A report from KOIN 6 states that the supply for single family homes in the metro area of Portland is having a shortage in inventory, and that the latest housing influx is more focused on building multi-family houses.
According to the report, homes that are still under construction are being bought even before they are finished.
In an interview with Chris Suarez, a real estate agent working for Keller Williams, he said that, "there's this race against interest rates and we'll continue to watch that."
Suarez said in the news report that there are three possible reasons for the shortage in the inventory of single-family homes: the tremendous influx of new potential buyers, the increase of conversion to single-family homes rental, and the lag in new home construction.
"Some of that is builders late to the party. Historically when you look at the ups and downs of real estate, the last thing that hits the market when it's good is new construction," said Suarez in a news report.
In a Sept. 9 report of KOIN 6, House 4 Rent, a publicly traded company, has owned more than 200 Portland area homes.
It is not clear however, if how many of the 204 houses the American Homes 4 Rent holds around Portland, are truly owned by Wall Street, because the company runs its operations through more than 85 subsidiaries.
Diane Linn, executive director of the nonprofit real estate brokerage Proud Ground, which uses land trust dollars to make houses permanently affordable and expand homeownership opportunities to lower-income people in Portland, said in the news report that the ownership of a lot of single family homes by a single company can greatly affect the quantity of affordable homes in Portland. "It sounds like a situation that's just adding to the problem of affordability and market pressures around these kinds of agreements that force families out. It makes it all the much harder for us to serve people who really desperately need housing or affordable opportunities," said Linn.
According to Suarez, a 1,400 acre community planned in south Hillsboro could balance out the demand-supply of single-family homes. "There's a lot of proposals for single family homes and the hope would be that by the time it gets through planning, and development and construction, that values are still attainable," concluded Suarez.
