2009 Portland Real Estate Market Report

Ryan Frank of the Oregonian blogged about the latest RMLS Market Action report in this post. I thought there were a couple interesting inferences about the 2009 Portland Real Estate Market.

Here are a couple of the highlights that I found interesting:

*”Portland-area home prices fell 3 percent in 2009 to $242,200 in December…

*”Since the August 2007 peak of $302,000, the median home price has fallen 19.8 percent.

*”For the year, the median home price fell 3 percent, closed sales were down .9 percent and new listings dropped 19 percent. That 10,000 decline in new listings helped drive down the inventory from 19 months in January to 7.7 months in December.

* For December, “closed sales were up 53 percent from a year ago and pending sales rose 41 percent.

I read somewhere that 6 months worth of inventory was considered an equilibrium for a housing market so we can still say it’s a “buyer’s market” but not as much as it was in January of 2009.  It will be interesting to see what this number does after the expiration of the first-time homebuyer tax credit.