What Status Sells a Home for More: Vacant, Seller, or Tenant Occupied? 2023 Report

There are a number of factors that cause homes to sell faster or slower and for more, or much less. Whether you’re picking the best time of the year to sell in (or the worst), whether you’re on the east or west side of Portland, whether your condo is downtown or elsewhere in the metro, whether your home is on septic or sewer, whether you have a swimming pool or not, whether your home is on a single level or multiple, there are many factors that drastically change how fast a home sells and for how much.

Licensed since 2003, I’ve been writing these reports for the local Portland real estate market for years in order to inform the public and better educate my clients.

One of the biggest factors in a home sale is whether or not the home is vacant during the sale, owner occupied, or tenant occupied. This particular research report I’ve been running since 2017. The trends have remained consistent.

I’m using date from RMLS to create these local market reports. In particular, I’m looking at Portland city proper, and only detached single family homes. The main idea of the report is to determine how many of each type of occupancy (vacant, seller, or tenant) hit the real estate market and then successfully are sold or failed to sell (they cancelled the listing and weren’t able to find a buyer). Let’s start by looking at the results from 2017 to 2022 below.

Vacant Homes Sell Best, Followed Closely by Seller Occupied, While Tenant Occupied Trails Way Behind

Vacant, to clarify, can mean staged or totally empty. Here vacant simply means no one is living there. For our research and advice on staging a home, go here.

2023 Report on What Home Occupancy Status Sells Best

The data below is from city of Portland property detached home sales from Jan. 1st 2023 to May 1st 2023. We add together the number of expired, cancelled, and sold listings together to get a total, then we divide in the failed listings (expired + cancelled) to determine a failure rate. Once we have a failure rate, we can easily determine the success rate.

This Produces a Strong Commentary on the 2023 Real Estate Market vs. the last Six Years.

Vacant single family homes have successfully sold at a 10% less rate in 2023 vs. 2022. Seller occupied homes sold at the second worse rate since 2017. Tenant occupied homes sold at their worst rate in 2023 since I started this report. Less than half of tenant occupied homes sold.

Read our latest in-depth report on the 2023 Portland real estate market here.

If you’re still considering selling a home with a tenant inside, check out our updated reporting on recent landlord tenant laws. Also check out our last years report on tenant occupancy that gives additional in-depth reasoning on why tenant occupied homes fare so poorly on the Portland real estate market, and what you can do about it.

Other Important Factors in Selling a Home

Other than the factors noted at the start of the article, here are some of the most important things you can control in order to help your home sell faster and for more, ranked from most important.

1. Listing your property on multiple MLS systems at the same time.
2. List your home with professional photos and 3D home tours.
3. Feature your property on the top search portals (like Zillow and Realtor.com)

Work with an Experienced Portland Sellers Agent

Our top 1% sellers agents have completed over 2,000 local home sales. We provide top-ranked market experience along with extensive marketing. We charge a max. of 4% to sell a home in Portland (includes the buyer’s agent fee) and top it off with a cancel anytime policy for no charge. Let’s connect today! Give us a call at 503-714-1111 or chat with the bot on this site. We look forward to talking with you.