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April 16, 1999

Real Estate Buzz

By MARC STILES
Journal Real Estate editor

Your big chance to own a celebrity's house ... Forget about the latest big deal downtown for fancy new office space or whether brokers can entice some sleek high-tech company to the Bellevue CBD. The real real estate news is on the residential side and comes from gritty Grays Harbor County: Kurt Cobain's child-hood home is for sale.

Kurt Cobain's childhood home
Kurt Cobain's childhood home is for sale for $82,500.
The price of the remodeled 75-year-old bungalow in Aberdeen is $82,500 and that, says listing agent Michael Svardh of Windermere Real Estate, "is as close to comparable as one would expect." Seller Karen Powers wants to market it as a house, not a historical site.

Svardh used the Cobain connection when he began the marketing campaign. He posted a notice on a couple websites dedicated to Nirvana, Cobain's band. But Powers had second thoughts once ABC News in New York and radio stations from Australia to Europe began calling Svardh for interviews. In the face of the impending media tsunami, Powers and Svardh realized too that they had no proof that Cobain -- the poet/songwriter who killed himself after he and Nirvana put Seattle on the world music map -- actually lived there.

(Note to conspiracy theorists who doubt Cobain committed suicide: Don't call us, we'll call you.)

Powers bought the home from her insurance agent, who apparently bought it from the Cobains almost 25 years ago. Svardh said Powers had no idea of the house's historical significance until midway through the remodel when a neighbor mentioned that her kids used to play with the boy who would help make grunge music popular. Alas, this was after some poetry that Cobain may have written on a wall of the house had been painted over.

"Once you get into childhood stuff it's hard to prove anything," Svardh said. "If we had documented proof then we'd feel better charging a little more. Plus we didn't want to make a big deal out of this."

The house, 406 W. Scott St., has been on the market since Feb. 24. Svardh has had some interest but no written offers. The average number of days a house remains on the market in Grays Harbor County is 109, compared to 59 days in King County.

"We're hoping someone can purchase the house and use it as a house," Svardh said.

Maybe this Internet thing... isn't all it's cracked up to be. SpringStreet, the online apartment finder service formerly known as AllApartments, is shifting its business model to widen its consumer appeal by opening offline stores in Seattle and San Francisco. Seattle's will be at 905 E. Pike St.

SpringStreet -- whose motto is "Log on. Move in." -- is taking this low-tech approach for the very simple reason that not everyone is online. Thirty million Americans have access to the Internet. "The rest don't," said Andy Jolls, marketing director for San Francisco-based SpringStreet.

Clearly, the Internet is the wave of the future and SpringStreet sees a day when everyone accesses its services online. But that day hasn't arrived just yet. The bricks-and-mortar presence will give SpringStreet an opportunity to grow faster by reaching consumers it can't reach online, Jolls added.

High-technology on the... commercial side will be discussed at The Counselors of Real Estate convention next week at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle. On the agenda is Microsoft Systems Director of Technology Robert Angrisano, whose speech Monday will be about high-tech realities and visions.

He must have something interesting to say because the media won't be allowed inside. That's a disappointment, not a surprise because he'll speak about the cutting-edge gadgets anticipated for the buildings of the future.

More on the biotech front... Seems many newspapers, including the DJC, missed the point of Immunex CEO and Chairman Edward Fritzky's recent speech in Lynnwood about the future of biotechnology in Snohomish County. Observers reported that Fritzky seemed to warn the city of Bothell that it must cooperate with Immunex on permitting projects.

Immunex is seeking permits to build a 43,000-square-foot, $30 million product development facility on its 24 acres in Canyon Park. It also is studying whether to build an approximately 300,000-square-foot production facility there. Estimated cost of the latter facility is $250 million to $300 million.

Fritzky wasn't telling Bothell to buck up, says Immunex spokeswoman Cathy Keck Anderson; instead, he was giving all governments a heads-up on what they can do to grow the biotech industry in the county where job growth was 2.5 percent last year. That compares to a rate of 7.1 percent in 1997. Now that Boeing is scaling back, attracting new businesses and retaining existing ones is paramount.

Immunex's message: Government should streamline the entitlement process by being flexible and having in place adequate staff to review applications. "You can't have a $30 million expansion in the same permitting pipeline as a private home remodel," Keck Anderson said.

County Executive Bob Drewel and Economic Development Council President Deborah Knutson say they're on board. Drewel noted that the county's philosophy is to work with all developers -- biotech or otherwise -- to "front load the permit process to keep surprises at the tail-end to a minimum."

"The message is that up here it really is ripe for some high-tech growth," Knutson added.

It's not as though Snohomish County has to go begging. According to the EDC, the county's Technology Corridor in 1985 had 25 high-tech and biotech companies employing 200 people. Ten years later, the corridor was home to more than 280 companies with a total employment of 12,500. A further breakdown of the EDC numbers shows that in 1995, 239 people were employed in pharmaceutical manufacturing and that the projection for 2005 is 612 such jobs.

The latest news indicates the growth will reach farther north than Bothell. SNBL USA, a Redmond company that tests equipment for biotech industries, is expanding at Everett's Seaway Center by building a $7 million, 50,000-square-foot facility that will employ 60 people by the end of next year.



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