The 2009 Year End Recap of Portland, Oregon Real Estate Market: 

1-12-2010

Well 2009 was the year of inventory declines and continued market depreciation. Two thousand nine was the second straight year of market declines. Portland is desperately trying to get their real estate market back to normal, but it's still way too volatile. A big stat that is very telling is in December 2008 the inventory was at 14.1 while the inventory now is at 7.7%. That's almost a 50% decline year to date.

There are three main reason the inventory declined in the Portland, Oregon market. First, the inventory grew to such obscene levels in by January of 2009 that it only had one way to go, which was down. The second reason for inventory declines is that people simply stopped by houses due to economic fears and Portland's overwhelming job losses. The third main reason is that new listing were way down for the year. With double digit market depreciation people are so upside down on their houses they could not sell.

In 2008 people were in denial and finally started realizing that they could not sell their homes due to the market conditions, but in 2009 people understood this so they did not list their homes to begin with when the data didn't correspond. On top of it all those listing that never sold in 2008 were taken off the market in 2009 thus causing inventory levels to drop significantly. We are now in a more balanced market. The supply of homes still overpowers the demand a bit but we are getting close.

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