Last week the Seattle PI reported that people who give up a car and ride the bus can save up to $8,400 a year. That’s $700 a month!

That’s a lot of cash – it’s the difference between affording payments on a $300,000 home and a $400,000 home. The handy Estately mortgage calculator, given a 30 year loan with $60,000 down and 6.31% interest shows:

• Payments of $1,487 a month on a $300,000 home (example home here)
• Payments of $2,101 a month on a $400,000 home (like this one).

The result: You could ditch one of your cars, go from a $300,000 to a $400,000 home and still have $75 a month left over every month.

Disclaimer: we didn’t include all of the fees and, heck, you might not even qualify for a loan. Don’t sue us if you end up paying more.

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.

So what did we do? We added rail line to the “Near Transit” search option, allowing you to find houses and condos up to 2 miles away from specified bus and/or rail routes! Be one of the many who are leaving the gas pumps behind for public transit. If a mile-long walk sounds daunting, keep in mind that it takes the average person only 17 minutes to walk one mile. You can use that bus or train ride to get some good reading in, as well. Convinced yet?

This feature isn’t limited to just Portland – you can use it in Seattle and cities-soon-to-be-disclosed, too.

Not only is rail better than buses, the word is that Seattle’s rail is going to be better than Portland’s rail. What do you think about that, Portland Transport?

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.