Comments on: Portland sees trend of ‘zombie buildings’

By: Nick Bjork

Nick Bjork — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:52:25 +0000

Nemo Inis and Old Town,

Your posts remind me of something my father has always told me, “you don’t buy a house as an investment, you buy it to live in it the way you want to, and if it makes you money in the long-run, that is great.”

I know that he is only speaking on behalf of people flipping houses, but I thought it fit nicely into what you are saying. While I don’t agree that there isn’t money to be made in real estate development, the recession has exposed an inherent flaw in how the ‘building for investment’ game works. Prices need to go up for real estate to be a sound investment. That is a bubble. Bubbles must pop. That is what happened during the recession. Prices got to the point that no one was going to pay them. When real estate prices go down again that same process will happen again and the bubble will pop again. There is no getting around that. I guess it is now a matter of timing your investments right.

Thanks for reading.

By: Martha Perez

Martha Perez — Fri, 07 May 2010 02:09:32 +0000

As I mentioned at my speech the other night at the Urban League, contracts, RFP’s, shady bank deals, TIF’s and other insider deals, are simply not going to reach out to enough people! What we need to do, besides rent abatement, is to continue to reduce the short-term barriers to simply getting money into peoples’ pockets. There are many useful long and mid-term solutions to our economic crisis of faith, but not enough short-term ones. Hopefully, the business community would continue to be open to working with those organizations and/both individuals, that it hadn’t considered doing so, prior to the recession (which officially began in November of 2008).

By: Old Town

Old Town — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:25:08 +0000

Zombie buildings – very descriptive. Portland’s Old Town and downtown has many. The recession only increased the already plentiful zombies. As one commenter noted – the particular situation sounds more in greed with a heavy dose of ignorance – or vice versa.

Their own actions have put themselves in the position of having overvalued properties, yet they want to maintain unrealistic market lease rates to maintain artificial property values. How can this do anything more than increase the zombies?

There seems to be something inherently wrong in the buying and selling of properties, commercial or residential, as if they were stocks. The real estate market has become a stock like market where the value of the property is unrelated to its inherent value.

By: Jill

Jill — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:34:25 +0000

“…vacancy will hit bottom at the end of this year,” says Mr Bach.

He doesn’t get out enough. Surrounding sub-markets are a wasteland — Clark County alone has 1 million sq ft empty.

By: Nemo Inis

Nemo Inis — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:19:24 +0000

I’m sorry but that just looks like GREED from here. Property “values” and rents in Portland are still wildly overinflated for the area’s economy and the banks, developers and owners did this to themselves. They were idiots to rack the prices up that high and idiots to build these properties that few people here can afford to buy or rent. It totally frosts my hide to see all these STUPID, over-priced business and residential properties sitting empty because greedy pigs built them and paid no attention to there not being a market for them here or what was actually needed and wanted in Portland. Now we’re stuck with them and a dearth of space we can actually use. I can only pray all you truffle-snuffling hogs will go bankrupt as quickly as possible so the rest of us can get on with our lives without you in our way.