Last weekend was the first fabulous weekend here in Salem Oregon. Like many other Salemites, my family headed to Minto-Brown to ride around the great bike/walking paths they have there. Armed with my camera, I took several shots of some geese and ducks that were playing in the pond at the park. A passerby said…
Okay, I made a few changes on my sidebar that I wanted all my readers, all 3 of you, to know about. First is my iPhone app. Yes, I love my iPhone and I am doing a little trial run with a Salem Oregon metro area home search iPhone application. You can search my IDX…
Yeah I know the saying is stop and smell the roses, but it is May and that means that the Keizer Oregon Iris Festival is in play now. The Tulip festival is the annual April event, and now the Iris are starting to bloom. (You can click the bottom right of the slide show to…
Keizer didn’t really see a lot of corrections in the past year, but that is not going without consequences now. In April of 2008 the median home price in Keizer Oregon was $250,000. This April it was $177,550. That’s a 29% plunge. That figure is pretty consistent with what I have seen for my clients…
The other day, I wrote a post about how HUD was going to allow first time home buyers with FHA loans to get a “bridge type” loan on their tax credit so they can use it as a down payment. That has since been retracted. Personally, I am not surprised. It would take a while…
6.1% decline in the median home price 11% decline in the average home price 33% decline in the number of homes sold 9.5% increase in days on the market. Inventory: 13.9 months Whoo Hoo!!! Why am I whoo-hoo-ing? That is the best inventory number I have seen for Salem Oregon in a while. Okay, okay…last…
Down payment assistance programs, lovingly called DAP’s by we in the real estate industry, were nixed as of Oct 2008. Between asking sellers to pay for closing costs and then having the seller’s “gift” them down payment monies, many home buyers were getting into FHA home loans for nothing out of their pocket. The backlash…
Some of you may have heard that Zillow came out with their real estate market reports last week. I’m just a wee bit slow in getting to this because I installed Google’s webmaster on my blog, and found so many broken links that are making my head spin… Must…fix…broken…link… Anyway…now that I have a plan…
Dear Mother Nature, I just wanted to clarify something for you because it seems that you are a tad bit confused. See I live here in Salem Oregon and we are of course known for having a wee bit of rain here in the Pacific Northwest. Now as I have been out with home buyers…
Bank foreclosures are nothing new, but in California things are so bad in some areas that the banks are starting to destroy some homes. We clearly don’t have this problem in Salem Oregon. Our real estate market, while it has its issues, is far from destroying property. Here is a YouTube video that shows the…