Portland Blog: TWIP June 6-13

Dear Portland,

Your consistency is mind-boggling. May was awesome. Sun, BBQs, boating, high temps…Enter June: The clouds slink in and the rains begin again after a month of near arid Oregon desert. The truth is, I am game—I love it! I miss my rainy Oregon when its all hot and Phoenix-like. My new bamboo (props = www.bamboogarden.com) thanks you as do the lettuce, tomatoes, hops, kale and various other ‘green things’ I have adorning my outdoor life. Free water is good, too. Thank you!

June also means the Portland Rose Festival which is still rockin’ until the 14th so you have plenty of time if you’ve not made it down there just yet. Oh, and you simply don’t want to miss the Dragon Boat race this weekend! Grab a cup of coffee and pick your bridge or waterfront gazing point. Our dragon boaters look like urban Vikings out there— they’re an awesome sight to behold. And speaking of boats, its Fleet Week! Naval vessels from the United States Navy, U.S. Coast Guard and the Canadian Maritime Forces arrive from around the world for a four-day visit to the City of Roses. Ship tours will be available daily.

And since it is now officially June, we are announcing the winner of the May Portland Photo Contest...(drumroll) and the winner is...Paolo Beno who submitted the gorgeous shot overlooking downtown Portland in the fog. Paolo wins a $25 gift certificate to our fave, Powells Books.

Fog Town

Featured Portland Events

The Harmonica Pocket at Airplay Cafe The Harmonica Pocket begins their summer Northwest tour with a thoroughly active, all-ages show at AirPlay Café. The duo attracted hundreds of new fans to their spring show at Symphony Space in NYC, and they will return for a concert in New York’s Central Park in July.

The Harmonica Pocket is a Puget Sound based group known for “thoroughly catchy, toe-tapping indie-pop tunes.” They just released their second children’s album, LADYBUG ONE, a collection of original and classic tunes that celebrates the delight of nature. The CD has won national acclaim, including favorable reviews in the Seattle Times, San Jose Mercury News, New York Post, Mothering, Cricket, Time Out New York and Cookie magazines. This truly “green” recording was produced off the grid at the group’s solar-powered studios on an island in Puget Sound.

Equipped with a hula hoop, a ukulele, face paint and a suitcase full of simple props and instruments, The Harmonica Pocket family show gently expands the boundaries of family entertainment with swinging, acoustic story-songs and clever twists on classic American folk songs, all set to the choreography of a hula hooping ladybug. Keeth Monta Apgar and Nala Walla, the core duo of The Harmonica Pocket, will perform.
With their highly-interactive and playfully educational shows, The Harmonica Pocket manages to capture the attention of children AND their parents, keeping the whole family smiling. June 6

Visit this Portland Event

Residential Garden Design Workshop Sponsored by NE Coalition of Neighborhoods. The Garden Design Workshop will take place on four consecutive Saturdays. The first session will be an Introduction with the remaining sessions dedicated to learning basic skills needed to produce a residential Landscape Plan. The resulting drawing may be used as a master plan, to be installed over the years by the homeowner, or for obtaining professional construction bids.

The Workshop will present a step by step process which will guide the participant through the process of drawing a scaled base map of their garden area, analysing specific needs and opportunities and choosing the best plant materials for the space. Different garden styles, themes, and elements such as patios, arbors, decks, cutting gardens, and fruit/vegetable gardens, will be discussed, with an emphasis on the open exchange of ideas. June 6

Visit this Portland Event

Virtual Worlds: Escher and Paradox At the Portland Art Museum starting June 7: Printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972) created visual puzzles that astonish with their mathematical rigor and their patent absurdity. This exhibition traces the development of the artist’s work from his early stylized depictions of landscape and architecture to his later use of repeated geometric patterns, stimulated by his visit in 1936 to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. There he discovered Moorish decorative tiles with their purely abstract designs. By adding the suggestion of human or animal forms to such logical patterns, Escher began creating imaginary images in which one form morphs into another. Exploiting the potential for visual paradox of reversals of figure and ground, manipulations of perspective, and shifts between spatial illusion and the flatness of the picture surface, he created virtual worlds.

