​What happens on a home tour does not always stay on a home tour. Just ask the agents at Redfin, the local real estate agency that is letting the world in on some of its agents' strangest and bizarre encounters with buyers and sellers. They've just launched a Twitter account @REConfidential -- and it is a hoot and half! Ready for a sampling?

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​In recent months, the national press has spotlighted a new type of foreclosure. It involves so called "strategic defaults," whereby homeowners can afford their mortgage but nevertheless choose to walk away. And it's happening here--in droves-- according to Seattle real estate attorney David Leen.

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​As if the foreclosure crisis hadn't generated enough distrust of the real estate industry, now comes another scandal. A complaint filed with the Oregon State Bar accuses an executive of Bellevue-based Northwest Trustee Services--a huge operation that has implemented a quarter million foreclosures--with over-billing clients.

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Jonathan Kaminsky

​Orcas Island, as anyone who has visited can tell you, is lovely. The Emerald Island, as it is rightly known, is a study in greens, from its rolling, pastoral hills to the dense forest of Moran State Park to the wooded seclusion of its island residences. This is not to mention the breathtaking sunsets, cute little towns with twee little stores, and the ample, gorgeous shoreline. Indeed, Orcas would be the perfect place for a relaxing vacation--if it weren't for the jarringly unwelcoming locals, and the signs they erect to remind you, the paying visitor, of just how welcome you aren't.

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​Locally, the Seattle Housing Authority gets beat up a lot. The agency is forever facing accusations that it is gentrifying its facilities. A group of homeowners at the agency's first spruced-up development, NewHolly, sued a few years back over alleged defects in construction and management. Most recently, a woman won a long-running eviction battle in court. But SHA is beloved in D.C. It continually wins enormous grants, allowing it to build while housing authorities around the country are contracting. Witness the new Lake City development it is showing to the press today.

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Dave Poletti.

​"JT" isn't the only one to leave a piss-poor review on the Yelp page for local property-management company Dave Poletti & Associates.

But he is the only one to get sued for it.

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​At some point during the home-buying process, Rexburg, Idaho, couple Ben and Amber Sessions dropped their guard. They forgot the to do the all-important colony-of-reptiles sweep around the property.

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​When the Yesler Terrace apartment complex was completed in 1941, it became the state's first racially integrated low-income housing project. With its sweeping downtown views, individual yards, and diverse mix of residents, the 32-acre complex is not your typical project. And to many of its 1,200 residents--some multiple-generation tenants--Yesler Terrace is the only home they've ever known.

All that will change soon, however, and some of the folks who live at YT don't like what's on the horizon.

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​You know the housing market sucks when a negligible 0.1 percent bump in local home prices is greeted with breathless reports of Seattle "bucking the trend" and having "something to brag about."

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​There are apparently some 14,000 federally owned properties in the United States that are currently doing nothing but collecting dust and tax dollars. Of those 14,000 properties, 329 are in Washington state. You can buy one or all (preferably all) of them right now.

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