The online real estate website Zillow has teamed up with the biz magazine Business Week to digest the national housing markets in 3Q 2008.  See the Zillow blog here--the 12/18/08 entry by Katie Carnutte. Prices are down for the most part, but you can still read about the best and worst housing markets in the U.S.  BusinessWeek runs the full story in its online  Dec. 11, 2008 edition.

For Oregon, the Bend market tanked. No surprise there.  Corvallis WAS a surprise, though. The college town's prices were off by such a miniscule amount that one could fairly call it flat. 

No one can say for sure where where prices are going in Portland Metro. I see them drifting down a bit more--not a lot, maybe ten or twelve percent. Fact is, there's just too much inventory.  Moreover, too many properties that have been short sales have turned into REO (real estate owner), adding even more inventory and at distressed prices.  I have a client in Beaverton who bought a home in 2006 for $265k. It MIGHT appraise at $250k today, maybe even less. But there's a similar (albeit smaller) house a few doors down that's REO and listed at $229k.

And that's a metaphor of the whole deal. Kind of depressing.  But...are there points of light?  Well, maybe yes.

I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how abysmal the Bay Area market is--prices off as much as 45%--but prices in Noe Valley had actually crept up a bit.  I've done several CMAs recently for people in Garden Home and Capitol Highway areas, and they were really hard to do because there were so few recent sales.  Maybe that doesn't mean anything in a slow market, but then, maybe it means the market is stabilizing: If a buyer wants a home close-in, there's not much out there, save what's been on the market for a long time.  If that's true, then an owner wishing to sell may have a bit of leverage. 

Prices have dropped in the Pearl, but nothing like I'd anticipated.  Also, there are very few foreclosures there. Owners also have to contend with the added inventory of new construction, like the Encore. A good sign, overall.

Another bright spot: Today (12/115/08), Wells Fargo is offering a 5% interest rate (excluding points and fees and all that). That's a principal and interest monthly payment of $1,342 on a $250k loan, $1,610 on a $300k loan.  The message here is that if you're on the buying fence, you better get going.  These rates won't last..