I’m no prognosticator, but I do like reading others’ predictions. Seattle Bubble has a nice chart comparing the amount of upwards price movement during the boom against the amount of downward price movement in the recent, ehem, “soft” market. The takeaway:

This snapshot does appear to support the assertion that there is a good correlation between boom and busts cycles across markets -and that generally speaking, the more you go up, the more you go down. But there appear to be outliers versus the trend: Namely, Detroit on the down side, and Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and possibly New York on the up side. This is interesting to me because the relationship between up and down markets is usually cited as evidence that the Seattle market will remain relatively stable compared to other markets - when according to this view, we appear to be bucking the trend and perhaps poised for a fall. We are down 7% to date when the trend line suggests we should be off 15-20%.

Go read the whole thing

And we’re serving them in Seattle and Portland. San Diego transit agencies will not share their stop locations, but they say they are considering it.

CNN story:

Portland homes for sale near light rail include this Overlook house and this Laurelhurst house.

Bonus link: Commuters are saying goodbye to the suburbs.

But Portland, apparently, doesn’t pump pollutants in to the atmosphere, either. At least they’re more sensitive to it than other cities, as was noted in a Green Building Forum a couple weeks ago. A choice quote: “‘Portland is definitely out near the front if not in the front [when it comes to green building],’ Scott Lewis of Brightworks said.” Impressive! When will we see Oregonians getting their electric vehicles plugged in for them?

I enjoy discussing green living and design, as it’s an inevitable change that we will have to make, sooner or later. The Portland Water Bureau’s Water Blog has a few nice tips on “blue living,” (you know, the wet stuff that’s two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen), such as putting a picture of John Edwards in your shower. Yup…

Portland is also serious about their mass transit. Apparently, the MAX trains trains are made out of the same stuff as those armored bank trucks. Nothing a pickup can contend with, at least. If riding on a MAX train sounds too extreme, it’s not too late to participate in the 17 event “Pedalpalooza,” (June 12-28) and other “awesomely ridiculous” events.

Are there any Portland neighborhood blogs we’re missing? Let us know in the comments.

Portland MLS rules are out of the ordinary. As a member of the MLS we are restricted from showing any part of the address of homes for sale on Estately. We can map and show every detail in the world about nearly every property in the MLS, but addresses cannot be displayed. You can see the roofline in Google maps, the front of the house in the MLS image and in Google StreetView, the cross streets, and the lat-long, but you can’t see the address.

It’s reminiscent of Oregon’s approach to pumping gas - Oregon consumers are also not allowed to pump their own gas because, ostensibly, they might blow up the station and, in reality, to keep the supply of crappy jobs high. Our best guess is that the address rule is in place to prevent thieves from breaking into empty homes. This is a valid concern - vacant homes are broken into now and again - but the fact that a) you can see precisely where the home is on the map and b) most thieves use this web 0.0 thing called a car to quickly identify vacant homes with for sale signs in front of them makes it a little less valid. Additionally, the easiest way of identifying vacant homes is the private agent notes which identify which homes are vacant and those notes are not shown on the internet.

The real reason, like it or not, is probably to make it harder for consumers to get all of the information about properties on the market and to force them to seek out a professional before they need one.

And how can you, the consumer, make the most of it? You can still search by address or mls number (like try 1049097 or 8048413). You can also hit the “send to friend” button on any property and email yourself the property or sign up to get emails for property updates; bizarrely MLS rules permit the emailing of addresses. You can also just read the cross streets off of Google maps. Barring those two routes, you can get a Realtor (via Estately’s Realtor recommendations if you don’t have a great agent already) and the agent can set you up with email updates or serve as your MLS number to address translator. Being an MLS number translator sounds worse than pumping gas to me.

We both notified the media of important news on the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. John McCain actually released his news (John McCain and his 1,500 pages of his medical records), but we did manage to inform reporters of our Tuesday release at about the worst time to deliver news all year - just as they were cracking their beers and lighting their barbecues. Really - we weren’t trying to fool anyone. So our Portland release was picked up (35,000 more homes on Estately!) by the msm (that’s the mainstream media if you aren’t hip to the acronyms) not quite on the release date, but close enough.

Now that we’re in Portland, we have an array of new real estate blogs to subscribe to. I’ve been subscribing to the Turner Realtor’s Portland Real Estate blog for quite some time now to get a glimpse into what people are discussing in the Portland area.

Ron Ares is blogging about the newest real estate search website in town on his Portland Real Estate agent blog.

Turner Realtors spotted the now-highly respected Case-Schiller Report showing a 2% drop in Portland prices, year-over-year. Welcome to the Seattle market, folks.

Salvador Del Cid’s Portland blog points out something a lot of people forget; homes that are really good deals still get lots of offers.

The Oregonian’s real estate blog wonders what a 0.1% increase in prices between 2007 and 2008 actually means.

Like a lot of other folks, Tony and Libby Kelly are trying to nail down the metrics that will show a recovery in the market.

Mike Rohrig wants a map based search - sorry we don’t have an offering for agents right now, Mike, but you’re welcome to use Estately in the meantime.

Portland even has its own bubble blog in the Portland Housing Bubble, which reminds me of the ever popular and less objectively named Seattle Bubble. They even have open comment posts, just like the Seattle Bubble used to.

Hi Portland, meet Estately, your newest real estate search website.

We’re adding 35,000+ Portland homes to our existing database of nearly 50,000 Western Washington homes. While it might rain a tad bit less in Portland (and you have a few more sunny days a year), we have a lot in common. While not fantastic, the real estate market is holding up relatively well in both cities compared to the rest of America. We both love local coffee (Portland’s Stumptown Coffee is even creeping into Seattle) and hip bands move back and forth (they mostly move to Portland). Portland is a sort of hipper, artsier, cheaper and more strip-club friendly Seattle.

Portland is no longer Stumptown, a name it earned in the mid-1800s when it was all stumps (we also share a tradition of keeping old growth forests as far away from populated centers as possible). A quick glance at our stats show that the 5,142 properties for sale in Portland proper have an average price of about $405,000 but you can find a place for as cheap as $84,000 (even if you apparently are not allowed to live there).

We hope we make it easier for you, Portland, to search for a home in the hip neighborhoods - Hawthorne, Woodstock, Lloyd, Belmont, The Pearl District, and Sellwood - and the less hip ones. We also hope we make it easier to decide if a house is actually right for you before having a looksy. We have math and reading scores for the schools nearby every property (take this one for example) and, in this transit friendly city, the nearby bus and Trimet rail stops (another example). We even let you search for homes near specific bus and rail lines so you can live the transit-friendly one car lifestyle you’ve always wanted to.

So give us a whirl and take some notes on a property or subscribe to email alerts notifying you of price changes on a property.