Shea officials said they will soon start building model homes and open a sales center in late summer. Homes will range in size from 1,250 to 2,500 square feet, and will be priced from the low $200,000s to the mid $400,000s.

Jenamar Communities previously owned Jubilee, which is on Puget Sound and built around a golf course. The project now will be marketed as Shea Homes at Jubilee. Shea entered into a capital partnership with Angelo, Gordon & Co., of New York for this transaction.

The deal is part of a more than $30 million expansion for Shea Homes Active Lifestyle Communities.

The company also bought 532-lot master-planned community in North Las Vegas, and entered into a joint venture with Mountain Real Estate Capital to purchase and develop a 750-home community near Orlando.

Great City was founded by Mayor Mike McGinn, who stepped down from his post as director to run for mayor. The organization says it was created to convene broad-base coalitions that advocate for a more vibrant, sustainable and equitable city.

Joshua Curtis, executive director of the organization, is stepping down from his role and rejoining the board.

Board members will be responsible for different topics of advocacy. For example, Curtis will be responsible for housing and land use reform, together with Dan McGrady. General queries should be directed to Board Chair Brice Maryman.

For more information, visit www.greatcity.org

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index released Tuesday posted an 0.8 percent gain. It had fallen in each of the past six months.

Eighteen of 20 cities showed price increases in April from March. Washington, San Francisco and Dallas each posted gains of 2 percent or more. Eleven cities reversed their declines from the month before.

Only Miami and New York recorded price declines. New York hit a new low for the index.

Nationally, prices have risen 3.8 percent from their April 2009 bottom. But they remain 30 percent below their July 2006 peak. Seattle home prices registered no gain from March to April and were down 2.8 percent from the same period a year ago, the report said.

The median price of closed house and condo sales in King County was down nearly 2.9 percent to $340,000, compared to a year ago. Prices dropped 21 percent on Mercer Island and 17 percent on Auburn's West Hill and Vashon Island.

Prices jumped 13 percent in West Seattle; 10 percent in Redmond; and 9 percent in the Capitol Hill/Madison Park area of Seattle.

Median prices were down nearly 6 and 5 percent in Snohomish and Kitsap counties, respectively, and more than 4 percent in Pierce.

Across the service's 21-county reporting area 9,438 pending sales were logged, a 36 percent increase. Of these mutually accepted offers, 7,368 were in the four-county Puget Sound region — the highest volume since August of 2006. The service credited the surge to the federal home buyer tax credit that expired last week and rising consumer confidence.

Median home prices continued to decline on a year-to-year basis, but center officials said the reduction was much smaller than in recent quarters.

The median sales price during the first quarter was $245,900, 3 percent less than a year ago. Median prices ranged from $372,500 in San Juan County to $98,700 in Adams County.

Statewide, the number of sales was 92,720. That is 12 percent less than seasonally adjusted annual rates from the fourth quarter. But it's 36 percent above a year ago.

The data show the housing market is beginning to stabilize, officials said.

More employees are moving for a job as home prices recover from their plunge during the recession and employers have more secure outlooks, say providers of relocation services. But corporations are now less generous with moving assistance because of the decline in the housing market.

Just 11.9 percent of the population moved in 2008, the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1948, according to census data. That improved slightly in 2009, to 12.5 percent of the U.S. population.

In a housing market that's still rocky, the biggest roadblock for a job transfer is selling the employee's old house, said Elizabeth Portalla, a vice president at Mobility Services International. With the decline in home prices, it may be worth significantly less than when it was bought, or worth less than the mortgage.

That means an employer, afraid of incurring big losses, is much less likely to buy the moving employee's home outright, said Dan Keating, an executive at Cartus, which provides global mobility services.

“Companies are cutting back on actually buying employees' homes and are providing more support and assistance in helping employees sell the home,” Keating said.

Employers are much more likely now to mandate a maximum price for the listing. A too-high listing could delay the sale of a house in a slow market, adding to a company's cost of providing temporary living assistance to employees in a new city.

In a survey done last year by Worldwide ERC, the relocation industry's professional association, 17 percent of companies said they added policies to help compensate employees for selling their homes at a loss during a job transfer. The reimbursement is usually tiered by employee's seniority level. A survey released in May by Weichert Relocation Resources found the most common maximum cap on such a payment was $50,000. Keating, who has worked in relocation services for 25 years, said the average cap he sees is probably about $25,000.

More companies are also offering bonus payments to get transferring employees to sell a home as fast as possible, Portalla said.

Below management level, policies are less generous. Keating said some level of assistance with a home sale is the norm. But sometimes a company just issues a lump-sum payment that covers the cost of selling a home, moving and a temporary living allowance in the new location, Portalla said.