Rental Market? (Vancouver, Camas: rentals, house, look for a job)

[siliconimplant]

My family is considering moving to the Vancouver/Camas area in the next year. My husband would likely work in Portland, and I would look for a job in education or libraries, preferably a school library). Our #1 priority is that our children are able to attend their "home school" and get a good education (they are in elementary school).

We have "escaped" the silicon valley in the past, only to return because the area where we moved was very conservative (we are not) and there were limited job prospects. For that reason, we plan to keep our CA home and rent it out for a year or two. Whatever we buy in WA would be the home we live in for a couple years, and then our hope would be to keep it as a rental and either move back to CA or, if all goes well, sell the CA house and buy our "forever" home.

What is the rental market like in Vancouver/Camas? Does it make more sense to buy (with an eye toward renting it out in the future) in one area over another?

Also--how conservative is this area? We are not church-goers and prefer that church and state be kept separate. We don't want our kids to feel like something is wrong with our family just because we don't subscribe to organized religion, but we do want them to know something about the world's major religions and be respectful of others' beliefs.

Thanks for any input you can give!

[bler144]

I don't think anyone can predict the future of the housing/rental markets enough to give you any certainty, particularly with Camas. If you assume the Portland metro continues to grow, it's possible the multiple upsides of Camas (pretty, quieter suburb with good schools) only make it more valuable, but it's also possible to imagine that the metro's inability to solve its traffic issues - particularly the bridges - makes the commute from there increasingly untenable.

While a bit of a bear on the housing market overall, Camas strikes me as a reasonably safe investment, since I tend to think Vancouver itself will grow, but that's far from a certainty.

By current national standards the area is moderate, and arguably maybe even skews a bit liberal on social issues. As the Portland metro goes it's conservative, particularly on fiscal issues.

But I would definitely look at where in Portland your husband would be working. A commute to the airport is fine, a commute downtown at prime hours is doable but not what I would call desirable, and a commute to the west side (Nike/Intel) is imo a bad idea.

[siliconimplant]

Thanks for your feedback. We plan to visit this spring and so he'll "practice" the commute at that time. Apparently some neighborhoods in Camas don't "allow" rentals, so that might make things tricky. Hopefully our realtor can give us more insight during our visit.