I lived in Bellingham for 7 years. Moat of my family is still there. They seem to have all slowly left kansas and ended up in bham
Also you worked on EMP? I was working right across the street for a bit while that was going up
I recall a hotel going up during the construction process. Is that where you were working? There was so much construction in that area at the time it was hard to keep track of it all. Seattle is a cool city, lots of great restaurants. Bellingham is really nice as well. Whale watching between Bellingham and Friday Harbor was a dream trip for my wife. We came close to pulling the trigger on a condo out there but decided the long distance to travel made it impractical. Do you visit much?
I spent every other week in Seattle for about 2 years during construction. Still my favorite project. There was a bar across the street that had a chainlink fence around a chunk of asphalt with a basketball goal inside. We called it the thunderdome, there were regular games played in there usually ironworkers versus the sheetmetal workers. I played pg for the sheetmetal guys when I was in town. We didn't drink there as they had shitty beer only fit for ironworkers, we would go to McMennamins in Queen Anne a lot or down to Pike Market. The ironworkers had control of the tower crane during the day and sheetmetal guys had it all night, so I would be up on the roof at night observing the sheetmetal workers installing panels. Watching guys lose their grip and slowly slide off the edge of the building into the dark until their harness lanyard went tight and then pull themselves back up over the edge by rope was a weird late night sight. During the day the inspector would come on site and I had to rappel the side of the building to review things he wasn't sure about. He was a steel inspector and he had to review and sign off on the panel installation. It was all aluminum and he was in over his head so we would climb all over the building and I would sign off on things he was unsure of or we would have the sheetmetal guys fix it. I suspect visiting that building as a small child when it opened was one of the events that made my daughter want to become an engineer as well. Years later during her first year of Arch E design studio at KU every one in her class had to pick a building from a list of buildings by famous architects to write a report and give a presentation on. There were 3 buildings in the list that were projects I worked on and she had seen as a small child. She picked the EMP and texted me from class to ask for anything I might be able to add to her report.
It was the gates foundation building. I think emp was actually complete but still working on punchlist stuff and finishing exterior landscaping work etc. There was a ton of work there, i worked in south lake union for most of my 15 years in Seattle.
I like bellingham but i hated/hate Seattle. Lots of construction work there tho. Havent been back to bham in 3 years. Long drive with 2 young kids and now covid etc. The whale watching between Anacortes and the san juans is awesome. Spent a lot of time at lime kiln park on the other side of Friday Harbor.
I would never ever move to seattle. I couldnt do it. Bellingham or ferndale or mt baker maybe. I couldn't even live in Seattle when i worked there...i lived 40 miles northeast and made that horrible fucking drive everyday.
Where Gates is now was a huge vacant lot when we were working. I suspect it was owned by Paul Allen back then. It was the lay down area for sorting and uncrating panels. The panels would come in from KC and then be uncrated and slayed down so that they could be hauled across the street in the right sequence for installation. There were 2100 panels and they cover a large area. The EMP building takes up virtually every square foot of it's property so staging was a big deal and took an entire city block.
I haven't been in the Gates Foundation. Assume it has to be pretty nice inside. Are there any cool private rooms in there?
In the top of the EMP there is a room called "The Founder's Room" up in the top. The only people who had access were Paul Allen and his sister Jody. If you knew someone who had the code you could sneak in for a short period of time. The walls and ceiling were covered in a tile mosaic that looked like the visuals from a wild shroom trip. They had a whole team of artists up there for weeks installing and then Jody had a late night party there during construction and decided she hated it and had it all torn out and something else installed. We used to get text messages notifying everyone on site that they needed to stop work and go to their respective trailers or a large room in the basement when VIPs were about to arrive. The Allen's would go to concerts and then bring the bands back to the EMP at about 1:00 AM to party in the Founder's Room sometimes until dawn. We were never told who was there and were told to never open the door until we were given the "all clear" text. A sheetmetal guy once got really curious at about 2:00 AM and decided he was going to look out and see who was out there. He said he almost hit Roger Daltrey in the face with the door, he was in some shit the next day but said it was absolutely worth it.
If you had to drive in that traffic I feel for you. That would suck. I always had a driver waiting when I got there, no matter the time of day traffic was bad. I like Seattle but that is probably because I never lived there. I like the stimulation a busy city like that has to offer. Bellingham is beautiful. We rented a place in Chuckanut while there. It is an easy place to like.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:21 pm
by japhy
TDub wrote: ↑Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:43 pm
Also, Fuck ironworkers. Cant stand working around those guys. Thwy are the worst. Sheetmetal guys are alright usually, a little arrogant but usually decent people. Shouldve sent your Ironworkers to the Re-Bar tavern. Haha
I never drank downtown because my drive home. Id stop in snohomish and hit up docs or the old inn tavern.
