• •Live, work, and entertain in a well designed, thoughtfully updated family home.

• Join an engaged, active, and well-organized community of successful neighbors.

• •Enjoy the lake’s finest private marina, just a short walk away.

• •Educate your children at some of the top-rated public schools in the area.

• Completely remodeled 5BR, 3BA 3,421 SF home with extensive built-ins has been impeccably finished.
• •Gourmet kitchen, wine-bar, formal dining room, great-room style family room, expansive back deck, complimented by an integrated sound-system make this home an entertainer’s dream.
• •Magnificent master suite with deck highlight thoughtful living spaces.
• •Two offices, each completely wired, are ideal for the modern family.

Offered at $799,000 MLS# 9022856

Virtual Tour Here

Click on any of the images below to see a bigger image

If it’s a good time to be a seller, can it also be the right time to buy?  Paradoxically, the answer is often yes.  How come?  Mortgage interest rates are extremely attractive right now.  If you think about buying a house payment instead of buying a house, it can get real easy to make an economic argument to buy now.

Example: Let’s assume that you have your eyes on a beautiful home that you could purchase today for $375,000 and you are in good financial shape and can put down 20% and will finance the $300,000 balance.  At a 5% interest rate, your monthly mortgage payment would be $1,610.  Let’s say you think this home might be worth 10% less in the future, so it could be purchased for $337,500.   This would be a significant price drop.  At the new purchase price, your 80% mortgage would only be $270,000.  If interest rates remained at today’s current 5%, your mortgage payment would go down to $1,449/mo for a monthly savings of $161/mo.

Let’s assume that you were correct and the home price bottomed at 10% below today’s price, and you timed the market perfectly.  Let’s also assume that mortgage interest rates rose 1% over the same period.  In this event, your monthly payment would actually increase nominally to $1,619/mo.  Given the assumptions in this example, you could end up with a higher monthly payment, even if you time the market perfectly, if interest rates increase by 1%.   The consensus of the economists we track expect the real estate market to bottom nationally in the 3rd quarter of this year.  Nationally we’re already at a 30 year high in housing affordability.  With the massive economic stimulus, it’s not unreasonable to assume that inflation will soon become a concern.  These same economists expect interest rates to start climbing this year, and increase significantly in 2010.

The advantage of buying today is you can take advantage of a great assortment of inventory and the buyer negotiating power to negotiate great terms with the inventory so high.  If you’re a first time home buyer you can also take advantage of the $8,000 tax credit and, of course you can take advantage of the interest deductions on your mortgage payments.  Add them up, and it’s not at all hard to make a compelling argument that it’s a very good time to “pull the trigger” on that home you’ve been eyeing.

Want to see more?  Check out the chart below to see the payment sensitivities to your own assumptions about how home prices and interest rates will change over the coming months.  In the cart below, I start with a base case of a $300K mortgage at 5%.  I then increase mortgage interest rates by 5% per period and decrease home prices by 5% per period.  The guts of this chart are principal and interest payments on a 30 year fixed schedule.

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I pulled preliminary numbers for February real estate activity in Portland, and want to report the following highlights:  Pending sales volume is up from January, despite the short month.  After all the month-end sales get reported we could end up with a ”nice” month.  Preliminary numbers have us down to about 11 months of inventory.  Since selling has been heaviest at lower price-points and especially with first time home buyers who are taking advantage of more affordable housing and tax credits, we’re not surprised to see healthier sales inventories in the east-side regions of Portland.

Bank-Owned and Short Sales are Selling in Portland

Over 25% of all the transactions in February were with bank-owned properties and properties requiring third party approval (short sales and relo’s).  18% of the active listings today are either bank owned or require third party approval.  Over 1/3  of the closed sales in Beaverton and Tigard areas were on these “distressed” properties.  Similarly deal hunters were active in Lake Oswego last month. Half of the current listings are vacant.  This is down slightly, which is good.  Nonetheless, we have noticed that many of today’s vacant listings become tomorrow’s short sale and/or bank-owned property.

We stand ready to help you understand how to maximize your proceeds if you want or need to sell.  Call us for a free consultation, and we’ll show you how we can court our extensive buyer traffic to get your pricing strategy right and connect you with your target audience.   If you’re ready to purchase,  we can help you find the right home and negotiate great terms.

