Real Estate Trends

Vancouver, Washington Neighborhoods

April 25, 2018 by Mathew Mattila

The Vancouver, Washington real estate market is heating up! With a current median home value of $299,000 in Vancouver, Washington, compared to an average home value of $413,300 in it’s more metropolitan neighbor, Portland, Vancouver is currently a very viable option for potential home buyers due to affordability, current and future growth potential, and a host of other positives.

Other notable figures: according to Zillow, the current average home listing price in Vancouver is $319,000 with the median sale price is a bit lower at $303,800; compared to Portland where homes are currently listed at an average price of $450,000 with homes selling at an average of $413,200.

That said, Vancouver home prices are by no means stagnant. With numerous high-end developments and upcoming projects in this part of Washington, including a luxury condominium development on the Vancouver waterfront, there is a ton of buzz right now and, relatively, increasing growth leading to more competition for properties.

Hasson Company realtor, Amelie Marian works with clients on both sides of the river and understands the Vancouver, Washington real estate market well. When I asked her which Vancouver-area neighborhoods buyers are most drawn to and why she offered the following insight:

The secret is out on these charming and walkable Vancouver, Washington and nearby neighborhoods! Multiple offers on properties in these areas are becoming very common. Make sure you have a winning strategy before jumping into this hot real estate market!

Hot Vancouver, Washington Neighborhoods

Downtown Vancouver, Washington

Amelie points to Downtown Vancouver initially as the areas hottest neighborhood, explaining: “Everything is going on in Downtown Vancouver these days! There are so many new restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and shops. The Farmer’s Market at Esther Short Park is one of the best in the entire Metro area. Right now, all the buzz is around the new waterfront project of 40 luxury condos. This development is well underway and coming soon. Pricing for the project was just released and units are starting at just under $1 million each!”

Camas, Washington

Amelie finds Camas, just outside Vancouver, to be another hot spot for home buyers: “Many buyers move to Camas for the top-rated schools, but with a median sale price of $460,000 it is also at the top of the charts for the area. Along with great schools, buyers can also get expansive views and have a variety of new construction options to choose from.

Belz Place, Deerhaven, & Downtown Camas

Amelie mentioned a few neighborhoods within the Camas area as particularly hot right now, pointing out one new neighborhood in particular called Belz Place that she sees as having great amenities including a local pool and walkability to the elementary school. She also notes that Deerhaven at Lacamas Lake as being perfect for those looking for an ultra-modern aesthetic.

While there’s nothing ‘new’ about Downtown Camas, it’s populated with old buildings full of charm and history amidst an eclectic mix of restaurants, coffee shops, bars, boutiques, and more. Buyers considering Camas should be sure to spend an afternoon exploring Downtown Camas.

Fisher’s Landing

Finally, Amelie explains that “Fisher’s Landing offers great accessibility to freeways and all the amenities on 164th and 192nd. With very few active listings and a median sale price of $358,000, buyers would be wise to be pre-approved and ready to make solid offers if shopping here. Houses in Fisher’s Landing tend to sell in a matter of days! Fisher’s Landing is also home to one of the area’s very few 55-and-over communities, Fairway Village. Centered by a gorgeous public golf course and known for being a very close-knit community, this is an especially popular option for seniors from throughout the Pacific Northwest.”

More Hot Vancouver, Washington Neighborhoods

Travis Newton, an agent with Newton Group Real Estate and a real estate investor, knows Vancouver, Washington real estate because he grew up in the area in a real estate family of three generations. Travis shared his thoughts on which Vancouver neighborhoods are hot areas for home buyers to focus on in the rest of 2018. Travis shared his list of the hottest Vancouver neighborhoods and I filled in the details. Travis seconded Amelie’s vote for Downtown Vancouver and added the following neighborhoods to the list:

Arnada

Arnada is one of Vancouver’s oldest neighborhoods and as a result boasts plenty of old-growth trees and a well-established neighborhood park. Arnada residents also enjoy a vibrant shopping district: Main Street’s Uptown Village which is populated with shops, markets, restaurants, and local doctors’ and dentists’ offices. According to a local news article, Arnada neighbors say it best, describing this charming area as “a small, self-sufficient town inside a city.”

The Parklands at Camas Meadows

By Cascade West Development, The Parklands is a luxury gated community bordering the Camas Meadows Golf Club. Home prices here start in the $900,000s. Bordering Vancouver, the population of Camas currently lands at around 21k. With numerous community amenities including lush parks with over 60 miles of nature trails, a vibrant downtown area and economy, and highly-rated local schools The Parklands is marketed as an oasis of high-end homes within a uniquely special city.

