From today’s Seattle Times:
Home prices in the Northwest continued to climb at a double-digit pace in June compared to a year ago, easily twice the rate for the nation’s 20 largest metro areas.
Seattle home prices rose 11 percent, second only to Portland, where prices rose 12.6 percent, according to the Standard & Poor’s CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index, released Tuesday.
The article also goes on to state that Portland has topped the list of price gains for the last five months—even while other top markets have begun showing signs of slowing. Read the rest of this story here.
I was recently talking to a local real estate broker about rising house prices, and he had this to say about the current market in Portland: Developers and landlords will continue pushing prices higher and higher until the bubble eventually bursts—even though they know it will only hurt themselves and others. Why? Because the money is there now.
And it won’t be after the bubble pops. In other words, it’s kind of like this:
But every realtor tells me it’s a great time to buy! Besides, if I don’t own a house, how can I turn it into an illegal Airbnb?
This local real estate broker you were talking to isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Developers don’t “push prices higher”. It is people moving here that drive prices higher. Plus, the vast majority of home sales in Portland involve already constructed houses, not newly developed ones.
Can you post this on a billboard next to that SoFi “dumb people rent” billboard?
Get the word out and maybe it won’t be too late for us, like it was for this guy:
http://www.portlandbugle.com/2016/08/24/…
What’s your point? Rent, don’t buy? Join one of our many (+many+) homeless camps (sorry, ad hoc outdoor living enthusiast communities)? Consider Gresham?
At what point do we get to throw bricks at Vic Remmers? Is it now? I got my eye on a really great pile of bricks.
Hippo has a whole stack of glass bricks, too. Not as cheap, but it seems like it would be worth it. Aesthetically.
No deeper analysis of why Portland and Seattle’s prices have been rising faster relative to other major cities, which would both explain the rise and also why this isn’t a bubble that is going to burst anytime soon.
As expensive as Portland housing might seem to long-time locals, it is still ungodly cheap for a major city compared to most everywhere else on the west coast.
For somewhere around $300 sq. ft., you can buy a beautiful property in Alameda, Irvington, and many other highly desirable Portland neighborhoods. Comparatively you’re going to be paying north of $600 sq. ft. for a fixer in any halfway decent neighborhood in San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Combine that with Portland’s international reputation, influx of tech investment, and the fact that lots of people are able to work remotely and thus command higher average salaries than have been previously available in the local Portland economy, and you’re going to see increased upward pressure on both home prices and rents for the foreseeable future.
Especially since there was little to no new housing stock built in the early 2000s, and even the current rapid pace of construction and development is not enough to have supply keep up with the increasing demand.
So yes, even though nobody likes developers or realtors, if you are wanting to live in Portland for longer than the next 2-3 years and can afford to buy, you should absolutely buy.