who lives in Gig Harbor. (Personal info has been redacted.) Written in red ink and on yellow, lined paper, it’s an unsolicited offer to buy this person’s home. It’s short and sweet and – with its neat hand-written text – a little folksy.

(Click image for full-size letter.)

The recipient of the letter thinks the pitch is unethical – misleading for the information it leaves out. Namely that the letter writer is the registered agent for Roy-based Ranger Projects, the company at the other end of the phone number where the letter says you can reach Sean or Charmaine. The receptionist who answered the phone earlier this week told the reporter that the company buys and sells homes and the letter is how Ranger Projects advertises. (When I called today, the receptionist said no one was available to talk to me at the moment. Will update if I get a call back.)

However, another reporter who’s seen the letter thinks it’s no big deal, no shadier than the glossy pamphlets agents send, pointing to houses selling in your neighborhood for big prices. There’s nothing wrong or illegal about telling someone you want to buy their house, even if all the info isn’t there and it’s done in an amateurish fashion, he says.

I’m not going to take a side. But as a journalist, I’m a big fan of transparency – something of a no-show in this letter. On the other hand, real estate is all about the sale and in a tightening real estate market, I think we’ll be seeing more and more creative attempts to buy and sell homes. And then there’s this, something a friend reminded me of when I told him about the letter: Isn’t everything for sale, for the right price?

Any thoughts?

In the second installment of Real Speak, let’s look at “new price.” I was going to write about the recent proliferation of “reduced price” in fliers and ads but became more intrigued by the attempt to positively spin the need to cut an asking price.

I saw it here:

And here:

And then in this ad for a Tacoma house listed at $295,000:
“Wow!! Hot new price!! Just reduced again!! Will sell fast!!”

So why “new price” instead of “reduced price”? A better ring? Is it something like pricing a home at $399,900 rather than $400,000? Don’t buyers know that a new price is the same as a reduced one?

John L. Scott agent David Gala, who's selling the first house pictured (in Fircrest for $249,950), said he's been using the term "new price" for about 10 years.

"Through the years, it’s amazing how many people have said I don’t like price reduced, because it makes it look like we’re desperate. But they don’t mind new price," he said.

What do you think?

Redfin wants to revolutionize real estate. But first it needs to hire another Pierce County agent.

The Seattle online real estate brokerage, which brought its services to Pierce County in January, has helped buyers purchase just 14 South Sound homes (six in the county, eight within five miles) in that time. CEO Glenn Kelman (left), who dropped by Firehouse Coffee this morning to talk real estate, said he’d take as many agents as he could get but will settle for one more to handle South Sound business. (Agents are paid a salary and then a bonus based on customer-service feedback.)

Redfin is trying to make digital what has long been a hands-on, interpersonal transaction: the purchase and sale of a home. (The company refunds two thirds of its commission at closing if you find your own home and does sales for a flat fee.) Plenty of opposition has come from traditional agents and various Multiple Listing Services, for which Kelman said it has hired five law firms.

When he started the company, Kelman said he thought Redfin would be all about software. But then he saw that buying a home is often an emotional transaction that requires complex negotiations. Redfin has since hired more than 20 agents. And he mingles in the real estate world: “I feel like I’m a nerd at a football game at these real estate conventions.”

Perhaps that’s because he says things like this, a thought he shared with me this morning about what he thinks is an ineffective agent-buyer model: “Most people don’t need a buyer’s agent to walk them through a room and tell them how beautiful it is. What they need is property access.”

Beyond hiring agents to handle transactions, Redfin now offers home tours. The first half day is free with a $250 charge for another half day.

Perhaps if Kelman had landed that internship at Harper’s magazine, all this Redfin controversy could have been avoided.

“If I could have got a job at a newspaper, I probably wouldn’t be here now.” I asked Kelman if he tells firefighters the same thing, but it turns out he was a staff writer at The Daily Cal while attending UC Berkeley.

A survey released this week identified the 10 U.S. counties containing the highest number of millionaire households in 2006. Pierce wasn't one of them. But the neighbor to the north was. And so were several counties to the south -- in California and Arizona.

Here's the top 10 counties and the number of millionaire households, courtesy of London-based research group TNS:

• Los Angeles County: 268,136
• Cook County, Ill.: 171,118
• Orange County, Calif.: 116,157
• Maricopa County, Ariz.: 113,414
• San Diego County, Calif.: 102,138
• Harris County, Texas: 99,504
• Nassau County, N.Y.: 79,704
• Santa Clara County, Calif.: 74,824
• Palm Beach County, Fla.: 71,221
• King County, Wash.: 68,390

As an added statistical bonus, the release said King County's millionaires accounted for one third of such households in the state.

The sale of second homes as investments fell 28.9 percent in 2006, according to the National Association of Realtors as reported by the Associated Press. Demand for vacation homes, however, remained strong.

According to the group’s survey, 22 percent of all homes bought last year were for investment. The number of vacation homes totaled 14 percent of the overall market.

David Lereah, chief economist for the Realtors, attributed the drop in investment buying to speculators driving up demand during the market’s boom years and then abandoning the market in 2006, the AP reported.

Massachusetts homeowners facing foreclosure might soon get a break, courtesy of the state’s governor, who has ordered state regulators to find a way to delay foreclosure actions, according to the Boston Herald.

Here's what the story said:

The governor’s move should halt the foreclosure clock now ticking for thousands of Bay State homeowners, said national housing activist Bruce Marks, head of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America.

“It is effectively a moratorium on foreclosures in Massachusetts,” said Marks, whose Jamaica Plain-based nonprofit has a nationwide network of offices. “It is a very big deal. We will bring the Massachusetts standard nationwide.”
Whether Patrick’s action turns out to be as sweeping as Marks believes remains to be seen.

Realestatebloggers.com isn’t a fan:

Like the insurance companies, mortgage companies are not forced to do business in a state. And if that state makes borrowing so onerous it does not make sense to do business there. You could see a liquidity crisis that would make the subprime meltdown seem like nothing if lenders determine that Massachusetts is a hostile environment and borrowers would see higher rates.

No talk of such action in Washington, but who knows -- various activist groups are pushing similar moratoriums. Pierce County foreclosures were No. 1 in March in the state, according to real estate research firm RealtyTrac.