I found a post on the Zillow blog about a guy who lives in a 96 square foot house! A few years ago he decided that he wanted to live in a smaller space. So, he desinged a special home for himself that could accomodate his needs. One difficulty he’s had is in finding a place to put his home since many neighborhoods have a minimum house size. He has often found people willing to let him put it up in their backyard, or has moved to the outskirts of town.

His idea of minimal living was so popular that he began to sell his designs! You can find out more about micro living at Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Sales statistics are in for the real estate market for this week. The following are the pending ratios (percentage of homes listed that have a pending sale) for Bellingham, Blaine/Birch Bay, Ferndale, Lynden and Sudden Valley.

Bellingham: 25% (last week was 23%)
Total units pending: 191

Blaine/Birch Bay: 14% (no change from last week)
Total units pending: 44

Ferndale: 14% (last week was 15%)
Total units pending: 39

Lynden: 19% (last week was 16%)
Total units pending: 33

Sudden Valley: 13% (no change from last week)
Total units pending: 21

Here are the graphs showing the real estate sales trends over the past year and a half. If you have any questions or would like a particular price range graphed, please let me know! Also, we always have the most up to date statistics on our website under Market News.

Don’t forget that the first half of your property taxes are due on Monday! And don’t just say “it’s built into my mortgage payment - I don’t have to worry about it”. This year the county stopped sending the tax bills to your mortgage company so it is up to you to get that bill to them. If they don’t have the bill, they can’t pay it!

Hello to all out there! Not to many changes in rates at all. The market has been holding pretty steady. When you compare rates to one year ago the average 30 year fixed rate was 6.5% today 6.125%. So that means you should go out and buy a house! When I say holding pretty steady I mean in the last month and a half there really has been no change at all in the fixed rate market.

Curious rate shoppers ask me about the 40 year fixed, one would think the savings per month would be big, not really though.

40 year fixed 6.125% with 1.5 points

30 year fixed 6.00% with 1.25 points

15 year fixed 5.625 with 1.375 points

To compare the payments between a 40 and 30 year using a loan amount of $200,000.00 the savings on a 40 year fixed is $16.10 on your monthly payment. Not a big savings as you can see. I would recommend a 30 year fixed, you will see your principal balance decrease faster that way. If you have any questions or comments please let me know.

Happy Friday to you all! Sidney

This weekend is the annual celebration of Fairhaven’s founder - Dirty Dan. This family friendly festival includes old fashioned games and activities, a scavenger hunt, motorcycle show, salmon toss, pie eating contsest, 1800s period dress contest, Dirty Dan look-alike and much more!

Also, on Sunday there will be the Chuckanut Chowder Cookoff which Graham assures me is amazing!!! Plus the piano race which is always entertaining.

The festivities will be on the Village Green in Fairhaven. There will be live music and lots of fun so don’t miss out!

You can find more info here.

Great news for travelers - there is a new airline in Bellingham! Hopefully this won’t be a repeat of the whole Western airlines fiasco. Skybus is a new airlineout of Columbus, Ohio whose mission is to offer the lowest fares out there. Period.

So, I went on their site and read all of the fine print and this is what I learnt:

• They really do have very low fares!
• All of their flights go via Columbus, OH. Cities that they service include Bellingham, San Francisco, LA, Kansas City, Boston, Richmond VA, Greenboro NC and Ft. Lauderdale.
• They offer 10 seats on each plane for $10. Apparently it is first come, first serve. However, when I went on their site today, other than a few days at the end of May, the next time a $10 fare was available was in mid-December!!!!! Did it really book up that quickly? I sent them an email asking about this.
• Flights leave once a day from Bellingham in the morning, and arrive around 4pm local time in Columbus. Return flights from Columbus leave there at 7am and arrive back in Bellingham at 8:30am. The bad part about this is that if you are going on to another city, you will have to fly back to Columbus the night before and get a hotel in order to make the early flight back to Bellingham.

So, the big question - how do they make it so cheap? Here is what I found.

• There is no assigned seating. The earlier you check in, the earlier you can get on the plane (like Southwest). However, for an extra $10 per person, per flight, you can buy your way into the first group.
• There is no in flight entertainment. But they will sell you cards or puzzles.
• You are not allowed to bring any food on board with you. However, they will gladly sell you drinks, snacks and light meals on the flight. My guess is the prices of these snacks will be super inflated. I’ve got to say, that I really don’t agree with this one. It’s one thing to not include a meal. But to not allow people to bring their own food on board? You’ve got them trapped for a 5 hour flight! Not very fair at all.
• You can have a pillow and a blanket, but you will have to buy it. But hey, you get to keep it.
• They don’t have a phone number. If you have a problem, you have to use their online help section.
• They don’t have any check-in agents. You do it all yourself.
• Your carry-on items are free. Checked luggage is $5 per bag for the first two, and $50 per bag after that.
• The gate attendant will only arrive about 5 minutes before you start boarding.
• They only fly into smaller airports which offer lower overhead costs.

The website also mentioned that they would make their money by booking vacations. They have tons of options for hotels and packages…..however they don’t fly to all of those cities which is a bit odd.

So, basically if you are looking for a super cheap no frills flight, this one will work! But just remember, it will really be no frills!

People around the county had an extra bit of stress added to the already stressful event of moving - the courthouse couldn’t record any transactions! Starting on Friday, the Whatcom County Courthouse would not record any purchase or sale transaction due to problems with their computer system. That left a lot of people who were supposed to move over the weekend in a difficult position. In order for funds to change hands, legal ownership of the property has to be changed (this is the part that is done at the courthouse). So, with no funds changing hands, and no change in ownership, people could not move into their new homes.

To make matters worse, the system was still down yesterday and this morning. The county finally started to manually record transactions this afternoon - much to the delight of many stressed out buyers and sellers!

Here are this weeks real estate sales statistics for Bellingham, Blaine, Birch Bay, Ferndale, Lynden and Sudden Valley. The following is the pending ratio (percentage of homes listed that have a pending sales contract) for each of the cities.

Bellingham: 23% (last week was 24%)
Total homes pending: 181

Blaine/Birch Bay: 14% (no change from last week)
Total homes pending: 44

Ferndale: 15% (last week was 19%)
Total homes pending: 43

Lynden: 16% (last week was 13%)
Total homes pending: 28

Sudden Valley: 13% (last week was 14%)
Total homes pending: 20

Graphs of the trends in each city over the past year and a half are availabie under the Market News section of our webstie, along with other statistical data.

Bellingham has made it to onto another list! This time, it is the 100 best places to live. The list was put out by relocate-america.com  Although Bellingham has been on many “Best place to…..” lists before, this is our first time being on the Relocate-America.com list. This list is unique in that the communities are voted on by the readers. It makes it a bit more special when you know that it was people that chose our community as special, rather than just a computer compiling population, job, housing and crime stats and punching out a number.

The Whatcom County division of Toys for Tots was named number one in the western US (9 states from Alaska to Arizona! 11,000 new toys were donated and distributed in Whatcom County to 3,600 needy children in Whatcom County. Awards are given out by the National Toys for Tots organization and they look at number of toys collected, distribution, timeliness and the number of children receiving toys, relative to the size of the community.

Toys for Tots is a Marine Corps charity that is mostly run by volunteers who are former Marines. Our office took a special interest in this cause since both Rich and Mike are former Marines. This year, Toys for Tots used the Johnson Team Moving Truck to move all of the toys making their job much easier. We are so glad that we could contribute to such an amazing collaborative effort!

Congrats to Art Anderson, John Forgette, Bob Fletcher and Vince McLeod who all organize the Whatcom County Toys for Tots. You guys did a great job!