Through some 135 prints, drawings, and printing matrices drawn from the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum and from a private Oregon collection, the exhibition scrutinizes Escher’s graphic production and illuminates his working process.

Visit this Portland Event

Children and Natural Medicine Dr. Arianna Staruch, ND, will discuss how to deal with common childhood problems at home, including the common cold, ear infections, digestive upset, bumps and bruises, and natural support options like hydrotherapy, herbs, and homeopathy for children. Diet and lifestyle choices will also be introduced. June 8 at the American College of Healthcare Sciences.

Visit this Portland Event

Have you been to the Saturday Market yet? Go!

There are lots more great Portland events this week, just visit the Portland Events calendar!

Featured Portland Business: The Red E

Newly opened and already a coffee destination, The Red E serves coffees by local Portland roaster, Coava Coffee (single origin) and Chicago's Intelligentsia (espresso blends).

The RED E
1006 N. Killingsworth
Portland, OR 97217
(503) 998-1387
website

Portland Photo of the Week

The featured photo of the week is Pioneer Courthouse by JohnK. Great eye, as always!

The theme for the June Portland photo contest is Summer. Show us in images what embodies the Portland summer to you! To enter, simply load your photo on the Photos page.

Blog, Forum, and Other Chatter

Moving to PDX....
Laurelhurst
Drugs in my neighborhood
Eco-Chic "Riverview" at Bridgeport
Best Thai in town

Alameda Neighborhood Report by Ross Seligman

Alameda is one of the premier neighborhoods in Portland. With quiet, tree lined streets, gorgeous homes, a strong sense of community, and incredible views of downtown and the west hills, Alameda is an incredible place to live. Want to know more? Read about it from the Portland experts on the .com side on Alameda's neighborhood profile. Want to locate it? Alameda neighborhood map. If you are looking for homes specifically in Alameda, I have a way for you to search for homes by particular neighborhood.

In my monthly Portland real estate report, I always talk about how each individual neighborhood is a micro-market. If you are looking to buy or sell in a particular neighborhood, the most crucial information that you need to know is what is going on in that neighborhood. In this situation, the overall Portland market report is less important and the national real estate report is just about useless. This posting is a real estate report for the Alameda neighborhood of all homes in all price ranges. Feel free to request particular neighborhoods in which you are interested in buying or selling and I am be happy to do a report, just contact me on this forum or at: http://www.propertiesofportland.com.

The first thing you will notice about individual neighborhoods as compared to the overall Portland reports are that the numbers can be wildly different month to month. Basically, the bigger the pool of data you are working with, the smoother the stats become. As we focus on smaller areas, many different things can happen month to month.

On to the report:

Here is the overall chart of inventory, sold, and pending for the Alameda neighborhood from 2/08 to 4/09:

Alameda generally has a higher price range than other neighborhoods, owing to it's extraordinary homes and perfect location. Although sales are generally sluggish at the moment in higher price ranges, Alameda continues to sell. There are 26 pending sales in April that were set to close in May.

More stats for you from your friendly neighborhood real estate statistics nerd:

One year change from April 2008 to April 2009:

Inventory (how many homes on the market for sale): Down 8.5%
Homes sold: Up 6.3%
Homes pending sale: Down 7.1%

(Compare to 15 months at the beginning of this chart and sales are up 13.3%, pending sales are up 44.4%)

Read the rest of this report by local Portland Realtor and Ecobroker, Ross Seligman.

How to Increase Your Credit (FICO) Score by Wade Willis

Credit scores have always been a very mysterious thing to may people. As stated in my article last week it is estimated that 70 percent of Americans don’t know they have a credit score, let alone how it is used and/or calculated. If you are one of these people, you are definitely not alone.

Having said that, it doesn’t have to be, nor shouldn’t be a mystery to you. There are some very easy ways for you to take control of your credit score.

Obtain your report!

The more credit reports I see from clients or potential clients, the more I realize how important it is to stay on top of your credit report. “But, Wade, I don’t have any control over what is reported there.” Wrong. Let me tell you a couple of stories.