I always got along with the ironworkers until they associated me with the sheetmetal workers. I would show up at a job site and there would be ironworkers and carpenters and an architect standing around. The architect would ben telling us the column was in wrong place and how could we move it? I would remind the architect that the column had been there ever since the foundations were drawn and he would have to work around it if he just now realized it conflicted with his stud wall. The ironworkers loved that part.
Mason are the worst. I can't count the number of times a mason told me, "I have been doing this for 25 years and I have never put grout and reinforcing in a wall like this." My standard response was, "good fucking news, before you retire you will get to do one job the right way and this is it." I had a mason in Chicago once ask me if I had ever seen what a man's head looks like after getting hit by a 12 inch CMU dropped from three stories?
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Sun Jan 03, 2021 4:16 pm
by TDub
We get along ok with the rodbusters because we have to work together so much. The erection crews and the misc metals guys? Not so much
I was gone from the gates job before anything cool happened. I was however on 2 blocks of amazons bldgs downtown, one of which has bezos office. They wouldn't tell us which was his......but 1 office had blastproof walls and bulletproof curtainwall.....
Inspectors can be great.....or not. I was on a job in tukwila that had 115 piles drilled 110ft deep with 15x15x10 pilecaps over each. The inspector there would freak out if tails of hookbar was touching. The cage was so thick you couldn't help but touch. Often i had to climb down inside the cage to beat bar over (rodbusters were often offsite during inspections). We wondered aloud how long it would take to find a man dumped in a 110ft deep casing which was then filled with concrete.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:58 am
by Walrus
Bitcoin and cryptos are doing quite well. I remember some on here telling me it was a "stupid idea" to invest in them.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 12:06 pm
by Deleted User 89
Walrus wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:58 am
Bitcoin and cryptos are doing quite well. I remember some on here telling me it was a "stupid idea" to invest in them.
clown
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Walrus wrote: ↑Wed Jan 06, 2021 11:58 am
Bitcoin and cryptos are doing quite well. I remember some on here telling me it was a "stupid idea" to invest in them.
clown
More like idiot.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Wed Jan 06, 2021 12:16 pm
by japhy
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2021 9:52 pm
by japhy
Has it really been a year and a half since we found out that the housing market was crashing within months?
We talked to a realtor in Colorado last week and she seems quite happy to sell our townhouse in Denver. She intends to list it on a Thursday and figures we will have multiples offers to choose from by the end of the weekend. We told her what we wanted for the place and she said we can definitely get about 5% more than that.
The housing crash has been horrific. I hope everyone else hasn't been crushed financially as well.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:07 am
by Deleted User 62
Our flip home in Cathedral City Ca is about 50% done, and we already have realtors stopping by to look.
That market just keeps getting better.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:22 am
by Sparko
Imagine how well the market seems to be going from a Bitcoin perspective? The ability to barter for magic beans with imaginary money. That is real high finance.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:31 am
by PhDhawk
I remember when lobster was on the message boards asking how long you could keep an open jar of pasta sauce in the $300 fridge before it went bad.
Then suddenly the guy who needed advice on food spoilage became an expert on housing markets, and had all the inside government information on every global conspiracy.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:33 am
by ousdahl
and all it took, was a master’s degree from YouTube university
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 4:46 pm
by Deleted User 62
ousdahl wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:33 am
and all it took, was a master’s degree from Prager university
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:19 pm
by japhy
jeepinjayhawk wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:07 am
Our flip home in Cathedral City Ca is about 50% done, and we already have realtors stopping by to look.
That market just keeps getting better.
It does seem to be very market specific. My daughter is moving to Chicago in the spring, leaving Denver. She started looking for an apartment in Chicago recently. She is very excited about how much more living space she gets in that market compared to Denver. She is considering in the near future purchasing a house there, which was simply not an option in Denver.
In the meantime we got into the Colorado market 10 years ago buying during the recession, buying in a ski town. Then sold and moved our money to Denver. When we sell the place in Denver we realized we will have gotten about 700% ROI on our original money in, from 10 years ago. Our only regret now is that we didn't buy a couple more houses during the recession.
