Portland Blog: This Week in Portland July 21 - July 28 2012

Welcome to the weekend and another edition of our all local Portland Blog!  I hope this weekend finds you enjoying our beautiful Portland summer to the fullest. There are so many wonderful opportunities that present themselves during our summers: the camping, fishing, hiking and exploring the mountains and the ocean, incredible Portland street fairs and festivals, great outdoor patios to enjoy some local crafted beers and wines and...sun. Ahhh...yes, divine!

I enjoyed this touching video of a couple exploring Portland. I know you will, too.

Powell's Bookstore Picks

We love Powells!   Portland Book Review of the Day   Portland eBooks   Powell's Author Interviews

Come and upload your Portland photos to the Photo Gallery for your chance to win each week.  Check back to see if your photo is selected for a spotlight in the weekly Portland blog! 

South Waterfront Heated Storage offers a State of the Art Self-Storage facility located in Portland, Oregon. This modern day Self-Storage Facility offers extravagant features including: A digital camera surveillance system, personalized customer access codes and individually alarmed unit doors. Also find multiple covered/heated loading areas, freight elevators and a large quantity of flatbed carts; making your moving experience a breeze! 

Just minutes from John’s Landing, Sellwood and Lake Oswego; South Waterfront Heated Storage offers you a convenient location while providing great customer service. Also find moving and packing supplies – Your one stop shopping center!

Visit www.SouthWaterfrontStorage.com or call 503.226.7777 to learn more!

Open 7 days a week! Stop in for a cup of coffee and a tour of this cutting edge facility – Great Move-in Specials Available!

Learn how you can receive up to 50% off your 1st 2 Months Rent!

The Portland Photo of the Week

The Portland Photo of the Week is by local Portlander, Double Z, the host of The Dancehall Mix With Double Z, a Dancehall radio program airing Saturday nights on 107.1FM KZME. This fun shot is of Bubba, enjoying the day at Rocky Butte.

Rocky Butte is an extinct volcanic cinder cone butte in Portland, Oregon, United States. It is one of four, along with Kelly Butte, Powell Butte, and Mount Tabor, inside the city that are each home to a city park, Rocky Butte playing host to Joseph Wood Hill Park. It is also part of the Boring Lava Field, a group of over 30 cinder cones in Oregon and Washington. [Wikipedia]

Our Portland Photo of the Week winner gets a $20 gift certificate to a local Portland business of our choosing. This week our winner is treated to Olympic Provisions: one of our favorite brunch spots in all of Portland.

Olympic Provisions is home to Oregon’s first USDA-approved salumeria, established in 2009. With two locations in beautiful Portland, Oregon, both Olympic Provisions operate as European-style restaurants, bustling neighborhood delis, and onsite meat-curing facilities.

Olympic Provisions Southeast is guided by the capable hands of Alex Yoder, whose food focuses on clean, bold flavors of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Come in to feast on our menu of small plates and tasty bites. The restaurant and our first meat curing facility are both located in the historic Olympic Mills Commerce Center, a beautifully restored cereal mill and a landmark in Portland’s lower Southeast Industrial neighborhood

Olympic Provisions Northwest kitchen is led by Chef Erin Williams, who creates beautiful rustic Italian food in a neighborhood cafe setting with a antique French rotisserie. The restaurant is also attached to our new meat plant that has allowed us to expand our product line and availability.

Salumist Elias Cairo crafts American Charcuterie using local, high-quality ingredients for wholesale to grocery stores, restaurants and wine bars around the region. Many products, including some that are available nowhere else, can be sampled at the restaurant and purchased directly from the deli case.

Dish

Written by PortlandNeighborhood Guest Writer, Rob Creighton Garrison

When my wife and I first came to Portland, we were of course wow'd by nearly everything we came across or were introduced to.  Having moved from a more conservative area (the Dallas “metroplex”), we were naturally agog as we took in the cobblestoned sections of downtown, the urban-cultural mixing bowls that are Pioneer Courthouse Square and Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the quazi-and-not-so-quazi hippyfied and punkyfied and hipsterfied denizens from all corners of the city.  It was an exhilarating kick in the pants.

The reaction of the missus' relatives, who came from Dallas for a visit soon after we arrived in Portland: not so much.

“I would NEVER leave the house looking like that, and none of my kids would either!”, my wife's sister squawked as she gaped at a skinny lad on the sidewalk, who appeared to be having a schizophrenic day with his tall macaw-colored mohawk clashing with his plaid shirt and skinny jeans and cowboy boots.  The afore-mentioned kids, two adolescent girls, looked up briefly from their phones and Walkmans (it was the early 90s), just long enough to say in robotic unison “Eww weird!” and then lowered their heads to resume bleeping and blooping.

I spent most of their (too long) visit annoyed.  At nearly every turn they went out of the way to opine about how weird or “unnecessary” (the Dallasite word for 'unnatural', 'nasty', 'demonic', and a host of other negatives) things were in Portland.  I thought to myself, how is it that my wife shares DNA with these people?  Thank the godz the breeding wore off!

It isn't that you can't find these things in Dallas, because you can; you have to go to them, though.  There's a segregation of societal preferences, and while they aren't exactly bounded by razor-wire and Dobermans, there is an understanding of sorts that peanut-butter and chocolate shan't co-mingle.  Drop a denizen of Deep Ellum into Highland Park, and he or she will instantly drop into a defensive stance with wide eyes, like a hunted mammal (and a Highland Park resident in Deep Ellum?  I'm thinking spontaneous human combustion).

