PORTLAND OREGON 
REAL ESTATE

Celia Lyon
Principal Broker

503-260-6231

CeliaLyon@aol.com

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Portland Real Estate Guide / Help for Buyers and Sellers

Portland Homeownsers Insurance


Portland Home Safety Measures. You can usually obtain insurance discounts for having a smoke detector, burglar alarm or dead-bolt locks. However, take note that some fire systems can be costly and not every system may qualify for an insurance discount, so check with your insurance company first.

Don’t Over-Insure. Homeowner’s insurance is designed to protect you against loss should your Portland home and furnishing be damaged or lost through theft, windstorm, fire, etc. The land under your home is not insured, as it is not at risk. If, in considering value, you include the cost of the land under your house, you may end up paying a higher insurance premium than you should.


Portland HOME BUYING PITFALLS TO AVOID


Buying your Portland home whether you are a first time buyer or an ‘Old Pro’ involves legal, financial and emotional considerations. The more you know about the most common buyer mistakes, the more likely you are to avoid them.

Make sure that when you put in an offer on any Portland home that you have spent time narrowing down just what you are looking for. When the sellers accept your offer, you are involved in a binding contract that could cost you your deposit and other damages should you decide to back out. The opposite scenario, waiting for the 100 % perfect home can be an exercise in futility. With the thousands of variables available in housing, including location, style, size, amenities and condition, perfection is almost always an unreasonable goal.


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.


Does Your Portland Have Curb Appeal?


Every prospective buyer who visits your Portland home is struck by a variety of impressions regardless of whether your landscaping is eye-catching or merely so-so. Plants that overrun the walkway, trees that badly need pruning and visible suggest to the prospective buyer that this home will take a lot of landscaping maintenance and yet if your yard is well-maintained, the prospective buyer is inclined to simply admire the fact and move on. If your Portland front porch or front door need paint, the prospective buyer is likely to notice the paint job inside and out and think about how much maintenance that will take on a yearly basis. The important message here is that things that look bad or run down call attention to all the work that needs to be done while things that are well maintained conjure up ideas of how pleasant it would be to live there.

Rent or Buy Portland


For most people, the chance to trade nondeductible rent payments for mostly deductible mortgage payments is a powerful inducement to trade a rental home into a Portland of your own. This is by far the single most important reason why people decide to buy their first Portland.

However, whether you are considering your first Portland investment or planning to move up, the number crunching necessary to figure out how much house you can afford depends on two calculations: one for actual monthly outlays, the other for the true, after tax costs.


Portland DEDUCTIONS


One of the advantages of home ownership is that while most other types of interest are not tax deductible, the interest you pay on your Portland loan is deductible on your Federal and State income tax. This fact alone gives homeowners a distinct advantage over renters.