Portland's Urban Core Holding On To Growth

Posted on 08/12/08 12:08 PM

Zillow puts out this nifty little map for several Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) every quarter showing the year-over-year home price appreciation broken down by area/neighborhood. Areas marked yellow are actually still appreciating, light green is down 0%-4% and dark green/blue is where you don’t want to be.

Click on the map to enlarge!

Zillow’s home value index is based on Zestimates i.e. their estimate of the current market value for a home. The formula for Zestimates has been improved over the last couple of months, but some significant inaccuracies remain. Nonetheless the overall trend seems to line up with more established standards such as the Case Shiller Index (read more here) or NAR’s numbers (the most recent of which are summarized here.

Note that Portland’s urban core, in particular the north/northeast and inner southeast are holding up fairly well. The Boise/Eliot neighborhood, for instance, is growing at roughly 2%. Growth is also still the norm for southeast neighborhoods Kerns and Woodstock. Neighborhoods such as Nob Hill, Downtown, Concordia, Irvington and Hosford-Abernethy are all posting less than 2% declines – not too bad, when you consider what’s going on in parts of Milwaukie, where -10% is the norm. Zillow’s reporting does also not paint a very favorable picture for suburbs such as Tualitin/Tigard (-7.3%), West Linn (-10.4%) or Gresham (-7.8%), which appears to tie in with what we’re seeing for Lake Oswego from other sources.