Q4 2020 – Walla Walla Trends Newsletter

The phrase describing getting married as “settling down” still refers to planting roots. To some couples, planting roots means doing so straight into the ground. They have no plans to ever live in widely varying locations. To other couples, planting...

The pandemic has certainly created its own news cycle, within it are many stories on the impact it’s had on small businesses across the U.S. There are the stories interviewing an individual who already had to temporarily shut down their business turning into...

While we won’t argue this is the flashiest data interactive we’ve highlighted here, it still provides an easy way to consume more than a handful of information. Authored by the Washington State Employment Security Division, the Local...

One of the many lessons to emerge from the covid-19 pandemic is how reliant our society has become on the interconnectedness of the internet. Experts report that the pandemic has accelerated its targeted further moves to online by several years. Think of telemedicine, grocery shopping, business travel and meetings, as well as education. The virtual world we have come to live in since March has made great challenges to our...

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Everyone 6 months and older should get a flu vaccine every season with rare exceptions.” and to do so “…before flu viruses begin spreading in your community, since it takes about two weeks after vaccination for antibodies to develop in the body and provide protection against flu.” The only people the CDC definitively say should not get a flu shot are those...

Ideally, the structure of a local economy resembles that of a well-balanced individual investment portfolio. That is, there is enough concentration in a winning sector to make a difference in the overall return, but not so much concentration that a downturn risks the entire asset/sector. In an investment portfolio, we mitigate these risks largely by spreading out the investment over several types of assets. Or simply put, we...

After recovering from the housing bubble pop of the mid-2000s, the housing market has been on a relatively positive trajectory since. Home values had decreased so it made more sense for those who wanted to sell before the crash but could perhaps hold-on, waiting for better times to do so. During these dark days, it seems everyone from banks to families were waiting for better times to sell. Purchasers, in contrast, were forming...