Still a great time to buy a home or investment property in Portland Oregon, look at the #'s
Submitted by Bruce Hecht
I found this great article by Dean Treftz from The Wall Street Journal Online to be very interesting discussing the national and local market trends.
The housing news isn't all grim. Even as prices sag nationwide, there are several cities in the country where home values are climbing smartly.
Portland, Oregon, Boise, Idaho, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Houston, Austin, and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., are among the cities bucking the national trend. Homes' appreciation there between the fourth quarters of 2005 and 2006 far exceeded the national average of 5.9%, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.
"All real estate is local, despite the headlines," says Lawrence Yun, the senior economist for the National Association of Realtors. Nationwide, the median existing-home price fell 1.3%, to $212,800 in February from $215,700 in February 2006, according to preliminary NAR statistics.
Most of the cities also have one or more strong industries to drive their economies, like Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Intel just to site a few examples. Their economies are strong and housing prices are still perceived as affordable, luring buyers into the market.
Today's declining prices nationwide are in part the result of an earlier explosion of short-term investors in Florida, California and other booming markets. Recently, both investors and long-term homeowners have been cashing in or cutting losses in formerly hot markets and settling in areas that avoided the boom, such as the Carolinas, parts of Georgia and Tennessee, areas of Texas, the Western mountain states and the Pacific Northwest. The growth of Portland, Salt Lake City, Boise and Seattle can be attributed in part to an influx of former Californians and people opting out of slumping Las Vegas or Phoenix. The trend may have created smaller echo booms.
While some experts worry that a new group of states could face a boom/bust cycle, local real-estate agents and expert economists predict stable and steady growth for the near future. Since the cities have strong economies and builders, lenders and investors are increasingly cautious, homes are less likely to become extremely overvalued than in booming markets in the first half of the decade.
