News
March Madness
March 20, 2012
| So what if it's snowing in mid-March? Seattle is still the place to be if you're optimistic about the markets, the economic recovery, the possibility that Matt Flynn will restore some respectability to the 7-9 Seahawks... really, everything but spring. |
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| This week we chatted comebacks with CRE stats guru Allen Safer, managing director of Integra Realty Resources. (He and wife Lori, a founding principal at Integra, completed the 200-mile Seattle to Portland bike ride last July in a day and a half. Allen says most of the time he really just drafts off Lori.) Allen calls Seattle one of the "green shoots" of the economy and notes that the city is transitioning from secondary to primary market. (You know you've made it when New York investors can't stop talking about the bands they've seen at Neumos.) Still, Allen and Integra feel the recovery has just gotten started—Integra predicts it's going to take three years for the office and retail sectors to balance. That won't happen until employment levels reach the numbers they were at before the markets collapsed in 2007. When will that be? "Most people think that will occur in 2013 or 2014," Allen says. |
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| No, that's not the Montlake Cut, it's the Panama Canal. Allen, who received a BS from the UC-Boulder, has been in Seattle since 1978, when he took a job as an appraiser for Coldwell Banker. He's seen many an economic cycle but feels recent decisions are going to have major impacts. If anything tapers Allen's enthusiasm, it's forces outside the city's control: European banks, the Middle East, improvements to the Panama Canal that may take shipping dollars away from Seattle: "Really, there's so many larger economic shoes to drop, things on the horizon that have yet to evolve." |
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| Locally, he predicts the 520 bridge (pictured in its glamour shot above) tolling is really going to change how people live, noting that some who live in Seattle but work in Bellevue (and vice versa) are going to be more tempted to move than shuffle across the bridge twice a day paying tolls of up to $10 per round trip. And though there's an all-out apartment building boom happening these days, Allen is a tad concerned that all units are being built with one generation—20 to 30 somethings—in mind. More seniors housing is needed, he suggests. |
