Portland, Oregon ranks 6^th of the 20 cities tracked by Case Shiller. The index reveals that a dollar invested in the Portland real estate market would be worth $1.47. That is a 47% return on each dollar invested. DC, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, and Boston place among the top five with Washington DC’s impressive 82% return.

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The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index showed the San Francisco area – which it defines as the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa – up 16.2 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same quarter in 2009.

Other California areas also showed recovery, with San Diego up 10.8 percent and Los Angeles up 6 percent.

“San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles went way up and came way down, so to some extent this is a rebound from the bottom,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee for Standard & Poor’s, which publishes the index.

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Image via WikipediaFrom LA Times

Industrial property landlords are suffering in most of the country – but not so much in Los Angeles, a real estate brokerage said Tuesday.

Vacancy in the U.S. increased for a 10th consecutive quarter to 10.9% in the first three months of this year, Grubb & Ellis said. Asking rents were down almost 7% from a year ago. With the economy finally starting to improve a bit, the pace of deterioration in the industrial real estate market is easing, “but not quickly,” said the brokerage in a report.

In Los Angeles, vacancy rose a smidgen from a year ago to a mere 3.4% in the first quarter, though that was a six-year high. Asking rents have been coming down for the most part since 2008.

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From the LA Times:

“Southern California home prices may have finally hit bottom, with median values rising last month for the first significant increase in two years, new data show.”

For the first time in 9 months fewer than half of the sales were foreclosures while the prices rose 6.4% in May.

“I think we can now say with fair degree of confidence the pace of real home price declines has slowed dramatically,” said Los Angeles economist Christopher Thornberg, who was an early predictor of the housing bubble.

“Sales in many higher-cost neighborhoods couldn’t have gotten much lower, so this recent uptick in activity should come as no surprise,” MDA DataQuick President John Walsh said. “The recession and problem mortgages are fueling more high-end distress, hence more high-end bargains.”

The percentage of homes that sold in June for more than $500,000 rose to about 20% of all homes purchased, up from 18% in May.

Additionally only 45% of the homes sold had been foreclosed upon, DataQuick said, the lowest percentage since July 2008. Foreclosures peaked at 57% of total sales in February.  Escrow closed on a total of 23,262 new and resale houses and condominiums in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and San Diego counties last month. That was up 12% from 20,775 in May and up 29% from a year earlier.

Los Angeles County’s median home price in June was $320,000, up from $300,000 in May….In Orange County, the median price went from $410,000 in May to $418,000 in June…The median price in San Diego County rose from $295,000 in May to $314,000 in June.

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“While the majority of the nation’s housing markets are still working toward a bottom, some cities are boasting fundamentals that make them good places to buy a home now,” Forbes reported this week.

Denver is the best city to buy a home. Phoenix was ranked No. 2, followed by Boston, San Diego and Los Angeles.

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A study conducted recently found that the percentage of households that could afford to buy an entry level home in California stood at 53 percent in the third quarter of 2008.  That’s more than double for the same period from a year ago when only 24 percent of households could qualify.

The First-Time Buyer Housing Affordability Index study conducted by the California Association of Realtors found that the minimum household income needed to purchase an entry-level home at $287,760 in California in the third quarter of 2008 was $56,100, based on an adjustable interest rate of 5.91 percent and assuming a 10 percent down payment.  At $56,100, the minimum qualifying income was 44 percent lower than a year earlier when households needed $100,500 to qualify for a loan on an entry-level home.

In Los Angeles County the index stood at 42 percent, up from 20 percent a year ago. The L.A. entry-level price of $332,680 requires a minimum-qualifying income of only $64,800 and comes with a monthly loan payment of $2,160. A condo can start near $100,000 and will require less income.

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