From the Ground Up
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Housing Crisis in Central Oregon—What a Difference Five Years Makes
Central Oregon's residential property values rose faster in the mid-2000s' housing bubble and fell harder in the 2008 crash than those in other Oregon areas. Bend, especially, has been a boom-and-bust kind of town since at least the late 1970s. The b...
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Neighbor Loses Right to Use Driveway: Part II
Last year, we wrote about the Gamboa v. Clark case, in which Division III of the Washington State Court of Appeals set a high bar for proving the existence of prescriptive easements. A prescriptive easement arises when one openly and adversely uses t...
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Narrowing the Scope of Subcontractor Indemnity
Owners, developers, and general contractors, beware: the protection afforded by a subcontractor's responsibility to pay for lawsuits arising from its work (what is known as "indemnity") might not be as broad as originally thought. A recent Oregon Cou...
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Back in the Bubble?
It has been close for a few months, but Seattle house prices and full-on seller's market are now confirmed in this report from the Puget Sound Business Journal. Prices are now all the way back to the 2006 peak with no indication of slowing down....
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Millennial Myth-Busting
After years of media speculation and pundits declaring that the millennial generation is so very different and may never own a car or a house, changing all business and real estate markets, Globe.st.com shares some actual research data showing that t...
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Are Raisins Protected by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
We will find out the answer to that question later this year from the United States Supreme Court in Horne v. Department of Agriculture. At issue is whether the Department of Agriculture can subject raisin farmers to a marketing order requiring the f...
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