Whitney Minnich Real Estate and Community Updates

Keeping a Listing Tidy While Pets Live in It November 27, 2018 Making sure a listing is clean when the owners have a dog or cat can be tough. Pets can leave behind messes, scratch marks, fur, dander, and odors. Home improvement website HouseLogic offers some of the following tips on how to tidy a house with pets while it’s on the market: Steam clean all fabrics. Steam clean carpets, rugs, upholstered furniture, and the drapes. “Job number one is to take care of [the soft surfaces in your house],” Melissa Maker, owner of a Toronto cleaning service, told HouseLogic. “They hold odors and hair like nothing else.” Groom. Have the pet professionally groomed to remove more hair and dander. Be sure to brush the pet regularly—outside is preferable—to get most hair on the brush and not on your sofa or rugs. Clean tile grout. Tile is resistant to dog stains, but the grout isn’t. Steam clean grout to lift out stains and odors. A pro can chip away t...

Oregon's population keeps growing in 2018, but slower By Elliot Njus | The Oregonian/OregonLive | Posted November 19, 2018 at 11:35 AM Oregon continued to grow at a steady clip between 2017 and 2018, but the growth slowed significantly from the year before. The state added 54,200 new residents during the year ending July 1, 2018, according to new estimates from the Population Research Center at Portland State University.  That brought the state's population to about 4,195,300. The bulk of the growth, 88 percent, came from 47,000 more people moving into the state than moving away. That's 9,000 fewer new arrivals than the year before. Natural increase -- births minus deaths -- accounted for the rest. But natural population growth peaked in 2008 and has since slowed as the state's population has grown older. Multnomah and Washington counties saw the biggest increases, each adding more than 10,000 new residents.  But Deschutes Cou...

INSTANT NOTIFICATIONS ABOUT THE PROPERTIES YOU CARE ABOUT  One of my clients’ favorite website tools is Property Tracker®. This is an automatic way to receive instant notifications anytime a new property is listed, a property they track has a price reduction, or when a property sells and what it sold for. You can even search by school! Go to www.whitneyminnich.com and click on Property Tracker® in the right hand corner. Of course, let me know if you have questions or if you want me to set up an account for you.

Cooling down of housing market could be good news for buyers By   Kenneth R. Harney November 14 Don’t call it a “buyer’s market.” Don’t call it a “correction.” But the fact is that a sobering change is taking shape in the housing market — an unmistakable cooling trend that defies an economy that is showing impressive growth, has the lowest unemployment rate in years and the highest home-equity levels on record. Anyone thinking of selling or buying a home shouldn’t ignore it. Doing so could cost you money, time and maybe a great opportunity. Call it a rebalancing. For years since the end of the financial crisis, prices in most markets have increased steadily — by single digits annually in most places, double digits in cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Denver and others that have vibrant employment growth plus persistent and deep shortages of homes for sale. Sellers were in the saddle. That was then. This is now: ●Sales of existing and new homes have been sa...

Attached-home option attractive to some homebuyers By  Patty Hastings , Columbian Social Services, Demographics, Faith Published:  November 5, 2018, 6:00 AM Katie Barrett said the potential homebuyers who have toured her model home in the Village at Fisher’s Landing neighborhood are typically looking for a starter home. “We’ve got some of the first-time homebuyers who are younger,” maybe a couple with one child, said Barrett, community manager and broker with Ginn Realty Group. They’re embarking on that American dream of homeownership. In this case, the ticket to getting a newly built house in this desirable east Vancouver area for about $320,000 means being sandwiched next to neighbors. Fisher’s View Luxury Townhomes are one of the attached home developments being built across Clark County. As home prices increase and buildable land dwindles, attached homes offer a less expensive alternative to a home with yard on all sides. “The feedback is usually pretty...

Daily Mortgage Rate Update Rates for 11/26/2018 as of 11:00 AM. Rates are higher compared to 11/21 Assumptions: 30 day lock, on a purchase loan for a primary home, loan amount of $300,000 (75% loan-to-value) with taxes and insurance and with credit scores of 740+. APR is not the interest rate but reflects the rate with charges that are paid to get a loan.  Rates are subject to change without notice.  JUMBO pricing is based on 20% down, 6 months reserves, and a 550K loan amount. All other assumptions are the same. Market - 10 year treasury yield is UP today and at about  3.06%+    https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=US10Y For more information and the latest market update  contact Evan Karr with Priority Home Lending .

Millennials Are More Likely to Buy Their First Homes in Cities AMANDA KOLSON HURLEY   NOV 15, 2018 If there’s a single question that has gnawed at urban economists and planners over the past few years, it’s this: Will Millennials’ well-known love of cities fade once they have kids and need space for double strollers and play kitchens, or is it a more lasting shift in how Americans will decide where to live? We’ve heard the  argument  that Millennials have “peaked” in cities and will eventually suburbanize from demographer Dowell Myers (cited by Conor Dougherty  in the  New York Times ), and the  counter-argument  from  City Observatory ’s Joe Cortright and others. One researcher, Harvard’s Hyojung Lee, has tried to square the circle by arguing that  Millennials are both urban  and  suburban . Although it doesn’t put the debate to rest, a new paper shows that Millennials are at least continuing to tilt urban as they st...

Consumers Worried About Uphill Battles to Find a Home November 20, 2018 Seventy percent of prospective home buyers say they expect house hunting to get harder or stay about the same in the months ahead. It’s a sentiment shared among buyers of all ages, according to new findings from the National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Trends Report for the third quarter of this year. Housing costs are also higher and could price out some prospective buyers. Mortgage rates are on the rise and, combined with higher home prices, affordability is a struggle.   Source: https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2018/11/20/consumers-worried-about-uphill-battles-to-find-a-home?tp=i-H43-Bb-3DL-5zapH-1p-FEes-1c-5zauy-1sDURh&om_rid=88561251&Om_ntype=RMOdaily&om_mid=12359 Source:  “ Most Buyers Don’t Expect House Hunting to Get Easier Soon ,” National Association of Home Builders’ Eye on Housing blog (Nov. 15, 2018)   ...

Why did my Oregon property tax bill go up? 4 questions to ask Posted November 14, 2018 at 04:40 PM | Updated November 15, 2018 at 10:24 AM Oregon homeowners might be wondering why they owe so much more in property taxes than last year.  Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas county residents can  look up their tax bills and compare them to the rest of the region on our map .  Oregon's complex property tax system doesn't always make it easy to figure out, but here are four questions to ask yourself (or your county’s assessor). Did it go up about 3 percent? Back in 1997, a ballot measure approved by Oregon voters separated taxes from the real values of homes. Instead, it pegged taxable values to 1995 levels, plus 3 percent a year. As a result, most homeowners can expect a 3 percent increase each year, regardless of what happens to market values. But property owners  don't share the benefits of those ballot measures equally ....

Young Adults Living at Home May Suffer Professionally November 20, 2018 Young adults who are given financial help from their parents to live independently instead of living rent-free at their parents’ home tend to do better professionally, according to  a study published in August in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence . Sociologist Anna Manzoni, the study’s author and an associate professor at North Carolina State University, studied about 7,500 young adults between the ages of 18 to 28. College graduates who received money from their parents—for paying bills or for having cash—tended to do better professionally than those who lived at home with their parents. Graduates who received the highest amount of cash from their parents—$15,000 a year or more—but lived on their own tended to thrive the most in their careers, Manzoni found. Such graduates ranked six points higher on a scale of occupational status than graduates who received little or no financial help from...