New Portland Real Estate Market Data

The RMLS — the official property database for the Portland real estate market — has just released some exciting new reports!

Now, I know that the words “report” and “exciting” don’t usually go together, but numbers are my secret weapon — and yours, too. The more we know, the better we can market your home or the better offer we can write on the home you want to buy.

I’ll introduce you to some of these new reports here in my real estate blog, and the first one I want to talk about is titled “RMLS Average and Median Sale Price Appreciation by Area”. It takes a look back all the way to the early 1990’s to give us a picture of how home prices have changed in the city of Portland and surrounding areas. This long-range look allows us to get a picture of how Portland sales prices have fluctuated over time, and gives some interesting region-to-region comparisons.

I find the median numbers particularly helpful because they tend to be less skewed by outliers. Remember how in 7th-grade math, you found the average of a set of numbers by adding all the numbers in the set together, then dividing by the number of items in the set?

To get the average sale price for Portland in 2014, we add up the prices of the all the homes that sold that year, then divide by the number of homes that sold. In this case, the result is $333,000. The median price is taken by listing all the prices for those homes in order from lowest to highest, then choosing the one in the middle. In the case of the Portland housing market, this middle — or median — number is always lower than the average because the dozen multi-million dollar homes that might have sold are far outweighed by the hundreds of homes in the $200,000 range that sold. The median sale price for a Portland home in 2014 was $285,500.

Here’s the cool part: Back in 1992, the median sale price for a home in metro Portland was just $97,000 (average: $116,000)! Another interesting observation from this report is how much the market varies between the various Portland neighborhoods, as you can see in these two graphs. The 2009 real estate market crash really hit Southeast Portland hard, with a 16% drop in the median sale price that year. In North Portland, the slump was not as noticeable, with only an 8% decline in the median sale price. On the other hand, both neighborhoods seemed equally resilient in bouncing back and now have median sale prices above and beyond their 2007 peak.
Do you love real estate data yet? If so, you should be getting the monthly Portland RMLS report via email. Stay informed, and have a good Portland real estate agent on your side, and your real estate transaction is sure to be a success.