Site Lines by Rami Al-Kabra

How's the real estate market nowadays?

I get that question every time I run into someone. It's hard to answer standing in a driveway or the produce section at the supermarket, because what people actually want to know is more specific. Is this a good time to buy? What would my house sell for today? Is something about to get built down the street?

So I just write the answers down. About twice a month, I write a short update on what's happening across the real estate market, mostly the Eastside (Bothell, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Kenmorea nd Woodinville, plus wherever else is worth your attention that month), what it means, and what's coming.

A bit about me: I'm Rami Al-Kabra. I work as a real estate broker with eXp Realty and I'm on the Bothell City Council. Before becoming a broker, I spent more than 20 years in tech, most recently as Chief Digital Officer, with earlier roles at Microsoft, Expedia and T-Mobile. My job was to take data and market information and distill it into insights I acted on.

That combination is unusual: I hear the zoning decisions months before they show up in home prices, and I read market data the way I used to read product data. Then I turn it all into insights you can act on.

Subscribe and I'll start you with an answer to the first question I always get: “How’s the market nowadays?” One page, a five-minute read: twenty years of sales and price data, what actually drives mortgage rates, and what the cities have already decided gets built in the next twenty years.