Housing Foreclosures and Portland

Here is a snippet of the 2007 foreclosure data released yesterday by Realtytrac. I just selected a few western metro areas from the full set of 100.



The picture is pretty good: yes foreclosures are up 24% over last year (percentage of households with filings), but overall Portland's percentage (0.6) is well below the national average of (1.0). I think this may turn out to be the story of the Portland housing market: Oregon's economy (especially in terms of employment) was slow to recover from the recession of 2001, this delayed the heating up of the Portland housing market and therefore it never got too over-inflated by the time of the credit market freeze due to the subprime mess. So we might just dodge a bullet on this one, though I would still expect a minor correction. At this point, the consumer credit market crunch is in full gear, and without huge supply pressure from foreclosures we may not see much of a drop in values. But the big question looming out in the distance is health of the national economy and the potential effect of a recession or extremely slow growth on the Oregon employment sector.