PORTLAND OREGON 
REAL ESTATE

Celia Lyon
Principal Broker

503-260-6231

CeliaLyon@aol.com

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Portland Real Estate Guide

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.


Guidelines for Buying Portland


Let’s say everything is a GO! You have found the perfect Portland home. You know you can afford it and it is actually priced below what you expected to pay. What a bargain! Yes there are bargains to be found in Portland. At this point it is fine to put in an offer on the property but only with a well-planned contingency. Of course, it the home is going to be financed, the lender will want a Home Inspection before agreeing to lend money on the property. However, you need to protect yourself by making an offer SUBJECT TO a clean bill of health from the Home Inspector of your choice. This kind of a contingency gives you an out if the inspector finds a problem with the roof, or foundation or other structural problem that was not apparent to the seller or to your agent. This does not mean you will not buy the house but you will have a good reason to renegotiate the price with the seller.


Portland. How Much Should You Offer?


Or more precisely, what does the seller owe on the property. If a seller owes $400,000 on the Portland real estate he or she is not likely to welcome an offer for $350,000. If you want to negotiate price, make sure you don’t waste your time negotiating where there is no room to budge.

Even if the loan is high, if the seller is in default there is a possibility of a short sale as many lenders will reduce the loan balance in order to move the property. Most lenders do not want to foreclose and manage homes and the Portland market is no exception.


Portland ...How To Determine Price


The asking price of your Portland real estate is not something to decide willy-nilly. Price it too high and you may not get any offers. Price it too low and you fail to maximize the return on your investment. Here is a good way to go about determining the price for your Portland home.

Buyers who will consider your Portland are out there inspecting and comparing a variety of homes that are for sale at the same time your home is on the market. If your home is priced significantly higher than comparable Portland homes, you may not get very many buyers to even look at your home. Ultimately, it is buyers who determine what your home is worth. Buyers who are represented by an agent are privy to knowledge of what homes are actually selling for. You should be armed with this knowledge as well and you should use this knowledge to guide your pricing decision.


Does Your Portland Have Curb Appeal?


Good curb appeal is definitely an advantage to home sellers when prospective buyers visit your Portland and can be an advantage in advertising in the newspaper and on the Internet. However, it is important to note that even a home with great curb appeal can look bad in an advertisement if the photographer did a bad job with the camera. A photograph of a Portland home on a dreary day will look quite different from a photo of the same home when the sun is shining. Sometimes it is better to take a picture of a home from an angle rather than a straight on shot that may turn out to be more about the garage door than about the house itself.

Tips for Buying or Selling Portland


Most experienced real estate agents and brokers already have Websites that showcase their local MLS data so your Portland can show up online as soon as it is listed. On the other hand, if you are selling on your own it will take time or a considerable advertising budget to get your individual Portland property to show up on the major search engines where prospective buyers will find it. You could tap into one of the several For Sale by Owner Websites but that would limit your market of buyers.

Buying real estate in Portland is also much easier when you work with a real estate agent who knows the area and the market. While there is a great deal of information online about real estate asking prices, it is not always so easy to find out what a property actually sold for. And even then, specific terms of a sale often make a difference in how to interpret the sales price.