Portland condo market

A client of mine from California asked me this morning: "where else in Portland is a good investment for condos?". This client already owned a couple of condo investment properties in the suburbs and is now considering other places. I didn't hesitate much to tell him that downtown Portland is likely to be the way to go.

In a previous post, I mentioned before that we're anticipating a large number of baby boomers hitting the retirement age. This group of market typically are empty nesters, tired of living in the burbs, no longer need a 3 or 4 bedroom house with a yard to take care of, crave more fun things in life like restaurants, walk to shops and parks, theaters, art. There's no where like downtown in Portland that offers so much and have the potential to fulfill these needs. Unlike many larger cities in the U.S., Portland doesn't really have all the gourmet food, theaters and such aside from downtown. So in a way, all these amenities are concentrated in one 5 square mile area. As more and more condos are built in the next several years, the demand is highly likely to surge more than this growth, considering the number of Californians coming to work and to retire in Portland. One of my other clients did say once: "we'd rather live richly in a smaller place than to live poorly in a large cosmopolitan city". And he's right.

So...am I confident about the Portland real estate market, particularly the condo market? You bet.