Searching for a Home to Buy

Find Open Houses to Visit

Portland realtors hold their "Open Houses" on Sunday afternoon.  So arm yourself with the Sunday edition of The Oregonian, which you can purchase early Saturday afternoon, and plot out your tour of homes. The Real Estate section of The Oregonian is where to look.

You can also visit the Regional Market Listing Service Web site. You can narrow your search by filing in the parameters. Note the field "Check for Open House"  at the bottom of the form. Hit the "Search" button and you'll get a list of homes that match your selection criteria. Click on the actual listing to determine the date and time a home will be opened to the public for viewing. 

The site covers all homes for sale in the metro area as well as other counties and cities in Oregon.

Hint:  If you searching for open houses in Portland only, select "Multnomah" in the county box and "Portland" in the city box.

Visit a Portland Neighborhood

First, download and print a map (PDF format) of the Portland Neighborhoods.  This will help you with directions and orientation.  Here are some of the neighborhoods you may want to consider visiting:

• Southwest Portland Neighborhoods:  Arlington Heights, Bridlemile, Council Crest, Hillsdale, Portland Heights, Multnomah Village, Terwilliger-Corbett-Lair Hill, and Sylvan Heights.
• Northwest Portland Neighborhoods:  Pearl District, Northwest, Hillside, Willamette Heights, and Forest Park/Forest Heights.
• Northeast Portland Neighborhoods:  Alameda, Irvington, Beaumont-Wilshire, Grant Park, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, and Rose City Park.
• Southeast Portland Neighborhoods:  Eastmoreland, Hosford-Abernethy (Ladd's Addition is part of this neighborhood), Laurelhurst, Mount Tabor,  Sellwood-Moreland, and Sunnyside (aka Hawthorne).

Many of the neighborhood profiles pages on this site have walking tour guides.

Portland Monthly Magazine Online Real Estate

In their April issue every year, the Portland Monthly magazine features neighborhoods. It has a ton of information about neighborhoods. The online site offers more data than the printed magazine.

To help those in the housing market, the magazine combines all the data from about 120 neighborhoods and communities in the Portland metro area.  Include are housing prices, school ratings, demographics, crime statistics, parks, commuting information, and services.

Portland Monthly Magazine also has a wealth of data about public schools in the metro area to include both Oregon and Washington. It also has information about private schools.

Apps

House Hunter

House Hunter is a good choice for anyone serious about buying a home because it can help users evaluate multiple houses more easily.

House Hunter offers a detailed list of roughly 80 house features, along with an easy method for scoring each. It also lets homeowners add their own features to that list, in case an indoor pool or a backyard Jacuzzi is a priority. You then rank each feature’s importance, on a scale from 1 to 10. After a house visit, you evaluate those features individually and the app assigns an overall score to the home.

Your comments and photos can be stored inside the app. House Hunter includes a mortgage calculator, too. Users can e-mail their ratings to a real estate agent or a family member, for instance.

A more limited Lite version is also worth considering.

Cost: $3.99 for iPhone.

Zillow and Trulia

House Hunter comes into play only after you have a set of homes to consider. Before that, Zillow and Trulia are still the best apps to consider. But because no centralized service has perfect visibility into local real estate markets, it makes sense to download both. Zillow, more fully featured than Trulia, is the best place to start.

Zillon users can go through a neighborhood and view the selling prices of local homes for sale, as well as rentals, and prices of homes that recently sold. If you like a home, and you have the iPad version of the app, you can save it by dragging it into a favorites section.

The notifications are intelligently designed, offering alerts when prices drop to a specified level or when homes are sold, among others. And if you covet a particular home that’s not currently for sale, the app will alert you if it ever goes on the market.

Zillow users can draw a line on a map — Trulia does not offer it — and search for only those houses that are available in a given neighborhood. For buyers who have finely tuned ideas of where they want to live, this is a helpful touch.

Zillow also offers a section for finding local mortgage rates, and mortgage calculators. The calculators allow you to tweak your down payment, purchase price and interest rate information, and quickly figure monthly payments.

Neither Trulia nor Zillow has foolproof listings. In recent tests, both services occasionally turned up listings that were stale, and failed to find others that had recently appeared on the market.

Cost:  Both are free for the iPhone and Droid.