My Portland Home is Not Selling. What do I do?

Since 2012 and until 2017 the Portland real estate market has been booming. Most would say that in 2018 the Portland housing boom is over! The real estate market is cooling off fast, in many areas and housing types (but not all). Read this article to find out what is really happening in the real estate market and finally what you can do to sell your Portland home now.

Portland Luxury Market is Cooling Fast

Right now if you are trying to sell a Portland Luxury Home or a condo or townhome, you are in the hardest hit portion of the Portland real estate market. Luxury home inventory is up. There are 196 active homes for sale in Portland over 1,000,000. That is 196 homes over 1 million for a buyer to choose from. Amazingly, only 50 homes over 1 million are currently pending. That is not good! We like to see a 50/50 ratio in active to pending sales, or the number of current actives to match current pendings. A real estate market is humming along if say there are 75 active homes for sale and 75 pending, or 25 active and 75 pending, but 196 active and only 50 pending – that’s pretty poor. For the 50 properties over 1 million that are lucky enough to be pending, the average time they took to get in contract was over 3 months. (All statistics are pulled from the RMLS today.)

For homes priced 800K to 1 million, it is even worse. There are 220 active for sale and only 59 pending! Those properties lucky enough to be pending took nearly two months to get into contract.

For homes priced 600K to 800K, 389 are active for sale and 197 are pending. This is better than the above two price points, but still not good at all, at nearly double the active properties for sale than pending in the same price segment. Those properties lucky enough to be pending took on average 49 days of market time to get an accepted offer.

Portland Condo Market is Cooling

There are 544 Portland condos for sale over 300K. Only 185 condos over 300K are pending. Again, this is not good. The real estate market is going well if those two numbers match and is hot if there are more pending sales than active at any given time. When there are 2 or 3 or 4 times as many active properties and pending properties in a given category – it is tough! It is not a seller’s market anymore in those categories, it is a buyer’s market.

Parts of the Portland Housing Market are still Hot

If you are selling a Portland detached house under 400K, guess what? It is still a seller’s market. There are 436 active Portland homes for sale right now under 400K and a whopping 468 detached homes pending under 400K. Remember that 50/50 example above? There are more pending than active in this market segment and so we have a seller’s market in this category. Even in this category, the numbers are not as hot as they were in 2016, 2017, but they are still good.

Should I sell now?

Um, yeah. If you think it is tough to sell now, just wait. First thing to know if you are having trouble selling your house now is that as far as the real estate market goes in Portland, it is not expected to get better moving forward (for the next few years), it is expected to get worse. So unless you can ride it out (which by all means go ahead and ride it out if you can, real estate is an amazing long-term investment) sell sooner rather than later.

How can I improve my chances to sell?

I wrote a book on it, “5 Secrets to Sell your Home in Less than 30 Days“, but I also put thosesecrets and more into practice every day. With 15+ years licensed in Oregon I’ve already worked my way through a difficult recession and I’m prepared to see it through another (it shouldn’t be nearly as bad this time around for a number of reasons). The marketing for your home must be TOP-NOTCH, increased internet exposure is a MUST, offering a good buyer’s agent commission is ESSENTIAL, open houses still work, and much, much more. However, nothing will have a bigger impact on your sale than the price. Even if you have a golden Portland real estate agent, the best agent in the whole world, if your price is too high for the housing market, it will not sell. This is the 21st century and housing market data is free and abundant. Home buyers have access to information they never had before. It is practically unheard of for a buyer to get “talked into” an overpriced listing. The home price must be market friendly. With the correct price and a strong marketing effort, you can sell a home in ANY real estate market. Let us know if we can help you today. Top 1% listing team in Portland, often #1 overall.