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Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

What sets me apart, will set you apart.

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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!

Signing Before Closing

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Signing Before Closing
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Remember: Signing before Closing.

signing before closing


Often, buyers and sellers think that signing and closing are one and the same. They are not. Signing is a prerequisite for closing. Signing and closing are handled by the escrow company.

What’s Escrow?

You may have seen wording like “the transaction is in escrow.” It means that buyer and seller have entered into a mutual agreement and the contract is now with the escrow company. Escrow is a neutral, disinterested party that directs and coordinates all activities from contract to closing. So if it’s signing before closing, what happens between the signing and the closing?

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Real Estate Bubble?

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Real Estate Bubble
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Real estate bubble? The dot-com kind.

Is a real estate bubble about to burst? I was still new to Seattle when the dot-com bubble went bust.  The crash lasted from early 2000 into 2004. Internet euphoria had infected investors who put big bets on anything that ended in .com.  They lost billions on overvalued companies. Hundreds of dot-coms disappeared while a few survived and flourished.  The most notable survivor: Amazon.

real estate bubble

Technology Candy

It appears that the same scenario is playing itself out again. Only this time it’s happening in the real estate sector. This real estate bubble is the investment kind. The candy that’s irresistible to investors is called technology. “We are a technology company. We are not a real estate company anymore,” Keller Williams co-founder Gary Keller declared recently.

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Celebrating 100 Months

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Blog
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Celebrating 100 Months

100 months ago puts us into the year 2011. That’s the year Seattle voters approved the Highway 99 tunnel, Oprah Winfrey aired her last show, and the unemployment rate was 9 percent.

I published my first View from the Street newsletter on Thursday, March 31, 2011. Since then, I’ve written about rats, listing lingo, and legal matters. I covered topics outside real estate, such as travel, type, and life events.

Gerhard Ade Blog

100 months of The View From the Street: 12 reader favorites

0️⃣5️⃣.2️⃣0️⃣1️⃣1️⃣
Oh Rats, I didn’t know this!

Seattle rats and vermin of any kind are a common problem in the Seattle area where water features prominently in the geography and trees make perfect “jumping-off points” for many kinds of rodents.

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Fingerspitzengefühl

Presenting any listing client with that many offers takes Fingerspitzengefühl, especially when the seller is 90 years old. The offers had only one thing in common. All buyers were prepared to pay more than list price.

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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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