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re:PDX is presented by Claire Widmark, broker affiliated with M Realty LLC in Portland, Oregon.
Phone: 971-275-3691
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Camera Friendly? HGTV has a role for you
My First Place, one of HGTV’s gazillion home shows, is coming to Portland to shoot soon.
From their invitation:
We are looking for fun, high-energy people who are just starting the home-buying process for their first place! Our goal is to capture all the trials and tribulations of looking for, bidding on and buying your first place.
Ideal candidates will be enthusiastic buyers with a great story to tell and a desire to share their experiences. Singles, couples and families are all invited to apply!
Interested? Call Jon Kawano at (303) 712-3222 or email at JKawano@highnoonentertainment.com.
I’m ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille.
Hat-tip Marisa Swenson & PortlandNeighborhood.com.
Buy Your Own Slice of Middle Earth
Bend’s Lord of the Rings-styled, 6-acre development is now for sale at $1.3M.
Umpqua Bank originally loaned $3.4M in 2004 for the project. An auction in December yielded no bidders and Umpqua foreclosed on January 16.
The Shire, a 15-lot, village-themed concept in the southeastern part of the city, was marked by its Old World housing styles and fantasy setting styled after J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series.
The CC&Rs promoted the use of English architecture, including unique stonework, artificial thatched roofs, terraced gardens and a network of streams and ponds with a pathway leading to what was called The Ring Bearer’s Court.
No word if the Mordor subdivision will suffer the same fate.
Photo courtesy of the Bend Bulletin.
Portland Real Estate Market Slows To New Lows – January 2009 Results Preview
Stagnant is the word to describe Portland’s real estate market over the past three months, emphatically punctuated by a new low-water mark for sales activity in January 2009.
With just 713 homes closed, my early look at January 2009′s activity showed that less than 4% of the active housing inventory is being absorbed (sold), compared to an 8% monthly average in 2008 and closer to 15% in 2007. Of course, the leading indicator, pending sales in November and December, predicted this crater in sales activity.
The median price ($250,000) is down nearly 11% year-over-year, and off 17% from the peak. The median value is now equivalent to that of October 2005. The average sale price ($297,100) is down 13% from 12 months ago and off 16% from the peak of August 2007.
If there’s a silverish lining, pending sales staged a marginal rebound in January, up to 1,100 from December’s paltry 810 pending sales. But its still less than half of the January average measured over the past 5 years.
(Note that RMLS will be scrubbing these numbers for their February 15 report, but these trends are pretty clear.)
Anecdotally speaking, buyer activity is picking up significantly since the New Year, primarily in the $200,000 to $300,000 price range. I can’t put my finger on why that is the case, but apparently, some buyers are feeling more bullish than they were in the second half of 2008, and are trying to capitalize on some of the ‘incentives’ available to them (i.e. tax ‘credits’, low interest rates, buyer’s market, etc.). We’ll see if that translates into pending sales in February.
Photo courtesy of terwilliger911, used under Creative Commons license.
Nip and Tuck
re:PDX gets a long-overdue facelift in anticipation of an upcoming property search feature and some new content ideas I’ve been mulling.
The new layout will allow me to do some micro-blogging on the right-hand sidebar in a section called Quick Hits, where I’ll touch on real estate news and interesting (hopefully) tidbits with some higher frequency. The main blog content will be devoted to the longer posts I typically write.
The property search application is next on the agenda, and, coming soon, a page devoted to Portland’s market statistics.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think of the new design.
