PORTLAND OREGON 
REAL ESTATE

Celia Lyon
Principal Broker

503-260-6231

CeliaLyon@aol.com

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Portland Homes for Sale / How to Shop for a Home


Portland FAIR MARKET VALUE


When you buy Portland real estate or refinance your present home, your lender will ask you to pay for an appraisal to help ensure that the sales price and mortgage amount is consistent with the property's market value. The appraiser uses the Rule of Three. What that means is the lender wants to evaluate three "comparables"—recent sales of nearby homes that are very similar to the one you are buying. Based on this information, the lender will make adjustments to reflect the differences between the properties and arrive at a fair price for your home.

Portland Homebuyers Quandry


When you find the home you want to buy you may make an offer contingent upon the sale of your existing Portland. In a Seller’s Market, offers with such contingencies are not well received because the seller must remove his home from the market while you sell yours. However there are times when this kind of offer is successful, even in the Portland market. A backup strategy might be to put in your offer with a very long escrow giving yourself time to sell your home. Very few sellers will accept these kinds of contingencies or long escrows if your house is not already on the market.


Buying a Portland Fixer-Upper


Finding the right Portland fixer upper often involves finding a seller who is in financial difficulty and wants to sell in order to protect their credit or to avoid foreclosure. Various government agencies such as VA, HUD, IRS and others offer homes in foreclosure for sale and these homes can make excellent fixer-uppers. Bank owned properties known as REOs, real estate owned, offer good opportunities since financial institutions want to eliminate their real estate holdings by selling foreclosures quickly.

Join my network of Portland buyers looking for specific types of properties. Call or Email me today.


Rent or Buy Portland


In the early years of your Portland mortgage, nearly all of every monthly payment is interest. This means you are only paying off a tiny bit of the loan principal, but it is good news in terms of tax savings.

The monthly payment for a $100,000, 30-year, 8% mortgage on your Portland would be about $734. In the first year of your mortgage, $7,970 of your $8,805 payment or 91% would be deductible as mortgage interest. Even in the tenth year, almost 81% of your payments would be deductible. What this is worth to you depends on your tax bracket but this tax savings built into the home-buying equation is why you can afford to make higher mortgage payments than your current rent payments without squeezing your budget. There is no similar tax subsidy for renters.


Portland APPEAL


A large part of the appeal of the real estate market in any area is the architecture or the style of the homes themselves. The appeal of Portland is its appropriateness to the region in terms of style, history and weather conditions.

Portland BARGAINS


A bargain exists in the mind of a buyer when entering into an agreement to exchange goods when the buyer thinks the price is favorable. Bargains can always be found in the Portland market if a buyer is patient and willing to wait for a truly motivated seller. In economic downturns many people believe that foreclosures and short sales are automatically bargains when, in fact, this may not be the case.