We figure that The Empire has even more potential upside, but you have to sell to make money and we are in this for the long haul now. We bought a good sized chunk of the commercial buildings on the main street in town for under $10/sf. When I told my developer friend in Colorado what we had done he was dumbstruck, he knew the owners who sold to us. Two months before they sold to us, they were asking $50/sf for a single building. I told my developer friend I was a little worried because; how the hell was this deal possible? He asked if we had closed yet. I told him not yet. He told me to shut the fuck up about worries and close, he hadn't seen a deal like this in 40 years for those kinds of numbers. At the same time Continuum Partners out of Denver was buying another chunk of the town nearby unbeknownst to us. Their project phase 1 has a soft opening in May. There is an airstrip on the edge of town that was a military training spot at one time years ago. Mostly crop dusters use it now, but it was built for larger planes. This summer Lear Jets will start landing there and all hell may break loose.
The market is going crazy but there are still hidden opportunities out there. It does take a lot of research and some dumb luck to find what may be hiding in plain sight. Timing can be everything and pay attention to who your neighbors are. If your newest neighbors have a lot more money than you do, then you are looking in the right neighborhood. At one time I felt like the best mountain towns to buy in, were the ones that catered to out of State tourists. There is a big market in Colorado now for in-State tourism. There are tens of thousands of millennials who head out of Denver every Friday evening after work looking for someplace out of the way to spend the weekend. Check the CODOT traffic cameras every weekend on I-70 heading to and from the mountains and you will see what I mean. If you can find that next place that they will want to visit and drop some of their disposable income in, you may have found a goldmine.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:36 pm
by zsn
Japhy- you just described Truckee, CA. Even in the pandemic it’s crazy. In fact many millennials from the Bay Area are just moving there to be close to the recreation. Rental activity is through the roof (pun unintentional). They’re not required to go in to work for the foreseeable future. Many startups are going fully virtual
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:20 pm
by Deleted User 62
zsn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:36 pm
Japhy- you just described Truckee, CA. Even in the pandemic it’s crazy. In fact many millennials from the Bay Area are just moving there to be close to the recreation. Rental activity is through the roof (pun unintentional). They’re not required to go in to work for the foreseeable future. Many startups are going fully virtual
Love Truckee. Always stop there when i am Jeeping the area.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 8:58 pm
by NewtonHawk11
japhy wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 9:52 pm
Has it really been a year and a half since we found out that the housing market was crashing within months?
We talked to a realtor in Colorado last week and she seems quite happy to sell our townhouse in Denver. She intends to list it on a Thursday and figures we will have multiples offers to choose from by the end of the weekend. We told her what we wanted for the place and she said we can definitely get about 5% more than that.
The housing crash has been horrific. I hope everyone else hasn't been crushed financially as well.
Buddy of mine bought a townhome in Colorado Springs about 4 years ago. Didn’t do a damn thing to it, selling if for about a 70k profit.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 9:10 pm
by ousdahl
Ugh.
There are stories here of someone buying some old cabin or condo up here, sitting on it a few months without doing a damn thing, and relisting it at a big markup.
The locals roast the listings in the comments, but it still sells. 1970s countertops at 2021 prices and yall eat it up, for all of 10 days a year, plus all those vrbo bookings.
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:04 pm
by TDub
So.....take advantage of that?
Re: Major housing crash coming this winter or sooner
Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:18 am
by Deleted User 863
Sounds like an ousdahl "story".
There would need to be some special circumstances surrounding the original sale to explain why it was sold way undervalue. Not listed on open market? Not listed with a realtor? No marketing of the listing? Things of that nature that explain why the buyer got such a great deal on the original sale and/or why he/she can sell things way above market value a "few months" after purchasing something at market value.
Otherwise i don't believe it because it doesn't make sense. It would have sold closer to market value on the first sale. If there have been no significant changes in market conditions then things don't appreciate rapidly in a matter of months.
To determine the cause of increasing real estate prices you've always got to look at inventory availability. In my area houses are selling for more than usual, but i do not necessarily believe it is because values are rising. I believe it is much more likely being caused by inventory being low so things are selling near/at/above list price much more often due to increased competition by having multiple parties submitting offers on homes for sale.
A local realtor put out a report saying average daily inventory over the last 12 months was like 50% lower than the previous 12 months and average days on market went from like 3 or 4 weeks to 1 week for sales avove $150,000.
It all depends where you look. Primary residence sales are doing well in my area. But go look at lower value investment type properties to rent to lower income individuals and stuff is just sitting right now due to the pandemic.
