A little bit of good news in Seattle

If the Seattle residential real-estate market is coming back to life — and that’s still a big if, despite a relatively upbeat monthly report Tuesday — it’s because of people like Lori Gifford. She and her fiancé, Scott Brush Goodwin, bought their first house last month. It’s a two-bedroom, one-bath former rental in the Arbor Heights neighborhood that the previous owner lost last year through foreclosure. Goodwin and Gifford paid Washington Federal Savings $249,000 for it. “I’ve been living in Seattle for 14 years, and I never really thought I could afford to buy a house,” Gifford says. But when they started looking this spring, “it all kind of came together,” she says. The key elements: Lower prices. Lower mortgage-interest rates. And new incentives for first-time buyers. The Northwest Multiple Listing Service reported Tuesday that pending single-family home sales in King County topped 2,000 in April, the first month that level has been reached since August 2007.