Lake Oswego & Tigard Oct 31 Housing Markets:  A Tale of Two Suburbs.

Lake Oswego & Tigard: Suburban Neighbors

There’s no question that Lake Oswego is one of Portland’s most beautiful & expensive suburbs, with homes ranging from simple cottages to  an island with a mansion currently for sale.  Those of us who follow the real estate market in Lake Oswego–or any other Portland area for that matter,  can get so wrapped up in the market statistics for our area of interest,   that we lack a perspective about the overall direction of the Portland area housing market. Because Lake Oswego is adjacent to the similarly sized suburb of Tigard,  I thought it might be helpful to compare the two using the statistics for the last week of October 2011. Tigard is a more moderately priced city separated only by Interstate 5 from Lake Oswego, but it too has a wide range of housing options from simple ranch style starter homes to  estates in the area of Bull Mountain (but there’s no island for sale in Tigard).

Looking at home listing & sale  figures that  are compiled weekly by Altos Research and provided locally courtesy of Ticor Title,  the weekly health of the Lake Oswego market revealed that it is more sluggish than the more moderately priced Tigard homes.      Here’s excerpts on Lake Oswego & Tigard taken from the Altos & Ticor report:

Altos summed up the trend shown by the Lake Oswego statistics with the comment “mildly positive”, based on tightening of inventory & the resulting increase in the market action index, which is directly related to home sales currently exceeding new inventory .  Any Market Action index 30 or above is considered a seller’s market, while numbers under 30 indicate a buyer’s market.  Last weeks Market Action Index for Lake Oswego was 14, barely over the previous week’s 13.9.

Tigard was rated as “bullish” with a tightening inventory, falling days on the market and a continually increasing Market Action Index which was at 16.1.  Tigards decreasing average days on the market of 167  vs Lake Oswego’s average of an increasing 222 days on the market undoubtedly reflects the increasing strength of more moderately priced homes.

For a quick review of some other west side areas, plus Portland I’ve summed up the Altos reports for October 31.  Portland is included as a city which is pretty meaningless because of the vast difference in its neighborhoods,  but next week, we’ll look at the weekly stats broken down by areas within Portland.

Weekly Housing Market Report October 31 Report sampling of Portland Suburbs

Some of these suburbs are quite a distance from each other–Hillsboro and Lake Oswego are prime examples,  separated by 20-30 miles.  The difference in the housing markets in some ways echoes the micro climates of these cities as well–Hillsboro tends to be a bit colder, where Lake Oswego may get more rain than some other areas.

These reports are available for specific neighborhoods, or zip codes.  Contact me if you’d like to receive these Weekly Market Reports by Altos (courtesy of Ticor Title)  for your neighborhood or any others.