Downtown Vancouver Condos

Downtown Vancouver remains a stronger market relative to many other neighborhoods. Downtown has enjoyed a surge in popularity compared to the other urban neighborhoods in Portland. If you want a true city living experience you are limited to neighborhoods like Downtown Portland, The Pearl District, Lloyd District, South Waterfront, and Slabtown in Portland or right here in Downtown Vancouver. Portland still suffers from empty storefronts and a depressed office market in the city center. Vancouver on the other hand is adding merchants and restaurants and has a fairly tight office market that is actually expanding rather than contracting.

The City of Portland has made some major changes in the structure of the local government and it seems like things are starting to improve. They are however going to need allot of time to recover their sagging reputation. Thats the thing about a reputation, it only takes a minute to ruin it, it can take years to gain it back. 

Vancouver has to be very careful here and mindful of its own history. In the 1980s and early 1990s Vancouver's downtown was in terrible shape. The beautiful Esther Short Park was over run with vagrants, drug dealers, and strung out prostitutes. Main Street had more sleazy card rooms and pawn shops than they did restaurants. Even after the beautiful park renovations and the fabulous redevelopment of the old Lucky Lager brewery site Vancouver still clung to the reputation as being a dumpy city. The Mayor continued to push for redevelopment and the city continued to improve. After the recession ended and the Waterfront started to emerge the city started appearing on the news for positive reasons rather than negative stories. Now that the Waterfront is 70% built-out, the city enjoys the reputation for being a destination and the hip place to hang out. It took nearly three decades to crawl out from under the crappy reputation and our local leaders need to be vigilant not to let the homeless overrun it, nor let crime get out of hand. That shiny reputation we have earned over the last 15 years can be gone in an instant. The city needs to reap the rewards of higher tax revenues downtown and if they screw up and let things decline they will never recover the investment they have into the redevelopment. Politicians are rarely smart enough to see that. 

I did a YouTube video that goes over the six condominium developments in the Downtown specifically as a bit of a guide to condos. You can watch that here:

          

Are Lower rates Helping the Local Market?

Mortgage rates have seen a slight drop and low to mid sixes are available to highly qualified borrowers. With a little help from the seller, rates in the 5s are easily attainable. One might expect some favorable movement as a result. So has it helped?

That's tough to quantify at this point. I am seeing an uptick in buyer activity, but we are also seeing an uptick in new listings. If both of those metric continue to rise it will keep the relative market stable. It will be good for agents of course as transactions will go up :) But for buyers and sellers the balance of inventory to buyers needs to change for there to be any movement in values. 

At this point our market remains a little soft on price and enough inventory to keep the buyers busy. technically our inventory levels still slightly favor sellers but certain sub-markets and neighborhoods may be hotter than others. 

A savvy buyer should open up the neighborhood range to capitalize on deals that may appear due to more seller activity. Neighborhood turnover can be a sign of trouble, but sometimes it's just a sign of normal turnover. Neighborhoods that were built 10-15 years ago in desirable school districts may now have a lot of empty nesters moving out, not because of any trouble but just the normal retirement move. That can work in the favor of buyers.

Buyers should always do their own due diligence and check things out, check with an agent about the area before making an offer. Things are looking up overall after a couple almost stagnant years. 

Home Prices Rise Despite Less Demand, What Gives?

One of the biggest drivers in price is in fact supply and demand. But the cost of building new homes is going up mostly due to government over regulation. Builders continue to face new laws forcing compliance with various environmental, local infrastructure, and safety that all seem great but absolutely increase the price of construction. Many builders are pulling out of over regulated areas like the three West Coast states. Despite having fewer buyers in the market place, there is also fewer new homes and this drives the price up on the remaining available resale homes. 

The median home price in Clark County currently sits about $550,000 depending on the source of data. That median price buys a pretty solid house, such as a 30 year old two story 4 bedroom house with 2000 SF or a really nice 30 year old ranch house with 1700 SF. New homes similar to these on any kind of decent sized lot are at least $100k more.   

Younger people struggle to afford to buy homes largely based on social tendencies more than actual costs. Homes have appreciated at significantly more than inflation in general over the last 40 years and many YouTubers point this out. But I was a 20 something in the 1980s and can assure you that buying a house back then was more difficult that it is today. Interest rates in the 1980s started out at 18% and dropped into the 11's by the end of the decade. That's a huge hurdle. But the 1980s had much higher costs on most things we buy today. Where the modern homebuyer faces higher education costs, higher healthcare costs, but lower costs on gasoline, utilities, food, electronics, and appliances. We did just come off a high inflation period that has brought some of these "lower" costs to parity with the 1980s but we also are seeing pretty strong wage increases in recent years that match it.

The general gist here is to stop complaining about how hard it is to buy a home, it has ALWAYS been hard to buy a home. I see people complaining about their inability to afford a home and then realize they have a brand new $1000 phone, a brand new car with $500 payment, they are drinking 4-5 energy drinks every day at $2-$5 a piece! They are wondering where all the money goes? 

Buying a house has always required some difficult penny-pinching and that still holds true today. I help young people all the time to get into a house, It is rarely easy unless that young person managed to find a six-figure job, but it isn't as hard as the internet is telling you.