It wasn’t exactly huge news, but last week, the revised economic numbers showed improvement! When does that ever happen—when the final revisions come in, don’t they always seem to be in a downward direction? Yet Friday’s release from the Associated Press told a different story. Earlier reports of a slowing U.S. economy had been revised to show a year whose beginning “wasn’t quite as bad as first thought.” The reason was housing—which “got a bigger boost” than first reported.

This is all to suggest that the wider economic climate for local real estate—that is, for sellers and buyers midway through this year’s spring/summer selling season—is one that shows improvement (“slight improvement,” according to many—but we’ll take it). Fears of an economic stall seem to have vanished for the moment. Lacking was anything in the economic tidings that would suggest the Portland area’s real estate picture includes any storm clouds on (or […]

The headline had to stop everyone who even glanced at Bloomberg’s Technology section: Town readers (even those who are relatively gimmick-immune) would have been hard pressed to pass up last Wednesday’s Bloomberg Technology headline: “Can This Real Estate Gimmick Save the World?”

Whether the subject of the article really is a gimmick or “the greatest real estate amenity since running water” is yet to be determined—but it’s certainly, at the very least, an intriguing idea. Steve Wynn is tearing up the golf course behind his Las Vegas Strip hotels to replace it with an installation. And with 60 of them already in place (and 250 on the drawing board), if it’s a gimmick, it’s one that’s making a large splash beyond the real estate world.

The core of the idea is the creation of gigantic artificial clear-water lakes (“lagoons” is the preferred word). It is hoped that real estate promoters will see the innovation as adding an attraction that turns otherwise […]

They’re called “swings” or “bridges”—but they don’t belong on a kindergarten playground. They’re the specialized loans that can help Potland home buyers get past the kind of cash crunch that can snag an otherwise perfectly achievable purchase.

This is a timing situation that happens quite frequently; it’s in the nature of residential real estate transactions. Suppose you are selling your Portland Metro area home to an out-of-state buyer. The deal is well on its way to being finalized on the agreed schedule. Meanwhile, you have found a new, bigger place that’s perfect for your family (it’s in Portland, too—also in a great neighborhood). The problem is that you need to close on the new home before the sale of your current one is finalized. That’s the cash crunch.

The solution can be a bridge loan (AKA, a swing loan). It’s a loan for the short period of time that will allow a home buyer to close on the new home purchase as the other sale […]

The Huffington Post (“Huffpo” to its friends) has an entire section devoted to real estate doings. Although the vast majority of those dispatches are tidbits about awesomely expensive celebrity condos in Manhattan, sometimes the Huffpo editors’ attention wanders momentarily to other matters. Last month they uncovered a study which delved into a topic of interest to any local homeowner who’s been thinking about when to enter the northwest listings.

The best time to sell a house, according to the study, is, specifically, RIGHT NOW!!!!

That is, between May 1 and May 15!

Or maybe not.

The picture for Portland was a little less definite than the Big Picture claim that “homes that sold in the first half of May…sold, on average, around 1.5 days faster than homes that weren’t listed in that timeframe.” It turns out that the study, which was put together by Zillow, was wishy-washy when it came to specifying individual areas. The […]

When you find yourself being drawn to the real estate listings, even only to peek, it’s a clue that something big may be on the horizon. Either you’ve begun to think you’ve begun to outgrow your current northwest home, or you’re just curious about what could be available in case you should decide to upsize, or downsize—or to move on because of a professional change that only just might be hanging there as a possibility…

The tipoff is the twinge of curiosity about those other local homes—the ones that are out there on the market this spring. It’s always somewhat interesting to see what’s on the Portland Metro market at any time, but if you find yourself visiting the listings more than every once in a while, it’s probably because you sense that you might find your own future somehow intertwined with one of them. Or that these could become the competition if you […]

Any dedicated bargain hunter who scours the Portland listings is not surprised to find among the most deeply discounted entries one of two notations: foreclosure or short sale.

Everyone knows what the “foreclosure” designation means—it’s been repossessed by the bank. It’s an REO (real estate owned). By discounting the asking price, the lending entity invites buyers to take the property off its books. It is here that the economists’ favorite acronym, “TANSTAAFL” (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), comes into play. Foreclosed properties have frequently been neglected by their previous owners, who are not happy campers. So the cost of rehabilitation must be factored in before any offer is made. Still, foreclosures can represent real opportunities for buyers with patience and determination.

Slightly different are foreclosures’ first cousins: Portland’s short sale listings. There are any number of unforeseen circumstances that can cause an owner to fall into financial distress, […]

Selling your Portland home is the kind of major undertaking that has so many facets just deciding where to start can delay liftoff. Since there is no actual “right” place to begin, like other mammoth projects, just digging in anywhere will do. The happy truth is that when you’re selling a home, once momentum gets going, the rest of the pieces tend to fall into place.

To get the ball rolling, here is a pre-sale checklist of major activities that selling your Portland home will entail. To get started, pick any one:

• Nagging problem elimination. Very few of us attend to every home maintenance problem as they gradually develop. If there were a reliable poll on the subject, I’d guess that 95% of local homeowners have at least a two or three areas that we’ve learned to live with—but those areas will need to be attended to before we get very far toward selling our home. Identifying them is a pre-sale first step…then […]