Picture a partitioned TV dinner.  You're over at the salisbury steak and you have to leap the aluminum boundaries to immerse yourself in the mashed potatoes, and from there once again vault to the cobbler or the corn.  Never shall these items touch each other (unless you drop the tray because you've burnt yourself in that spot at the base of your thumb, the place you ALWAYS burn when you pick up something hot. This is a question I always ask those people who say humans are the product of intelligent design: Why this easily-injured web of flesh?  Why isn't that spot thick and tough, so we can pick up hot stuff without burning the crap out of ourselves?  And while we're at it, what's the deal with shins?)

Portland isn't like a TV dinner.  Portland is like a truck-stop plate of Mexican food, all mounded together on a big plate with a huge slice of onion on top.  No boundaries.  Everything touching everything else.  Intimate.  Saucy.

Go downtown, or to Waterfront Park, or to Hawthorne.  Rollergrrls in bobby-sox fashions sitting with para-legal gal pals for lunch.  The guy with tat sleeves coming down the steps at the courthouse could be a defendant, or he could be your best defense at your traffic court hearing.  Your kid's school principal is yelling and busting a move at the Blues Festival.

Nary a flared nostril or curt comment amongst any of them.  It's just Portland, y'all.  It's how we are.

Read and comment on the original post here. Like this article? Check back weekly for a peek into Rob's world.

This looks cozy...@ Leach Botanical Gardens by Michael Barton

Featured Portland Events this Week

Here's the latest roundup of our featured Portland events for you to enjoy!  Mark your calendars and feel free to add your own!

Add your own events to our Portland events calendar! Its totally free. If we like it, we'll include it in this weekly Portland blog.

New to the site and want to add your own two cents to the Portland blog?  Please do!  But please remember to keep it real and community focused. Read our terms of use and don't spam the planet with self promoting material or weird stuff as it will just get deleted and you might get banned.  We have a zero spammer policy to keep the site valuable and hassle free for our members.  Thanks!

The Woodstock Neighborhood Real Estate Market Report

By Ross and Leah Seligman

The Woodstock neighborhood is located in Southeast Portland. It is bordered by the Richmond, Mt. Tabor, Powellhurst Gilbert and Foster-Powell neighborhoods.  To learn more about the Woodstock neighborhood, click here.

 
If you are looking for homes in the Woodstock neighborhood, visit this link where you can search for homes by particular neighborhood: Click Here

On to the report:

Here is the overall chart of inventory, sold, and pending for the Woodstock neighborhood in the last 15 months:

In June 2012, there were 47 closed sales, 44 pending sales, and 90 homes on the market in the Woodstock Neighborhood.

One year change from June 2011 to June 2012:

Inventory (how many homes on the market for sale): Down 22.4%

Homes sold: Up 27%

Homes pending sale: Up 109.5%

Chart for average price per square footage:

In the past 15 months, the average price per square footage in the Woodstock neighborhood has been between $140 and $174/sq. ft. In June 2012, the average price per square foot in the Woodstock neighborhood was $174.

One year change from June 2011 to June 2012:

Change in Price Per Square Foot:

Percentage Change: Up 15.7%

Days on Market, Sold/List Price:

This chart is showing us two things. First, how many days on the market that a home is spending, on average, before being sold. In June 2012, the average time on market for a home in the Woodstock neighborhood was 39 days.

The second thing that this chart is showing you is what percentage of the listing price the owners actually are getting when the house is sold.  This is a great indication of the pressure on prices.  In June 2012, sellers in Woodstock received, on average, 97% of their original listing price.

More stats for you:

Change from June 2011 to June 2012:

Time on Market: Down 29.1%
Sold/List price % difference: Up 3.2%

Average price for sale vs. average price of sold:

This chart shows us that the average listing was and what the average sale was. In June 2012, the average price of a house on the market in Woodstock was $449,000. The average sale was $378,000.

More stats over one year:

Average active price: Up 10.6%
Average sold price:  Up 20.4%

Months of Inventory:

Months of inventory gives a time line of how long it would take for all of the current listings to sell.  Anything above 4 months is considered a buyers market.  This figure is a good indicator of supply and demand.  June 2012 in the Woodstock neighborhood had 1.9 months of inventory.

By the way, this does NOT mean that it will take 1.9 months for your home to sell. That figure was, on average in June, 39 days.  Inventory is a figure that means that, if not another home were to come on the market in Woodstock from this point forward, in 1.9 months there would not be another home to sell.  They would all be sold.

In my monthly Portland real estate report, I always talk about how each individual neighborhood is a micro-market. The first thing you will notice about individual neighborhoods as compared to the overall Portland reports are that the numbers can be wildly different month to month. Basically, the bigger the pool of data you are working with, the smoother the stats become. As we focus on smaller areas, many different things can happen month to month.

If you are looking to buy or sell in a particular neighborhood, the most crucial information that you need to know is what is going on in that neighborhood. In this situation, the overall Portland market report is less important and the national real estate report is just about useless. This posting is a real estate report for the Woodstock neighborhood of all homes in all price ranges. Feel free to request particular neighborhoods in which you are interested in buying or selling and I am be happy to do a report, just contact me on this forum or at http://www.propertiesofportland.com.

Best Deals in Portland this Week

Visit Ross and Leah's website where you can search all Portland metro area homes for sale and real estate from the RMLS, including neighborhood and school information.

Did you know there are nearly 100 unique Portland neighborhoods?  Read and learn all about these interesting urban communities.

Leach Botanical Gardens by Michael Barton

Thanks for loving this Portland Blog!

Tune back next weekend for another edition of our all-local Portland blog. For now, bookmark us, read our Portland neighborhood pages, get involved and most of all, share PortlandNeighborhood.com with your friends and family!  Want to find back issues of this blog? Boom.

Find more photos like this on PortlandNeighborhood.com