Royal Terrace

Located in Ridgefield, Washington, Royal Terrace is a brand new gated development by Evergreen Homes NW that offers larger lots backing to a lush greenbelt. With a small-town feel, an exceptional downtown area, and excellent local schools this is a neighborhood for families to consider. From the developer website: “Excellent schools support desirable neighborhoods, and Royal Terrace is lucky to have Ridgefield High School just around the corner, the new Sunset Intermediate School a 1/2 mile down the road, and the highly regarded Union Ridge Elementary School minutes away.”

Ready to Buy a House in Vancouver, Washington?

If you’re ready to buy a house in one of these hot Vancouver, Washington neighborhoods, or if you’re interested in another Vancouver-area neighborhood I’d love to help you. As a licensed mortgage broker in Oregon and Washington, I can help you navigate the home-buying process and determine exactly how much house you can afford. Please get in touch with me to get started!

Real Estate Investing in Vancouver, Washington

March 22, 2018 by Mathew Mattila

A long-term client approached me recently for a referral to someone to help him build out his real estate investment portfolio. I immediately put him in touch with my friend and colleague, Uwe Gluhr. A local business leader and brilliant real estate investment advisor, Uwe is the business manager and co-owner of Personal Property Management with Julie Brown and Leisha Dumas. PPM, located in Southwest Washington, specializes in managing single-family homes and smaller apartment complexes located in Southwest Washington, with many of Uwe’s owner-clients accessing his advice for furthering their own real estate investments.

Uwe has always advocated real estate investing as a lucrative and viable option for a diversified portfolio and I’ve seen the growth in Vancouver create a lot of potential investment value, so I decided to pick Uwe’s brain and share his top tips for real estate investing in Vancouver, Washington and surrounding areas.

Why invest in real estate?

Uwe explains, “Overall, real estate is a proven asset class that should belong in everyone’s portfolio. When you compare the overall returns against the S&P 500 you’ll see it offers a proven return on investment.

There are many ways to invest in real estate such as Real Estate Investment Trusts, commercial buildings, apartment buildings, and my personal favorite: single-family homes.”

[What is a Real Estate Investment Trust? REITs are companies that own, operate, or finances real estate for the purpose of producing income. They operate like a mutual fund, giving investors dividend-based income and returns. Learn more about REITs here.]

“For the purpose of this conversation, let’s compare multi-family units such as apartments to single-family homes. In the current market, I find that single-family homes make the most compelling investments (for reasons I’ll detail below) with one important caveat: you must buy them at the right cap rate.”

[What is cap rate? Capitalization rate, commonly known as ‘cap rate’, is a tool for evaluating the value and return on a real estate investment. To determine cap rate: calculate the yearly gross potential income of the investment property. Then, subtract all expenses associated with ownership and maintenance of the property from the gross income. Next, divide the net income by the property’s purchase price. Learn more about cap rate here.]

Investing in Single-Family Homes vs Apartments:

“Currently, apartment buildings are trading at around the same cap rates as single-family homes. If you look at what has been built since about 2010 you’ll see that historically the market has favored apartments. As a result, there is a lot of apartment supply coming available.

However, from a renter’s perspective, especially families with children, single-family homes offer a lifestyle that is totally different than and is often regarded as preferable to apartment living. For the investor, this can be seen as a big positive because single-family homes tend to bring those high quality, family-oriented tenants who are looking for something that lives and feels like a home (and are going to treat the property as such).”

Real Estate Investing in the Vancouver, Washington area:

Location, Location, Location:

“Investors looking to purchase real estate in the Vancouver area will be wise to focus on neighborhoods with good schools and are situated less than 30 minutes from an international airport (or an airport that has Southwest Airlines). Ideal areas for real estate investment also have high projected job growth and easy access to good healthcare.

In the Vancouver, Washington area I would recommend looking to invest in the area up and down I-5, primarily on the west side and all the way up through Ridgefield or near the Salmon Creek Hospital. Specifically, the Skyview and Ridgefield High School areas are great for investments right now.

Also, consider investing close-in to Highway 14 and into Washougal. Farther out east, the Camas and Union High School areas are promising in the current market.

Forecasting out about 10 years, I would target real estate investments as close to downtown Vancouver, Washington as possible. This area gives people easier access to downtown Portland, Oregon (and Vancouver proper). As urbanization, population growth and congestion will continue to boom in Clark County these central areas will continue to grow accordingly.

Regarding the actual house, I favor investing in single-story, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom homes with attached 2 car garages.”

