5 reasons Portland ended up with a housing shortage.
You may have heard that there’s a shortage of homes to buy or that sellers are getting dozens of offers — over the asking price — making it nearly impossible to get the home you really want to buy. While nearly every metro area in the United States is facing this same challenge, the severity of the impact varies.
“It comes down to supply and demand,” Michele Holen, the Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors chief executive officer, said in a recent Business Tribune article. “Right now, we have less than three weeks of inventory on the market, when usually a healthy housing market is somewhere between four to six months of inventory.”
Holen says the cause is straightforward, but it didn’t happen overnight. She explains that Portland hasn’t kept up with new home construction going back to the Great Recession more than a decade ago. Real estate experts in other U.S. cities are experiencing this same delayed effect of the Great Recession. Here are five other factors that are contributing to the housing shortage:
Ask our knowledgeable and friendly loan officers about getting pre-qualified, so you’ll be one step closer to that dream home.
“It comes down to supply and demand,” Michele Holen, the Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors chief executive officer, said in a recent Business Tribune article. “Right now, we have less than three weeks of inventory on the market, when usually a healthy housing market is somewhere between four to six months of inventory.”
Holen says the cause is straightforward, but it didn’t happen overnight. She explains that Portland hasn’t kept up with new home construction going back to the Great Recession more than a decade ago. Real estate experts in other U.S. cities are experiencing this same delayed effect of the Great Recession. Here are five other factors that are contributing to the housing shortage:
- Low interest rates increased homebuying activity.
- Increased demand during the pandemic when more people used their homes as offices and classrooms.
- Household savings increased due to stimulus checks and spending less by staying home, allowing some people to save up for a down payment.
- Millennials are a prime home-buying age group, the largest generation since the Boomers.
- Current new home construction is affected by supply chain issues resulting from the pandemic as well as increased materials costs.
Ask our knowledgeable and friendly loan officers about getting pre-qualified, so you’ll be one step closer to that dream home.