Happy Holidays from Our Team!

There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Hello, and welcome to our very last blog of the year!

We want to wish you a very Merry Christmas! We hope you're enjoying this wonderful time with your loved ones. We know we are!

We also want to say Happy New Year! We hope you have a safe and happy New Year celebration!

Lastly, THANKS for letting us serve you in 2014! We're looking forward to another fantastic year!

We'll see you in 2015!

Should You Be Selling Now?

 There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Should You Be Selling Now?

Why does it make sense to list your home during the holidays? We hope to explain the reasons why today, in our latest blog post. First, let's get some facts out of the way about this market:

• There are fewer sellers
• There are fewer buyers
• Inventory is below 3 months

In the Portland metro, we are still below 3 months of inventory and have a low supply with an increasingly high demand. 

Buyers during the holiday season are traditionally buyers that need to purchase before the end of the year. Either they are relocating due to work, or have to buy before the end of the fiscal year for tax purposes. These buyers are looking for good, quality homes and yours could be the one they pick. 

We wouldn't advise anyone to take their home off the market if it is already there. We are still below 3 months of inventory and we still have a high demand for homes, with much less competition. 

If you have any questions, feel free to give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to serving you!

How Being Hesitant Will Hurt You

 There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

How Being Hesitant Will Hurt You

Thanks for checking in with us today. We are excited to be talking today about the pre-holiday real estate market. This market sometimes gets a bad reputation for being slow and stagnant, but if you take a look at some of the statistics we have compiled, you will see that is not the case. Here are some of them:

• The number of people out looking for homes at this time of year has increased by 58% from last year
• We are seeing home appreciation rise across the board, specifically in the urban market, where we are seeing multiple offers and appreciation rates in the high single digits. 
• We have about 3 months of inventory, putting us in a seller's market.
• We have seen about a 22 day increase in time on the market. 

Right now we are seeing a perfect storm for sellers. When you don't have a lot of supply on the market, but still have the demand that we do right now, this will allow home prices to go up and your time on the market to decrease.

If you have any questions about the Portland real estate market, be sure to reach out to us. We would love to answer your questions. 

Selling Your Home: Fact vs. Fiction

There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Selling Your Home: Fact vs. Fiction

We recently got a call from a client in September who told us that an agent had advised them to take their home off of the market until January. They wanted a second opinion in the matter. We told them to absolutely not take it off the market and once we got ahold of the listing in September, we had it sold by early October. The point of this blog today is to separate the facts of real estate from the fiction.

Facts

• Right now we have a tremendous amount of low inventory
• A traditional balanced market has around 6 months of inventory, we currently have 2.6 in the Portland metro and SW Washington. 
• Traditionally, we have fewer homes on the market in the Fall months
• Market activity in October and November are the 4th and 6th highest of the year, respectively
• Interest rates remain phenomenal, right around 4%

These are all true facts. The fall is a great time to sell, especially in our market. Our 2.6 months of inventory has buyers out there chomping at the bit to get your home.

Fiction

• Properties don't sell in the fall or the winter
• The fall and winter are buyer's markets

As you can see from the above statistics, these assumptions simply aren't true. The fall selling season is underrated and with conditions the way they are, our market is set up ideally for sellers.

If you have any questions about selling in our market, or about real estate in general, give us a call. We'd be glad to help you out!

The Hidden Secrets of Zillow

There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home,click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

The Hidden Secrets of Zillow

Zillow says your home is worth what?? Zillow, the most popular online home search website out there, uses data and analytics to determine the value of your home. They do a great job at giving you a broad picture of what your home is worth and are useful tools to use to see what's going on in the market.

However, these sites do have some downfalls. They really do not take into account many variables that greatly affect your home's value. They don't account for supply and demand, nor do they factor in home renovations or location of the home.

We're not saying to ignore Zillow's estimates, but take them with a grain of salt, and talk to a real estate professional to help you analyze that data so you can best price your property. This strategy will net you a lot more money in the long term.

If you have any questions about the data you're seeing on Zillow or any other questions, let us know. Give us a quick email or phone call, we'd be glad to help you out!

What You Should Know Before Building Your Home

There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

What You Should Know Before Building Your Home

As you know, there is a great deal of new construction in the Portland and southwest Washington area. In fact, there is so much that keeping up with demand is difficult. 

With construction up 50% from last year, there are a few things we think you should know before starting a new custom built home.

The first and most important thing is planning your budget. This will allow you to decide what part of your custom home is most important to you, whether it be faucets and outlets or cabinets and woodwork. 

The next step is deciding whether or not you want to hire an agent. 

If you do it yourself, you have to pick your lot, architect, and builder. You should be sure to get numbers from each, make sure that they have experience so you can feel confident going forward.

If you want help, make sure you hire an agent that has experience and a working team. 


We would love to help you make you real estate decisions! If you have any questions about the Portland and southwest Washington market, call us at (503) 594-0805 email us at info@westonepro.com

Low Inventory Will Result in High Profits

There are many great Portland area homes for sale. Click here to perform full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at (503) 594-0805 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Low Inventory Will Result in High Profits

It's an exciting time in the  Portland real estate market. If you were thinking about buying a new home or selling your old one, now is the perfect time to get into the market. Let me tell you why.

We are currently in a low-supply inventory crisis. This is not a bad thing, as the word crisis would normally imply. This has turned the summer season into a hot sellers market. In some areas of Portland, we only have 1-2 months of inventory and homes are selling extremely fast. 

The hottest areas in Portland right now are Close-in and Urban. A lot of time when we sell properties in these area, we will have multiple offers before the property is even listed. 

If you were even entertaining the notion of selling, now is the perfect time. With low inventory, there is little to no competition for your home. I have been advising all my clients not to wait for perfection, because right now, you will get multiple offers.  That will drive up the price, getting you more money for your home in a short period of time. 

One of the things driving the market is interest rates. Borrowing money is very cheap right now, as the rates are extremely low. With the combination of interest rates and low inventory, now is a perfect time to buy or sell. If you have any questions, please give us a call or e-mail and we would be happy to help you.