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Gerhard Ade covers Real Estate around Seattle and more.

For the past five years, Gerhard Ade has published the "View from the Street" a monthly newsletter he writes for his clients and friends. Appearing at the end of each month, Gerhard covers not only real estate but other topics that are close to his mind and heart. To reach a broader audience, Gerhard posts each newsletter on ReSeattle.com. Don't miss what Gerhard has to say and subscribe to his "View from the Street" right here!

Bad housing news

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Bad Housing News
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Bad housing news? The sky is not falling.

bad housing news

Real Estate is one of the most frequent topics of the daily news. Naturally, I pay attention to it, so a story headlined “Housing collapse 2.0 continues…” caught my eye. I found the story’s statistics suspect and disagree with the notion that real estate will lead us into the next recession. This is not 2007 when mortgage loans were handed out like cheap candy. In the next recession, real estate will be a victim, not the cause.

Data is not the same as information.

To keep informed about the Seattle area real estate market, I follow and study the numbers reported by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service – NWMLS.  To that end, I have set up location and price-specific searches that are of interest to my clients. One of those reports showed a home that had been listed for $17,750,000 and sold, after only 65 days on the market for a mere $8,350,000. At first glance, this seemed to confirm the national news that luxury homes were sold at much-reduced prices.  That’s bad housing news. Upon closer examination, it not only proved that all real estate is local but that each transaction has its own story.

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The year I bought Jeff Bezos lunch

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Jeff Bezos Lunch
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

The Year I bought Jeff Bezos Lunch

Rockefeller Plaza - the year I bought Jeff Bezoz lunch
© David Shankbone

The year was 1997. My office was right above the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center. On the way to work, I walked past the same people I had seen 30 minutes earlier on TV in my Upper East Side studio apartment when I watched Good Morning, America.

20 years ago, the internet was still a curiosity for most. Two years earlier, in 1995, I had created my first website. The client was Chicago Title Company. This did not strike me as meaningful much less as a sign of things to come.

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Willing buyer, willing seller?

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Willing Buyer
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

It takes a willing buyer and a willing seller.

“It takes a willing buyer and a willing seller to close a transaction,” said my real estate instructor 17 years ago. That sounded obvious then, but I’ve learned otherwise since. There are plenty of ways for sellers and buyers to have a falling out. It’s more likely for buyers to have a change of mind, but sellers are not immune. The likeliest moment for buyers to turn their back is after the home inspection. For a first-time buyer, the inspection report reads like a litany of defects pointing to an impending disaster.

Wikipedia explains that “the fair market value is the price at which the property would change hands between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or to sell and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts.”

Willing Buyer

This story is about buying a new home and selling the old one.

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Buying Season

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Buying Season
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Buying Season

Residential real remains a highly personal business. Your taste, likes and dislikes, cultural preferences, and personality matter. Virtual reality is no substitute for the real thing. Exploring a home from room to room and up and down the stairs is still essential.

What looked like a spacious living room online, in reality, accommodates only two armchairs. While the expansive master suite impressed, it was large only at the expense of the other two bedrooms. Often, buyers like the downstairs but not the upstairs or the reverse.

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My Germany Journey

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My Germany Journey
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

My Germany Journey

How to visit Germany and not set foot into Bavaria.

Unless you are an avid skier, a trip to Germany in January or February may not sound like such a hot idea. I went because the flights are inexpensive and I wanted to see my Germany.

My Germany Journey - Map of Germany

  I saw my sister, my half-sister, one aunt, several cousins, my nieces, and grandnieces, my best friend from high school, and two German clients. One now owns a five-acre parcel on the Olympic Peninsula; the other used to own a home on the Sammamish plateau. I also made some new friends whose faces I knew only from Facebook. The Facebook group, over 4,000 strong, is the online place to be if you are a fan of the SC Freiburg. The actual place to be is the Schwarzwald-Stadion where I watched my first Bundesliga match. More about that later.

Places

My Germany Journey - Freiburg im Breisgau

 I landed in Frankfurt,spent the first ten days with my sister in Kirchzarten near Freiburg, then headed all the way north to the countryside around Oldenburg located in the state of Lower Saxony, then back south to the Cologne area and after a side trip to Münster, traveled back to Frankfurt. From Freiburg, I took a day trip to the Bodensee (Germany’s largest lake) and some jaunts into the Black Forest and the neighboring countryside toward the Rhine valley. You will come across these cities in my Germany journey below.

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