Shelli’s & Susan’s Guide to Portland

Let us Help You Find a Home and a Neighborhood

Welcome to our website about the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. It’s our way of helping you become acquainted with the neighborhoods and communities of the Portland metro area and to inform you about the Portland area housing market. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome. 

If you have questions or if you’re interested in buying or selling a home in the Portland area, contact us online or call Shelli at (503) 497-5061 or Susan at (503) 497 -2984.

Shelli Gowdy — Real Estate Broker
Susan Marthens —  Principal Real Estate Broker/CRS GRI

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New Listings in the Five County Metro Area

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New Listings by Area in the City of Portland

Northwest Portland  ♦  Southwest Portland  ♦   Southeast Portland ♦   Northeast Portland  ♦  North Portland  ♦  All Areas

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Homes for Sale by Community in the Portland Metro Area

Beaverton  ♦  Dunthorpe  ♦ Forest Grove  ♦  Happy Valley  ♦  Lake Oswego  ♦  Milwaukie  ♦  Portland  ♦  Sherwood  ♦  Tigard  ♦  Tualatin  ♦  West Linn

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Real Estate & Homes 

On the market: Oregon homes with a private wine cellar

22 October — Pinot noir and other grapes have been harvested from Oregon’s bountiful vineyards. The fruity clusters are being crushed, then pampered to age away in flavor-enhancing oak barrels or tanks for months before bottling. What can you do until you can buy the 2016 vintage? Root into your wine cellar and quaff what you have. Don’t have a wine cellar? Don’t feel dispirited. In this week’s real estate gallery, we look at homes on the market or recently sold that have a room dedicated to storing wine, either underground, where the temperature naturally stays around the preferred 55 degrees, or near the dining room, where it’s easier to show off status labels.  Read more… 

September home prices chilled out a bit — but not much

24 October — To paraphrase the Regional Multiple Listing Service: Some clouds blew into the real estate market in September, casting shadows over sale prices, new listings and pending and closed sales. In its latest Market Action Report, RMLS noted that, while the 3,673 new listings in September was a jump of more than 7 percent over the same month last year, they were down 12.6 percent from August. Pending sales were also down nearly 4 percent from last September and more than 14 percent from August.  Read more…

Hottest ‘Hoods: The Portland areas with the highest average home price (Q3 2016)

24 October — The names near the top are the ones you’d expect: Irvington, Nob Hill, Lake Oswego and so forth. But it’s also interesting to see that the zip codes at the bottom of the list of the 25 neighborhoods with the highest average sales price show commanding numbers themselves. Case in point: Damascus, Wilsonville, Tualatin Sherwood and Happy Valley had average home prices that ranged from $411,026 to $446,653, respectively.  Read more… 

Maverick Portland Developer Kevin Cavenaugh Builds Diamonds of Design in the Urban Rough

23 October — In 1993, a 25-year-old named Kevin Cavenaugh returned to his native California after a Peace Corps stint in Gabon, a Francophone country on Africa’s Atlantic coast. In Gabon he built teacher housing: firing up chainsaws, laying brick, and learning local building techniques. In some ways it was a logical follow-up to his UC-Berkeley architecture studies and an obsession that first bloomed when he was around six, sketching buildings in the Bay Area’s burbs.  Read more…  

  

News

Wood-fired electricity sparks ambitious plans, controversy in Oregon

23 October — By year’s end, Portland General Electric will fire up its 550-megawatt power plant in Boardman for a daylong test burn, feeding 8,000 tons of pulverized, roasted wood into its boilers instead of the usual diet of coal. The exercise is meant to gauge whether the aging fossil fuel plant could reliably generate electricity using renewable feedstock such as “torrefied” wood after its scheduled closure in 2020. If it works — technically, economically and environmentally — Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant could one day become the country’s largest biomass power plant.   Read more… 

5.0 earthquake rumbles Southern Oregon coast late Saturday

23 October — According to the United States Geological Survey, a 5.0 earthquake occurred at 10:01 p.m. Saturday in the Pacific Ocean about 93 miles southwest of Gold Beach, Oregon, or about 124 miles to the Northwest of Eureka, California. The quake was followed by a 4.6 earthquake that hit at 2:50 a.m. Sunday off the Oregon Coast approximately 97 miles west of Brookings. Neither earthquake prompted tsunami advisories from the National Tsunami Warning Center  Read more… 

Explore Deconstruction

21 October — Deconstruction is the systematic disassembly of a structure in the opposite order it was constructed to maximize salvage of material for reuse. Portland City Council adopted an ordinance, including code language, which requires projects seeking a demolition permit of a house or duplex to fully deconstruct that structure if it was built in 1916 or earlier or is a designated historic resource. The new deconstruction requirements become effective October 31, 2016. Demolition permit applications deemed complete prior to October 31st are not subject to this new requirement. Visit the City of Portland’s website www.exploredecon.com for more details about the new deconstruction policy.

Building a better birdhouse

21 October — Larry Schwitters is putting a lot of hope into a five-gallon bucket of bird poop. It’s one of the ways he plans to lure thousands of Vaux’s swifts into his homemade version of the chimneys these birds use as a nightly roost. “The idea is we throw it in the chimney and it has an odor supposedly the swifts can smell,” he said. “If they fly over it and take a sniff, they’ll think, ‘Hey, swifts have used this before. This is a good one. You can smell it.’” Vaux’s (rhymes with “boxes”) swifts are known for the dazzling displays they create as they funnel into chimneys to roost for the night.  Read more…

Lake Oswego’s vote on city-backed internet service could send signal statewide

21 October — Don’t like your choices for internet service? In Lake Oswego, voters have a chance to demand their own. A November ballot measure asks residents whether the city should back a new fiber-optic network that promises superfast, “gigabit” internet service for $60 a month. A private company would build and own the network, but the city would be on the hook if signups don’t meet expectations. Some advocates of making internet service more accessible have called on municipalities to treat broadband service as a utility, like water and electricity.  Read more…

Is pain infectious? Apparently so! New experiments show sensitivity to pain can be spread socially – through SMELL

21 October — Pain could be contagious, a groundbreaking new study claims. Lab mice were put through a series of tests which should not have been painful – ticklish at the most. But the rodents reacted as if their feet were burning. The experiments by researchers in Portland, Oregon, suggested the mice caught this heightened sensitivity from other mice who were primed to feel pain. Both groups of mice were in the same room, in cages approximately 1.5 meters apart from each other – but they could not see each other.  Read more…

Oregon coast has a ghost forest

21 October — At first glance, the Neskowin Ghost Forest, some 15 miles north of Lincoln City, Oregon, looks like the eerie remnants of an old pier. In fact, the beachfront spectacle at Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site is made of a couple dozen barnacle-coated Sitka spruce tree stumps from a decimated 2,000-year-old forest. Most Oregonians were unaware the forest existed until 1997, when big storms created powerful waves that excavated it, revealing the peculiar tree remains. Scientists believe the forest was originally destroyed and buried under sand during an earthquake or the resulting tsunami.  Read more…