Kary L. Krismer's Discussions

Mean, median and mode are all averages--just different averages.Mean is the total price, divided by the number of houses.Median is the one sale that's exactly in the middle. So if you had 11 sales, and 9 of them were for $200,000, and one was for $800,000, the median sale would be $200,000 because there would be five sales above and five sales below. The mean would be about $254,000. There's also the mode, which in that example would also be $200,000.

Rather obviously, if the tax records aren't updated, Zillow won't know about it. Part of that depends on whether you updated with permits, but we added a bathroom with permits, and the county never picked up on it.

Asteaks,It might be that you've held the property too long. Zillow is much less accurate on properties that have been held for over 10 years, and even worse on properties held for 20 years or more.

Different states work differently, but in Washington your assessed value going up does not mean your taxes will go up. That's because the county is authorized to collect so much money, and that gets divided by the total value of property in the county. So your assessment can go up 10%, and your taxes might go down if everyone else went up 20%. But it doesn't really quite work that way because they don't reassess everyone in every year (I think it's every three years). But over the long run, that's how it works.Here in Washington most counties are making a killing on the real estate excise tax, because the market is still fairly strong and prices are too. King county is doing really well because a lot of large buildings are selling at low multiples.

Alreth,You're really good at finding links. Go try to find news links from late February early March about the stock market. I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you on the direction the market will take, because I don't try to predict the direction. My point is mainly that by the time something makes the national network news, the worst is usually over.

Keep in mind if your seller breaches, you're possibly liable for the SOC!I'd suggest this. Get the buyer to agree it can stay there for a month and the seller can find a buyer for it during that period. If they can't find a buyer, then it's the buyer's property to dispose of.The seller needs to realize that just because they paid $2,300 it's not worth that amount to other people, especially used.

Aldreth wrote: "Thats how the market is doing twats."Not sure if that's directed at me, but my point was if you listened to the daily news back in Feb/Mar, you'd have sold all your stock, which is just the opposite of what you should have been doing. It's up roughly 10% since then, even with today's losses.I remember that because my mom called me up all paniced by the reports on the news. I had to calm her down, and Aldreth you might be surprised to learn I told her she was more at risk with her real estate investments!The press trys to scare people. The Seattle Times had a front page headline a couple of weeks ago that made you think the bottom had dropped out of our market. When you got inside the paper, they gave the statistics, and 7 of the 8 areas they covered had price increases over last year, and the one area that was down had volume up over 100% (probably new condos hit that area). But on the front page they did manage to tell the story of one person who had had a difficult time selling.Last nigth on the NBC news, they found someone who was having a difficult time finding financing. We've yet to have a sale flip over financing, and I don't even know of anyone who had to switch programs after signing up (knock wood).

I'm not sure the information would be useful. You'd really need it broken down by zip code and type of property, and even then I'm not sure what it would tell you.About the only time I can remember that being useful was a year ago in the condo market, where just about everything was selling for more than the list price. You knew then you didn't want to make less than a full price offer on a property you liked. That was an unusual situation, however.

When you look at any profession, there are good people and bad (incompetent) people, and the number of bad people is surprisingly high.Try not to think about that the next time you go to the doctor. ;-)

If it's too messy to show (which I can understand), I don't see the point of putting up a "For Sale" sign, unless you want to sell it at a discount so that cleaning it up is someone else's problem.