Sign up here for our Investor Notification for Portland Bank Owned, Short Sales, Fixers & Foreclosures

Unlike Previous Springs where 1/4-1/2 of existing inventory sold, we never broke the 10% threshold in 2008.  The median home price in our market has dropped 1+% per month through our winter months.  Should we expect the bottom this Spring, as is being predicted by many national economists?  There is simply still too much available inventory on our market to support a pricing rebound in the next few months.

I believe that there is a significant “shadow inventory” of would-be sellers that want to sell, but are unwilling to sell at today’s market prices.  As you can notice above, new listing volume is actually down.    I believe the drop is even more significant given the large number of short sales and bank-owned reo property currently on the market.  Approximately 1/8 homes is a short sale or bank-owned.  If financial hardship is the only reason that some or many of these homes are being sold the drop in new listings for non-hardship owners is larger.

Even though we expect home prices to continue to retreat, it’s a buyers’ market and we’re helping our clients take advantage of the great selection, negotiate great deals, and lock in great mortgage interest rates.  We’re coaching clients to think in terms of house payments.

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Staging does what the fly does

To a behavioral economist, the flies etched in the porcelain of the Amsterdam airport are famous. Why?   They have quietly encouraged users to have better aim, which has reduced spillage by 80%.  They’re fun,  and their objective goes un-noticed.

The best staging does something similar:  it makes your home seem more spacious, more receptive to a buyer’s stuff, and yes, more fun.  Ideally, the staging goes un-noticed, and seems natural.  The nudge is natural too.  Good staging will typically result in 1/3 less time on the market, and as we all know, time is money.  Serious money when the market is retreating.

Having problems getting your home sold?  We’d be happy show you how we would help you get more buyers into your home and then nudge them into writing you an offer.

After framing the problem (see 8:15-11:15 in video), Gates suggest that the best way to improve education is to make better teachers.  I’m shocked. “If every teacher in the US was as good as our top quartile teachers, in 2 years we would close the gap with Asia, and in 4 years, we’d be blowing the rest of the world away.” That sounds like a vision worth achieving.

The last 9 minutes of this presentation Bill suggest a straightforward approach for making better teachers.  He highlights a set of charter schools in Houston called KIPP  (14:00), who’s deeply engaged in making teaching better.  Encouraging.  Achievable. Replicateable.  

If you’re interested in finding out more about KIPP, check out Work Hard Be Nice, by Jay Mathews.

Please share your thoughts about how we can make Portland’s schools better.  It’s probably the number one thing we can do to make our homes, and communities better.  In these tough economic times, I’m hopeful that we will collectively prioritize our investments in educaiton.

Portland Median Price

The median price for a Portland area home in December was $250,000, or 17% below the market peak which happened in July and August of 2007.    The snowstorm that closed schools for a week and the typically slow holiday season resulted in the lowest volume month in over two years.  Pending sales were less than half the volume sold in December of 2006.   The market seems to have driven many would-be sellers to the sidelines.  There is still a significant gap between the pricing of  homes currently for sale and the price of homes that have sold: median price of homes for sale is $300K, and $290K for homes listed in December.  Homes currently for sale have been on the market for an average of 144 days, compared to an 89 day average for those that sold in December.   These indicators all suggest that home prices will continue to retreat.   See December 2008 Market Report for Portland Metro Area.

There continues to be a significant pricing gap between the homes that are selling and those that are languishing on the market.

significant price reduction likely required to sell

As you might imagine, we see this repeated over and over. It’s awesome when everybody finds a feature of their new home that they absolutley love. If that’s missing, it’s probably not the right house.

These stories have renewed our interest in helping neighbors be more neighborly by hosting or promoting web spaces that make it easy for neighbors to connect.  It has always been our goal to foster community; our mosaic logo reminds us of this intent every day.

We’ll be spending some time on our web site in January to see if we can introduce some new tools or apps that would help us begin delivering on this intent.  If you have any suggestions, we love to hear them.

I thought you might enjoy some snowy pictures to help remind you how your friends and neighbors helped see you through the storm.

If you have any winter pictures to share, please email them to us.

I have to admit that there weren’t any surprises.  The projects are very straightforward: Insulate, use solar power, install water-saving devices, replace appliances with more energy efficient units, use local materials, and plant trees.  I like the way it organizes the suggestions and there are plenty of follow-on links to help you do more research.

If you have any other ideas, let us know.  We’d love to hear from you.