Focus on Immediate ROI:

“I always tell people to invest for positive cash flow first and look for appreciation second. When in doubt, learn how to calculate the cap rate and make sure that your cap rate is greater than your 30-year fixed rate.

Investors should always try to target cap rates at around 5.5% or higher. As interest rates rise, be sure to adjust the cap rate threshold upward accordingly.”

Stay Positively Leveraged:

“If you are using a loan to buy your real estate investments always make sure you are positively leveraged. Don’t forget to calculate the necessary property management costs, vacancy loss, and maintenance costs into your cap rate.”

Build a Team:

“Assemble your team of professionals. At a minimum, you’ll want to find a realtor you trust and feel comfortable communicating with, a responsive mortgage broker, an insurance agent, an inspector, and a property manager.

Having each of these key players in place before you start investing in real estate will help ensure you get into the right investment(s) and that you’re in the best position possible for the long term. Do your homework when building a team of professionals and you’ll be better off for it. Like most things in life, you are going to get out of these relationships what you put in.”

If you’d like to reach out to Uwe, you can email him via the Personal Property Management website. And if you’d like to discuss the loan process for an investment property in Portland, Oregon or in the Vancouver, Washington area, I’d love to hear from you.

Buying Real Estate with Bitcoin

January 22, 2018 by Mathew Mattila

After a very enthusiastic tip from a good friend a few years ago, I casually purchased some Bitcoin on the Coinbase exchange. At the time the cost to invest was approximately $600 for one Bitcoin. If you’ve been watching headlines at all it’s hard to miss the fact that although it fluctuates wildly, the value of Bitcoin has increased dramatically.

It seems that lately everyone is talking about Bitcoin, trying to figure out if it’s ‘real’ or a scam of some kind, and whether or not they should be buying cryptocurrency themselves. I’m not going to evangelize BTC, or even try to explain what it is or how it works – there are some very good resources online for information. What I do want to illustrate is that these new types of currency are poised to become a part of our everyday lives. Today, Bitcoin can be used to purchase just about anything, from a house to a cup of coffee at Starbucks – you can even spend your Bitcoin at online retail giants like Amazon and Overstock. Granted, buying a coffee is a lot less complicated than buying real estate, but both are happening and with more and more frequency.

Purchasing Real Estate with Bitcoin

As recently as the tail end of 2017 and as close to home as Tukwila, Washington a twenty-something aerospace engineer purchased a 3-bedroom house priced at $415,000 using Bitcoin Cash (BCH), an offshoot of Bitcoin. Generally, when a purchase is made with cryptocurrency (for a cup of coffee, for example) the buyer simply sends the seller the agreed-upon amount of currency directly. The seller has a ‘receiving address’ or digital wallet – expressed as a scannable QR code or a string of letters and numbers unique to their account – and the buyer sends funds to the seller from their own digital wallet using this information. In the case of the Tukwila purchase, it wasn’t as simple as a transfer of the BTC from the buyer to the seller because the buyer had acquired traditional financing on the home purchase and U.S. cash was required by the lender. The buyer’s BCH was used as an ‘asset’ to secure his loan – and then it was converted to/sold for ‘fiat’ (regular money) in order to make the actual purchase in the traditional way.

Back in 2014 a property was purchased for Bitcoin in Lake Tahoe – the price was 1.6 million dollars or 2.739 coins (based on the value of BTC at the time the purchase was made.)

There are numerous cases though where sellers put their properties on the market seeking Bitcoin specifically, and only, as payment. In these situations, buyers paid for the real estate outright with Bitcoin. In Miami, in December 2017, a 2-bedroom, 950-square-foot condominium for about 60 BTC. Or, a little farther from home, a developer is accepting Bitcoin for purchases on a project in Dubai consisting of two residential towers and a shopping mall.

In all of these cases, once the seller receives an offer he wants to accept, the transaction is, in essence, an all-cash purchase. As long as a lawyer isn’t needed it’s not necessarily any more complicated to complete a real estate transaction using BTC than it is to buy that cup of coffee – the buyer and seller simply have to agree that cryptocurrency is being exchanged and seal the deal. Although this doesn’t necessarily preclude the need for utilizing (and paying) real estate agents, inspectors, and any other specialists involved in the transaction. who may or may not accept Bitcoin in exchange for their services.

Lenders are getting in on the action as well, with players like Unchained Capital coming onto the scene. Unchained is relatively new lender offering loans backed by a buyer’s cryptocurrency assets. According to an article in Barron’s, Unchained allows buyers who own cryptocurrency to borrow up to $1 million with interest rates between 10% and 14%. The length of the loans ranges from three months to three years, rarely longer, with the principal due at the end.

