We often hear of the “Shadow Market” of homes that are not in the Portland real estate market statistics reported; there is a large inventory of home out there waiting to be listed. Other factors of a “shadow market” include sellers that are waiting for the market to improve and foreclosed homes that banks are sitting on (I’ not sure where they are keeping them).
Regardless, foreclosures are a factor in our market, all around Oregon. If the house is owner occupied, the foreclosure eviction process is pretty straight forward within the legal framework. There is a legal framework for tenant occupied properties as well (punchline: seek legal advice if you have any questions).
The State of Oregon’s “Tenant Foreclosure Rights in Oregon” is the starting place that tenants looking for information regarding their rights if the home they live in goes into foreclosure. Some laws have been changed as of September 2009.
It’s been four years since the roofers caused a fire at our house on Thanksgiving. Thankfully the house was still in the remodeling stage, we weren’t living there and nobody was hurt. The sounds of the fire department cutting into the roof is still a vivid memory.
This is a pretty cool fund-raising concept: the Pink Glove Dance. The email I received from my aunt, a nurse in Toronto:
Emily (MacInnes) Somers created, directed and choreographed this in Portland last week for her Medline glove division as a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness. This was all her idea to help promote their new pink gloves. I don’t know how she got so many employees, doctors and patients to participate, but it started to really catch on and they all had a lot of fun doing it.
When the video gets 1 million hits, Medline will be making a huge contribution to the hospital, as well as offering free mammograms for the community. Please check it out. It’s an easy and great way to donate to a wonderful cause, and who hasn’t been touched by breast cancer?
The video was shot locally at St. Vincent Hospital.
These graphs show a selection of real estate markets, primarily on the west coast. The top one starts in January 2003. The lower expands out 2009. Portland is the thick line in both graphs. Miami hit 280.87 in December 2006. At that time, Detroit was at 119.51, a 161.36 point difference. Today, those locations are at 149.69 and 72.9 respectively, a 77.2 point drop. Portland peaked in July 2007 at 186.51 and is now 149.72.
It’s 6:15 AM and the report is not posted on the Standard & Poor’s website so I’m going to go make another cup of coffee…
…The press release is online now but the spreadsheet data is not. Portland’s housing market took a slight dip, along with about half of the markets reported in the Index. 149.72 is .5% off August’s reported level. Overall the national real estate market continued to climb.
I’ll post this now and come back later with some graphs.
* What: S&P/Case-Shiller September home prices indexes
* When: Tuesday, Nov. 24, 9 a.m. (1400 GMT)
* Economists’ median forecast: +0.8 pct for 20-city index
-9.0 pct yr-over-yr 20-city
NEW YORK, Nov 23 (Reuters) – U.S. home prices likely rose
in September for the fifth straight month, trimming the year’s
losses, a Reuters survey on the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller
indexes found…
As you probably could have guessed, I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon and say that the housing market is all fine and dandy now that we’ve seen two months of big jumps in existing home sales.
In fact, that bandwagon isn’t all that crowded; a lot of the housing cronies are saying that this big surge is all about the first time home buyer tax credit, which was originally supposed to expire November 30th but was then extended to closings by June 30th. The numbers today represent buyers who weren’t banking on the extension. Now that demand has been pulled forward so much, we are going to see a falloff after one more monthly reading…
The Case Shiller Index is released on the last Tuesday of each month (tomorrow). The Index has a three month lag; tomorrow’s report will tell us about September. RMLS Market Action comes out midway through the following month; we already have data through October. Without a massive amount of statistics, does RMLS Market Data predict what the Case Shiller Index for the Portland real estate market look like? I don’t think so.
The graph ab0ve with inventory levels makes the average sales price and Case Shiller Index (for Portland) hard to discern so the graph below removes inventory but is the same otherwise.
Ghost writers are nothing new. Some will, most will not, be surprised that the content for some real estate blogs is written by others and posted under the author’s name. That is not the case here. I write my own content or cite where it came from.
I was surprised to learn yesterday that their are Realtors using ghost writers to make them look good on Facebook and other social media websites. That doesn’t thrill me. I think Realtors need to find the balance on social media and having others pretend to be you isn’t the way to do that and earn trust.
Dorothy and Toto received the ultimate relocation package out of Kansas thank to wind. Last night, a storm blew in from the Oregon coast and through Portland and the surrounding areas taking down trees and knocking out power. Wind gusts hit 49mph in the West Hills and over 90mph at the coast.
As of now, there is only one reported power outage around Portland but zooming out will reveal more. The graphic here is a static shot of PGE’s dynamic safety and power outages map. They map feature also works from my iPhone so if your power is out, you can still check the site if you have a charged phone.
We’ll be checking in with our listings today to make sure that the wind blew through without damage.
October 2009 RMLS Market Action for Portland was released yesterday. The complete RMLS report for all areas is here. The 6.5 months of inventory is the lowest it has been since August of 2007 and is down 67% since January’s all time high. Inventory is a ratio of the number of months it would take to sell all the active listings at the current rate of sales.
Pending sales are up 64% compared to October of last year but those properties are selling at a discount: the average sale price is down 12.6% and median price down 10.9%. The average sales price of a residential property in October was down compared to September and the whole year.
We proudly support the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Oregon with our charitable dollars. Charles is a member of the Junior Board for the Oregon chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. We also support Transitional Youth and other local charities.
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