Housing: Is this another bubble? Opinions? (Portland, Hillsboro: insurance, mortgage, house prices)

[urbanlife78]

Originally Posted by KJoe11

The model of owning a starter home and moving up to a nicer one when your income increases does not apply in the Portland area. Very little new neighborhoods are being built.

For many owning a house in Portland is just not attainable. It is just one of the negatives of living in this beautiful state. IMHO, there is a slight housing bubble with the upper end of housing over $500,000. This is not San Francisco or LA. The income cannot sustain those kinds of prices.

This is the case with most cities that have built to their city limits....if one wants to move into a new neighborhood, then they either have to buy in the areas in the outer suburbs where there is still room to build new neighborhoods or move into an area that is being redeveloped as a new neighborhood like places like Slabtown.

The starter home in the past was the old workman houses that were often times fixer upper houses. Unfortunately in today's market, those same home sit in the $250-350K range which are the most sought after homes.

I am not sure I agree with you about the slight housing bubble with houses above $500K because they are still taking longer to sell with a much more limited market of buyers. Where the biggest demand is at is the $250-350K range, and those homes are ones that the income levels in Portland can sustain....though that does mean a good portion of people are not in the home buying market because finding anything under $250K keeps getting harder and harder.

[AndyAMG]

Everyone knows my opinion on the matter.

It's going to burst in 2016 and continue a downward slide through 2020

[urbanlife78]

Originally Posted by AndyAMG

Everyone knows my opinion on the matter.

It's going to burst in 2016 and continue a downward slide through 2020

That works for me, that would put it right in the ballpark for when my wife and I will be looking to buy a house.

[Sherwoody]

Originally Posted by Sherwoody

Two lower end homes (under $300,000) in Sherwood I've been watching have reduced their prices two and three times so perhaps my wish for a more reasonable market will pan out when we re-enter the fray.

And for contrast, this sold $23,000 over asking at the tail end of summer.

https://www.redfin.com/OR/Tigard/954...ource=myredfin

[SETabor]

I don't think it's a pure bubble. Some of the price rise is due to demand and increased employment. There are speculators out there though. Instead of a burst and slide, there will be stagnation.

[bler144]

Originally Posted by Minervah

The relative wealth of 10% of the population you are describing must be very wealthy indeed to make that much of an impact on the housing market.

Portland (city) QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau

Two problems there:

1) The stats you link cover just the city, not the metro.
2) Also, and perhaps more importantly, only about half the boomers are over 65. Median birth year for living boomers is somewhere around 1956.

Not to mention that's 2010 data and would miss almost all of Portland's recent 'surge' in popularity, plus the median boomer would have been 54 y.o. in 2010.

Nationwide boomers are about 23% of the current population, and most research suggests they have a highly disproportionate amount of both wealth and disposable income.

[Discovery1]

Originally Posted by urbanlife78

That works for me, that would put it right in the ballpark for when my wife and I will be looking to buy a house.

I would wait at least, until 2017.

The entire west coast housing market peaked passed May and spilled over to June. Thing started to slow down late last month and you will see that data come in next month. I wouldn't be surprised by December is that prices will be reduced and there you will have a new trend.

[Bluesmama]

Originally Posted by jjpop

The Portland Metro Area, just as much of the US, went through a housing bubble in the middle-2000s that had fully burst by about 2009 or so, sending prices way down.

Now they are back up again. Granted, the economy is MUCH better than it was in '08 through '11 (or '12), but other than this being a trendy place to move to that's relatively inexpensive for the west coast, what could possibly sustain these prices we're seeing?

The previous bubble was brought on, in large part, by people getting out of the stock market and putting their money into property. Other than the volatility we've seen over the summer in the stock market, it's not like we've had the kind of stock sell-off that we had in '08. So people are bringing money from other sources to finance their home purchases. Where is this money coming from?

Are people moving here with their jobs? I guess Oregon is doing pretty well on the jobs front based on the government figures, but if I read it correctly, a lot of Oregon's new jobs are service sector jobs... Those don't seem to be jobs that would help a homeowner finance a home that costs $350k and up.

It's certainly partly supply and demand. Housing inventory is very low, so people can charge what the market will bear. Maybe that's part of the question: Why are people hanging on to their homes?

And really, is this all because we had such a mild winter that the people that came to Portland in the spring of 2014 don't REALLY know what a Portland winter is like? I'm semi-serious here--do newcomers think every winter is like the winter of '14-'15 and they didn't get scared off?

I set up water accounts, so I sometimes get to hear a little about the people moving here. Some newbies work from home, others wanted to leave severe weather in other areas (climate refugees), while yet others have told me that they transferred here for new jobs at Intel.

My house is almost paid off but, at this point, I have no intentions of selling it because I do not want to start over with house payments. And in my neighborhood we have low turn-over except for two houses that are each getting occupied by 5th families since we moved here. Otherwise, nobody's leaving.

Unless I misunderstood your comment above, I don't give a rip about supplying my house to somebody else.

I do agree with what you said about the last couple of winters, although I don't think that's a criteria for most transplants.

Interesting times, that's for sure. Don't know what lower-income people will do before long.

[urbanlife78]

Originally Posted by Discovery1

I would wait at least, until 2017.

The entire west coast housing market peaked passed May and spilled over to June. Thing started to slow down late last month and you will see that data come in next month. I wouldn't be surprised by December is that prices will be reduced and there you will have a new trend.

I am not sure I would consider that a new trend yet, housing sales always typically slow down around December. The real measure would be next spring and summer compared to previous years.

[jjpop]

Originally Posted by Bluesmama

I set up water accounts, so I sometimes get to hear a little about the people moving here. Some newbies work from home, others wanted to leave severe weather in other areas (climate refugees), while yet others have told me that they transferred here for new jobs at Intel.

My house is almost paid off but, at this point, I have no intentions of selling it because I do not want to start over with house payments. And in my neighborhood we have low turn-over except for two houses that are each getting occupied by 5th families since we moved here. Otherwise, nobody's leaving.

Unless I misunderstood your comment above, I don't give a rip about supplying my house to somebody else.

I do agree with what you said about the last couple of winters, although I don't think that's a criteria for most transplants.

Interesting times, that's for sure. Don't know what lower-income people will do before long.

Oh, yeah, I'm with you on that. Our house value has increased about 20% (maybe more) since we bought it in 2009, so we could do pretty well if we sold. But there's no way I would sell now, mostly because the inventory of homes we would want is so low we would have a hard time finding a new place.

What I was referring to with that question is that it seems like the American habit of moving every 7 years, or whatever the statistics say, seems to not be playing out this year.

I don't know if this is a bubble or not. I do think the price increases seem unsustainable, but I wouldn't expect prices to decrease. If anything, I bet they will just flatten out. What would make prices decrease? If people put their houses on the market and they don't sell. Why wouldn't they sell? Because people stop moving here. But I don't see that happening... UNLESS... the climate refugees decide after a couple of normal, or, dare I say cooler than normal winters, that they miss their old climate.