Bitcoin Technology in the Real Estate Market

As the real estate market catches up to this new technology everyone from lenders, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents are taking note. One agent, in particular, has notably brokered four homes with Bitcoin. When asked what she sees as the biggest hurdle the real estate industry faces in terms of moving forward with cryptocurrency purchases, Piper Moretti states, “Bridging the gap between new technology and the “old school” way of doing business. Real estate is very slow to adopt new ways of thinking and implementing technology.” She goes on to clarify that the ‘technology’ she’s referring to is the tech backbone of BTC, called the Blockchain which she believes will, “…revolutionize all aspects of how deals get done.”

If you currently own Bitcoin and would like to learn how your cryptocurrency assets could impact your home loan or purchase, feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email to discuss.

Portland Real Estate Market Recap 2017

December 14, 2017 by Mathew Mattila

The Portland real estate market and mortgage industry in 2017 was interesting to watch, to say the least. Here’s my brief Portland real estate market recap for the year:

Early 2017: A Super-Heated Portland Market

We came into 2017 after two solid years of rapid value appreciation that left clients feeling distraught and frustrated as they tried, and failed, time and again to secure the home they wanted. Many buyers were losing out to incredibly high offers, often tens of thousands of dollars over the property asking price. While the Portland real estate market has always been competitive to a degree, the market peaked in early 2017 at an extreme.

Just one example to illustrate what had become the new normal for the PDX real estate market:

A property in Northeast Portland received no less than 22 viable offers within a period of just 72 hours. When it came down to it, the property sold for $150k over the asking price – and it was an all-cash deal. Two of my own clients were among those vying for that particular home. It was painful for everyone involved, except of course the sellers.

Spring 2017: The Market Gradually Cools

As we moved into early spring there was an almost palpable shift toward hope among buyers as the frenzy finally started to settle down. Multiple offers became less and less frequent until they were few and far between. Properties that would have seen a bidding war in months prior actually began to sit for lengthy periods. By the summer of 2017, we started to see home values settle. The massive price increases that had plagued Portland for the last two years came to a halt.

Summer 2017: Slowing Market a Relief for Buyers

Summer, which is typically a more active market and a competitive time to be buying a home in Portland, actually saw even more of a slow down from the previously super-heated market. Even so, from June into the middle of August many buyers who had been left exhausted and disappointed after losing out on so many properties earlier in the year decided to sit tight and wait it out.

We also started to see tentatively increasing buyer interest as pricing continued to slow and some homes that had been sitting on the market the previous few months actually began to drop in price. Well-priced homes in nice areas were still moving quickly, but the majority of homes were no longer seeing multiple offers. For the most part, buyers were no longer having to overpay just to get into an average house.

Late 2017: A More Stable Portland Real Estate Market

Moving into fall we saw increasing inventory as well. Portland real estate broker Richard Lockwood of Oregon Realty Co. in Clackamas wrote that “on average, buyers now have more homes to choose from than they have had for the last 2.5 years.” Lockwood went on to explain that in September 2017 Portland was “at 2.3 months of inventory of available homes for sale. To put this figure in perspective, we haven’t been above 2.1 months of inventory since February 2015.”

If you‘ve driven through familiar Portland neighborhoods consistently throughout the second half of 2017 it was impossible to miss the fact that ‘for sale’ signs were sticking around longer and longer. The previously unthinkable ‘price reduced’ notices starting to pop up as well.

Now, the Portland real estate market seems to have moved into a healthier, more balanced place. Sellers are pricing their homes more reasonably and buyers are generally able to get into the homes they want without the frenzy of competition we had seen in 2015, 2016 and early 2017. Home prices in Portland are still rising, albeit more slowly.

The Mortgage Industry in 2017

It’s been a lucky coincidence for the mortgage industry that the slowdown was not due to increasing interest rates. We have seen some fluctuation as naturally rates rose and fell with the seasons, but overall, interest rates have stayed relatively low in 2017. This has allowed home buyers to purchase homes with more affordable mortgage payments even within the rising values of the Portland market.

Looking Ahead: 2018

It’ll be interesting to see how things play out in the Portland real estate market in the new year. Were headed into 2018 in a few short weeks and Zillow is predicting a national real estate market increase of 3.2%, compared to their 2018 market prediction for Portland, Oregon of 4.4%.

If you’re thinking about purchasing a home in the Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, Washington areas and would like to discuss what your own mortgage options will be as we move into 2018 please get in touch, I’d love to help.