Moving from Spokane to Portland, why so expensive?

[oregon911]

Let's run a search on Zillow. First we search with no filters and say "homes in Corvallis." The search brings up 99 houses starting from $79,500 with median (not average) price of $384,900.

Then we apply a filter for 3+ bedrooms and 2+ bathrooms which is a must if you are not living alone. Now the number of houses drop to 78 starting from $194,000 with median price of $409,900.

Then we apply another filter for age since we don't want a house older than 40 years since Oregon is an earthquake zone and older homes are hazardous. In fact, earthquake readiness was added to Oregon building codes in 1990s. If we use 1977 as a conservative cut-off, we now have 43 houses left starting from $215,000 and median price of $435,000.

I didn't even start filtering based on lot size (even using quarter acre as your lot size brings the minimum house price to $330,000), whether different parts of the house are updated (such as kitchen and bathrooms), how much repair the house requires, whether the house is in a good/bad neighborhood, mobile homes and a bunch of criteria people use to pick houses. A decent home will easily go over $400,000.

[OneTimeSEALover]

"Decent houses". Well, with that qualification, there's no way to know what is the situation of the house. No use discussing anything that subjective.