New house!

It's Seattle, it's urban, it's greatness. I'm naturally excited to be a first-time homeowner, and may end up posting lots of house links for a while. We already have our first DIY home improvement projects lined up.

King County home buyers and owners absolutely must see
the King County GIS Center map portal, especially the Parcel Viewer. The Parcel Viewer lets you search for a property, find the parcel number, see maps and get OMG-I-can't-believe- that's-on-the-Internet reports, including a description of the house, the name of the current taxpayer, the date and amount of the last sale of the property including the name of the previous seller, district info, and much more. Use the map to see reports for your potential (or current) neighbors.

The current owner and previous sale information may indicate the softness of the asking price for a property for sale. If the previous sale was recent and for notably less than the asking price, it might have been purchased by and investor for fix-up and resale. A "sale" might also represent a divorce. If you look up the taxpayer in white pages and find an address other than that of the property, it might be (or have been) a rental property.

From the GIS Center link, see also the iMAP utility, a very useful (high bandwidth) mapping tool with lots of data and print capabilities. See also the Virtual Map Counter.

I couldn't quite get the zoning information I wanted out of iMAP for some reason, but I was able to find some fantastic maps and data at the Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) Map Center. The "DPD GIS" interactive map utility only works on Internet Explorer for PC, so I couldn't play with it, but Map Books Online has a huge amount of detailed map data. Clicking on a numbered rectangle downloads a gorgeous 2-3 MB PDF file, including streets, parcel numbers and zoning borders.

It was from this map that we discovered the house we were considering (and ultimately purchased) bordered a small commercial zone, limited to neighborhood service and 30 feet in height (NC1-30). Even though the neighboring properties in the zone are houses, in ten years they could be condos. There's a gas station and mini-mart in that zone, so I suppose we could be living next to a Burger King someday, too.