We pulled a credit report on a client who knew he had maintained excellent for the past 10 years or more. He was not worried in the least about his credit score. And for the most part he was correct. He Equifax score was 808. His Experian score was 813. Both exceptional scores. His Trans Union score was 703. Not only a huge difference, but anything below 720 is treated as a greater risk by a lender. The lower your score, the greater the risk.

What he wasn’t aware of because he hadn’t check his credit report in a long time, was that a cable bill from 1984 that had gone into collections and had been paid off in 1986, had never been removed from the Trans Union report. It was mistakenly on there. If two of the reporting agencies had never removed it, it could have easily cost him thousands of dollars more to get his mortgage or a lot of time to dispute it and have it removed from the Trans Union report.

In another instance, a client wanted to purchase a property. When we pulled his credit report, he was surprised to find that while his Equifax score was 750, his Trans Union was 695 and his Experian score was 675! Why? The same reason, an old collection had never been removed even though it had been paid off in 1995! It took him an additional three weeks to track down all of the documentation to prove to Trans Union and Experian that that collection was being reported incorrectly and should be removed. On a refinance, usually the only worry about extending the time before the transaction is completed is that interest rates might go up and it not longer makes sense to refinance. On a purchase, however, there are many more deadlines. In this case the additional three weeks put him beyond the closing deadline. The seller chose to accept an offer from another buyer who could close within the given deadlines.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to help save this deal because my client had signed the purchase agreement before he came to me. It was somewhat understandable because he knew he had great credit even though he had not checked his credit report in more than a decade. And he was right. He did have good credit. Two of the three reporting agencies, however, didn’t know that.

How to obtain your credit report

There are several ways to do it. Whichever way you decide, make sure that you are getting a report from all three reporting agencies.

1. You can call each reporting agency separately:
Equifax 800-685-1111, Experian 888-397-9742, Trans Union 800-916-8800
Each report will cost about $9.00 each.

2. The law allows you to obtain your credit report once every 12 months for free. Go to www.annualcreditreport.com or call 877-322-8228. You will have the choice to receive a report from one, two or all three reporting agencies. Make sure you get all three.

3. The third way is to have your mortgage professional run the report for you. While it will cost you in the neighborhood of $20.00, there are benefits to running your report this way. If you use your mortgage professional to work on your loan, you may be able to use that report. Each time you run the report it cost money. A free credit report will not be viewed by the lender as usable. The other benefit, is that your mortgage professional will be more than happy to go over the report with you. This can be very helpful.

How can you improve your score?

If there are not any inaccuracies on your credit report to dispute, there are other methods of increasing your score over time. If you are even considering purchasing a home, you should start working on increasing your score now.

Since 35 percent of your score is determined by your payment history, there is not another way to create a history than by having a history. It is much more beneficial to your score if you have at least one credit account that you pay off every month than not having any credit at all. Always pay on time. Having said this, while I would never recommend paying beyond the due date, your payment is not late in the eyes of the credit agencies until it is 30 days late. You will be charged a late payment fee by your lender, however, if your payment is paid one day after the due date.

Since 30 percent of your score is determine by how your balance-to-limit ratio, begin working today to pay your balances down on all of your cards to at least 50 percent of the available credit limit. Your score will go up even more if you pay it down to the 33 percent range or better. Let’s say one of your cards has a $10K limit and you have a $6,000 balance on it. Your other card has a $5,000 limit and you have a $1,000 balance on it. You have $1,000 to spend on improving your credit score. You may be temped to pay off the card that has a $1,000 balance on it, but you would actually improve your score more by paying your $10K card down from a $6,000 balance to a $5,000 balance.

Another aspect of this 30 percent determination is...read the rest of this article prepared by Wade Willis Portland's So...

Best Real Estate Deals in Portland

Here are the best deals in Portland for the week of June 1 to June 7

New PortlandNeighborhood Members

We're over 700 real members!! By real I mean we don't allow folks who don't actively engage in the community or who commit the ultimate online sin of sending you gross "visit my webcam" links or anything else that is just plain wrong. I have a ban button on my keyboard and I am not afraid to use it! ;-)

A big Portland welcome to the newest members of this wonderful Portland blog! If you love this site as much as we do, please invite your friends!

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