Portland Real Estate Blog

Death, taxes and Case Shiller on the last Tuesday of the month. Pretty much like clockwork but the Case Shiller Index for Portland, and other markets, hasn’t been quite as painful as the first two in recent months. The Portland real estate market remains flat, posting a .1% loss from September.

The Portland Case Shiller Index is at 149.88 [note the report lags three months so this is through September]. This represents a 49.88% increase in value from January 2000 when the Index was set to 100. The Index tracks 20 cities and Portland’s appreciation ranks sixth since then. Washington (179.71), New York (175.01) and Los Angeles (168.43) lead the way with Detroit bringing up the rear at 73.97. Detroit is the only city ranked in double digits; #19 Las Vegas is 104.70. Case Shiller reminds us: “Data presented in the spreadsheets are calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag.”

RMLS Market Action was released yesterday. The last page of the Portland Metro report focuses on condos. The median sales price is down considerably but has seen an uptick the last couple of months.  Closed sales appear to be fairly consistent but the number of listed condos has declined more than 20% since November of 2008. [both graphs from RMLS]

If you want to take a closer look at the reports for other regions, follow these links:

• - All Areas (52 pages)
• - Baker County
• - Columbia Basin
• - Coos County
• - Curry County
• - Douglas County
• - Lane County
• - Mid-Columbia
• - Portland Metro
• - SW Washington
• - Union County
• - Wallowa County

RMLS of Portland just released their Portland real estate market data for November 2009.  Inventory ticked up a little from October’s 6.5 months.  The 9% increase is less than the month on month increase in 2008 but in 2007 the inventory level remained almost static for the same period.

Must run.  More later.

A couple of weeks ago I took a look at whether RMLS Market Action could help us predict what the trailing Case Shiller report might look like?  The answer was no, at least not as reported.  It was pointed out that the methodologies are different.  RMLS Market Action does not include Clark County.  Case Shiller uses the entire Portland MSA which Wikipedia defines as:

The Portland-Vancouver, Oregon-Washington, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), also known as the Portland metropolitan area or Greater Portland, is an urban area in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington centered around the city of Portland, Oregon. The U.S. Census Bureau’s definition for the MSA is currently all of the following counties: Clackamas County, Oregon, Columbia County, Oregon, Multnomah County, Oregon, Washington County, Oregon, Yamhill County, Oregon, Clark County, Washington, and Skamania County, Washington. The Washington counties are separated from Oregon by the Columbia River.

The graphics from RMLS show that Clark County has been hit harder than the Portland area in some aspects and has done better in others:

It’s easy to get wrapped up in market statistics (me, the media and you) but we all have to remember that one “Portland Real Estate Market” is not necessarily the same market that someone else is talking about.

As reported earlier this morning, Case Shiller’s housing market data is now available.

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.

Yesterday I took some data from RMLS Market Action to see if it gave any indicator of what today’s Case Shiller report would look like and also reposted two articles written in advance of today’s report.  Nothing stood out from the graphs but one comment reminds us about the difference in methodology.  This links to Case Shiller’s methodology.

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.

News outlets are buzzing in advance of tomorrow’s Case Shiller report:

Reuters:

* 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…

Diana Olick at MSNBC this to say about  Case Shiller report:

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…

Portland’s numbers in tomorrow’s post.

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.

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.

Case Shiller for August reports that the Portland housing market is up from July but not by much and behind the national average.  Portland increased from was up .40 points to 150.4.  The national 20 city index was up 2.3 points.

The Portland real estate market has risen 3.61 points since its low in April.

More later.