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Right now is a tedious time to be trading Seattle real estate. While the nation at large is experiencing a deflation in housing values, the Seattle market is stubbornly fluctuating between plateau and boom days.

A large number of properties are going unsold for 90+ days [zillow.com] while others are subject to irrational bidding wars. Part of me wants to sit it all out for another six to twelve months, but my better half insists that we need a house.

And so, we are in the market for a house.

House #1 was an estate sale for a beautiful, large fixer-upper with an entirely unfinished basement and asbestos throughout. Not afraid of building a little sweat equity, we placed a very attractive no-strings-attached offer slightly over the asking price of $350K.

We tried very hard not to get wrapped up, but being the first house we’d made an offer on, it was difficult not to get emotionally invested. It attracted a lot of attention including two offers that ended up beating ours, both with automatic re-bid triggers that pushed the final cost to well over $400,000.

In the end, the most stressful part was waiting for that call from our agent, but we were certainly disappointed when word came that it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps I shouldn’t have spent all of those hours making a detailed scale Google Sketchup diagram of the entire house.

The buzz was that some of the other bidders had family ties to the house, so I imagine their own emotional attachment added considerably to what they were willing to spend.

Lesson learned: Remember not to lose your head over the first house you fall in love with. Better yet, don’t fall in love with a house if you can avoid it. Best of all, stay away from family affairs if at all possible.

House #2 was FSBO (for sale by owner). While outside of our primary search area, it had a nice location that made it worth considering the extended commute. Not wanting to be consumed in a bidding war like the one we’d just witnessed, I did an extensive amount of number crunching to find the true market value of this house.

Just looking at the raw numbers for the neighborhood, a house of its stats is valued at $315K-$325K. Excluding the outliers on both ends brought the house down a couple thousand, but in real estate it may be best to leave that data in since those are your neighbors, after all.

The killer feature that this house has which few of its neighbors could claim was the wilderness reserve directly across the street. I factored that in at a $20K bonus to the property value. That bonus brought the estimated value right in line with the more contextual housing valuations such as Zillow and an appreciation-adjusted comparison of the houses on the same block that have sold in the past year.

Unfortunately, the house turned out to be FSBSO (for sale by sentimental owner) and they had been given advice by someone that the house was worth $365,000; 75% more per square foot than even the nicest of their close neighbors. Perhaps self-conscious of the high price, they even misrepresented number of bedrooms and square footage.

The owner was quite galled when our agent presented the initial offer of 9% less than the asking price. In fact, this FSBO wrote off the possibility of a counter offer until I called them directly to discuss the situation. Still quite ruffled, they agreed to counter, but only after flat refusing to pay the buyer’s agent’s fee at any price.

The sad part is that this house may have quickly fetched a similarly inflated price a year ago, but I believe that more buyers are getting wise to the fact that they could buy a larger condo near downtown Seattle or a little mansion in the midwest for similar money. 2007 may shape up to be the year of the self-informed house buyer due to the online revolution in market information.

With any luck, this mixed-up market may yet produce a buyer who doesn’t do due diligence and pays full asking price just because they love the house. Then again, this un-motivated seller may still be living there months or years from now when it finally appreciates to the price they want. This person has very little to lose by just waiting until the right buyer comes along.

Lesson learned: Some FSBO sellers don’t want to know what their house home is really worth. They certainly don’t think you’re doing them any favors by butting in with your know-it-all offers. Don’t let yourself think you can convince them otherwise. Don’t let any of that stop you from trying.

Photo credit: Lance McCord

The new Data Robotics Drobo is a very tempting new offering to the expandable storage market; a segment appealing both to home users and small business.

For $699, this desktop redundant storage box offers four hot-swappable SATA drive slots that are automatically managed by the device. Simply plug it into your computer’s USB 2.0 port and it appears as one large storage device. There is no need for management or hassle. Lights on the front of the box indicate device capacity and when its time to add or replace drives.

The Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is arguably a different beast, but priced at $649 and covering a lot of the same territory as the Drobo, it is a valid competitor.

Infrant’s ReadyNas NV+ offers most of the basic features of the Drobo, with the huge added benefit of NAS (network attached storage) capabilities. However, the Drobo has one killer feature not offered by the NV+:

Both devices offer hot-swappable drive support, but the Drobo offers much more flexibility when dealing with drives of different sizes. If you have four drives in your NV+, the protected capacity is essentially the smallest drive size times three. The Drobo employs a more intelligent redundancy system that employs a dynamic combination of mirroring and parity to deliver more usable space when working with drives of different sizes.

This means that where 2x250GB + 2x500GB in the NV+ would yield about 750GB of protected storage whereas the Drobo would get you about 929 GB, according to their interactive capacity tester.

A bit of fact checking revealed that the Drobo is in fact slightly larger than the NV+ and does indeed employ a cooling fan. However, like the NV+, the fan is temperature controlled. No word yet on the noise level.

The Drobo appears to fall down when it comes to other features. The NV+ costs just a bit more but offers full NAS (AFP, SMB, WebDAV, FTP, rsync and more), media serving, and several modes of security.

Drobo’s 100% hands-free management can be a boon, but the added flexibility afforded by the NV+ web-based control panel is very useful if you need any features beyond USB storage.

Conclusion
Data Robotics’ Drobo offers great value if your goal is to eek out as much usable space as possible from an array of drives varying in size. It is also ideal if all you need is a USB backup solution and you don’t want to spend any time configuring it.

However, its lower cost and much wider feature set make the NV+ a more attractive option for power users and networked environments.

If the Drobo isn’t your cup of tea right now, I’d suggest keeping your eye on Data Robotics. If their first product is any indication, their inevitable NAS product ought to be a formidable contender for the home & small office storage crown.

I work in a large corner office with a beautiful view of Seattle’s Lake Union with frequent breathtaking views of Mount Rainier just to the side of downtown. The hitch is that I share it with three other developers.

On top of the general noise four people make while coding, there is a constant stream of visitors who come to make unceasing mouth noises. Of course, all this stray conversation makes productivity difficult, especially when your job relies heavily on mental focus.

In order to improve my concentration in the face of such adversity, I purchased a pair of AKG K271 circumaural headphones which promised to cut the noise in polyphonic style.

All of their claims are true. These new headphones are like magic genies singing ultraphonic renditions of all of my favorite songs right into my brain all while silencing the crazy world around me.

I typically work with a Windows XP machine as my primary machine and my personal MacBook Pro off to the side as a secondary tool. I had just burned some MP3s to CD on my Mac and was testing them on the PC when I noticed the audio had lost some of its vibrance.

I returned the CD to the Mac to verify and the music did indeed sound much better. Even after turning off EQs and matching volume levels, the audio quality was notably better when comparing the same song back to back.

I suspect that Apple is using some subtle 3D sound enhancements that my poor Dell workstation’s corporate class sound card simply can’t compete with. Many PC sound cards, even generic varieties, come with this feature, but I simply don’t have the hardware to make that comparison.

So, for now, I’ll just have to conclude that music just sounds better with Mac.