Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkDaMan
except in Portland we are talking of the low thousands of extra units and in other parts of the country they are dealing with tens of thousands of housing units. I believe I read somewhere that Miami had 80,000 unoccupied units? I might be wrong on the city, but Portland's market isn't nearly as saturated as the others you mentioned.
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Yes, the numbers are quite different. Places like Miami and San Diego have a much higher number of vacant units than Portland. Although these cities also have larger resident and tourist populations, so if you wanted to compare numbers, you'd need to normalize them to the populations first. Also, the number of vacant units in those cities did not become apparent (for some reason I don't understand - maybe some funny accounting in the RMLS system?) until well after the market decline began; possibly, Portland's vacant inventory is similarly understimated now.
The fact that Portland is behaving so similarly to those cities, albeit with a 12-18 month lag, leads me to expect that the normalized excess supply in Portland may be similar. After all, if the Portland oversupply relative to real demand was not similarly large, why would these auctions appear?