Many buyers are searching for foreclosures in Government Camp, Welches, Rhododendron and Brightwood. The Mt. Hood area has relatively few foreclosures compared to other areas near the Portland metro area and Portland itself. The majority of homes that have shown up as foreclosures have been in the Timberline Rim subdivision.

Most of these foreclosed homes in Timberline Rim are under $300,000 and the majority fall in the low $200,000 range or less. When compared to subdivisions closer in such as in Sandy and the Happy Valley area, we have really not had the hard hits that many of these newer subdivisions have had. Lack of available land to develop with"new subdivisions" in the past couple of years has caused an escape from this problem.

foreclosures do bring  values down. Banks price these homes to go out the door. These foreclosure sales will be used as comparable for conventional loans. New lending rules require home sales in the past two to three months to be used as the comparables whether foreclosures or not.  They will help establish values for bank loans to buyers.This s the bad news.

The good news is that once the inventory of foreclosed homes are gone, existing home inventory gets adjusted to "market" and gets sold, values will stabilize and eventually we will be back to a more equal market for buyers and sellers.