Oregon Public Broadcasting

Real estate statistics suggest that residential home sales in and around Portland were slightly improved last month. April Baer has more.

If you compare December numbers with four or five years ago, they don’t look very impressive.

But compare last month with December 2008, when the economy had just entered its nose dive, and you see a 52 percent improvement in real estate closings.

Pending sales also looked better, up forty percent from the prior December.

That said, broker Norm Rice finds his business is still sluggish.

Norm Rice:  “High ends are still moving very slowly, anything above 300, 250-300 seem to be moving very slowly. It’s the lower end, that’s where the deals are. Those seem to be.”

Rice says he knows several potential customers who want to buy, but who are still too nervous about long-tem job prospects.

Average and median sale prices for the Portland metro area in December were both up slightly from November stats.