Have you ever wondered about the way Portland listings appear on your screen when you search for houses for sale through one of the search engines? If you have already found a local Realtor’s® website (like this one!), it’s easy to search the Portland’s (and all the surrounding towns’) listings right from that site without bothering further. You’ll come up with the most current accurate information because it represents direct updated information from Portland’s multiple listing service.

But whenever you go searching for Portland area listings through Google, Bing, or any of the other search engines (there are scads of them), you will see that what comes up will be quite different. You may find individual house listings, alternating with real estate agency home pages, mixed in with aggregators like Zillow and real estate magazine ads. Depending upon which search engine and the way you phrase your inquiry, you might actually come up with an interesting listing…or one […]

Last week, Portland residents who keep their eyes on real estate trends got some fresh information about one factor that seeks to put numbers to the relative benefits of buying versus renting. When real estate values head south, buying may seem to be a particularly risky proposition…even though later it’s clear that the value proposition was actually improving. The trade-offs are hard to quantify. Even now, if Portland listings reflect prices on the rise, renters who failed to lasso the most extreme bargains may assume they’ve missed the boat.

Putting numbers to the problem is a complicated, pencil-snapping exercise. In addition to current dollars spent, it involves speculating on future market values. But Portland readers who checked into CoreLogic’s Insights blog found some new data toward the end of last week, presented in an interesting way. It arrived in an article that looked at one particular aspect of today’s national real estate landscape “seven years after the last […]

When it comes to selling Portland luxury homes, you really can’t pigeonhole who the ‘typical’ buyer is likely to be. The 9% of buyers that make up the pool of ‘affluent’ prospects are themselves pretty much profile-proof—and the dollar value that 9% represents fluctuates substantially from one end of the country to the other. On the other hand, it is possible to take advantage of features that are growing in popularity with today’s luxury home buyers.

Realtytimes researchers found that affluent buyers are increasingly attracted to features that belong in the smart-home technology category. Smart thermostats that owners control right from their smartphones, wireless homes security camera arrays, and fully tricked-out home theaters are draws. To qualify at the high end, an entertainment center really should be controlled by a single device. Let’s face it: no matter how fancy a home theater might be, if three or four remote controls are visible, they’re certain to draw scowls!

Kitchen tech—of the kind that marries function with fashion—continues to gain […]

You usually can’t find as many Portland lease option opportunities being offered as you would have a few years ago. Because the more normal marketplace has given buyers more confidence and sellers more and better offers, some of the usual reasons that Portland lease options come about rarely develop.

One of the appeals to renters that a local lease option conveys is that it provides some financial wiggle room. Back when housing values in the Portland metro area were in freefall, buying seemed like a much more risky proposition than it does today. After all, nobody rushes out to buy something they think is going to be on sale in a month or two—and for a long stretch during the financial crisis, that did seem to be more likely than not. Especially for would-be buyers unnerved by the press reports of that period, renting for a while longer seemed the prudent course…even if bargain real estate prices made it tempting.

A lease option (short […]

There are many generalizations that can be truly instructive for homeowners with Portland homes for sale. The undeniable importance of “location, location, location!” is a good one; de-clutter! as a main order of business is another…as is the wisdom of researching neighborhood comparables.

Anybody with homes for sale in Portland can usually visit the National Association of Realtors® website for useful nuggets of that kind of information. However, one article that appeared there last week seemed to me to be less than real estate gospel—although it was thought-provoking. It dealt with features that might make some homes for sale harder to sell; features that most people might assume would improve rather than curtail a home’s appeal.

The article named seven otherwise “awesome” features that the author, Jamie Wiebe, thought belonged in that category.

First was a school next door, for the main reason […]

I’ll admit it: the tease was irresistible. There was no good reason why I should take the time to read on, even though it was near the top of the Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate section. This was not likely to be the kind of relevant background information that would be useful in my daily Portland real estate dealings.

But the tease was not something I could just skim past and forget. The words were dangling there on the screen; almost a dare:

“Where Home Prices Start at $115 Million.”

It wasn’t just the $115,000,000 home price that aroused curiosity. After all, this was the WSJ Real Estate section—where there are almost always stories about properties somewhere or other in the world with asking prices that numb the mind. It was the idea that there could actually be anywhere on Planet Earth where home prices start north of one hundred million!

Think of what the comparables reports […]