Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Portland Median Prices down 6.7% in August - RMLS Market Action

RMLS released their August sales data and in what shouldn't be a surprise at this point, median Portland prices continue to decline, falling 6.7% in August compared to last year. Average prices are also declining, falling 9.7% compared to August last year.

One major change to note is that the RMLS is now reporting the total time a property has been on the market, not just the most recent time since a re-listing. The change from 56 days to 121 days is largely due to this change, although some increase is due to more properties on the market and fewer buyers. This should help reduce the number of re-listings as re-listing a property will no longer reset it's time on the market, unless the property is off the market for over 30 days. Charles Turner talks about this in more detail on his blog.

Inventory in Months seems to have stabilized around 10 months of supply. I believe a "normal" market should be between 3-6 months of supply, but this is a metric that seems to change regularly.

The above chart also shows changes in th emarket by sub-region. This shows that some areas such as North Portland and NE Portland are holding up a bit better than areas such as Milwaukie/Clackamas. However take this data with a serious grain of salt, this is 12 month rolling data, not monthly data, so any significant changes are still being masked and areas such as N and NE Portland might be negative Year over Year, but won't show up for a few more months.

I'd love to see the RMLS report their data monthly instead of a 12 month rolling average. I bet it changes once the market picks up, as they'll want to highlight the increase. I'd like to see the change now.

Add to Technorati Favorites

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

remember too that the median price does not really reflect the entirety of what is going on. In Happy Valley for instance, there were lots of 3000-5000 sq ft houses being built and sold out there in 2006-2007. Now there are lots of smaller houses being sold. The small house market might be strong making the median price go down but the value of those sub $300K houses might actually be appreciating.

Anonymous said...

Yeah...and "mights" are found on a chickens azz. There's nothing increasing in value short term in the NW, much less Happy Valley. I live there. There are McMansions for sale everywhere, along with plenty of empty houses.

The Pac NW was late to the housing boom, and it will be late to crash as well. Just wait and see what a bloodbath the next 18-24 months is in NW real estate.

Lookout belooooooooooow!

When housing prices are near 3X median household incomes -we'll be near the bottom. Until then stay away from the capitulation that's about to hit NW real estate.

You don't need to look very far to see what's going to happen! Most of the country peaked in 2005 or early 2006 and is now crashing hard. NW real estate didn't peak until late 2007, and it won't crash to reality until 2009 or early 2010.

No...we won't be "different here".

Reality bites. Reality is that housing prices almost tripled between 2001 and present due to easy money, fraudulent mortgages, crooked appraisers, and stupid sheeple.

Reality is that the median house hold income was roughly FLAT during that time frame, and it still is.

Most of Alt-A loans made here to inflate the bubble don't even hit reset dates until 2009-2010. It happened in the rest of the country, and yes it will happen here as well. No question about it.

Walk away now or be priced in forever ! ! !

Anonymous said...

I see the RMLS has stopped lying about how they define a balanced market (they have been stating 6-8 months supply). Great, but I wonder what other numbers they may be manipulating. One significant one is seller concessions which they fail to address. Add about 2% to the declines in prices RMLS reports & that will be more accurate.

PDX real estate owners should have moved on by now to the second phase of this period of falling RE prices (acceptance). But I see by comments on this blog & others that many are still in the denial stage (not PDX, not my neighborhood, not my house we are special). Once the acceptance sinks in, probably within the next 6-12 months then the bloodbath will start in earnest. As infestors scramble to get out & foreclosures soar prices will tumble at alarmingly faster & faster rates. Based on PDX being severly overpriced, as a recent study by National City indicates, there is a high probability for 15-20% further prices declines.