Gorge Homes & Property

You Think Gas Prices Are High? Try Gorge Housing

By Susan Hess, 4-25-06

Why invest in the stock market when you can do much better buying a house in Hood River or White Salmon? We all know how pricey and popular the place is getting, but just how pricey and popular? Try half again as pricey as last year.

One result: “We just closed on a Hood River 75-by-160 foot lot with a river view. It sold for $375 ,000,” says Realtor Kim Salvesen.

That’s more than a third of a million dollars, for an empty lot.

Says Salvesen, “The thinking is these will all be high-end homes. If you were to pay that much for the property and invest in a structure that was say $300,000, then you would have invested $675,000, and it would be worth $800,000 by the time it’s done.”

Salvesen is principal broker and sales manager for Windemere/Glenn Taylor Real Estate in Hood River. She ran some statistics on Gorge home sales for the first three months of both 2006 and 2005 for New West Columbia Gorge. The numbers show that the average Hood River residential sales price rocketed up 52 percent in one year.

In the first three months of last year, the average home sale was $272,802. This year, it’s $413,244.

For White Salmon and Bingen, the first-quarter home prices soared 56 percent, from $198,025 to $309,781.

(Those figures make the central gorge house market hotter even than Bend’s.)

The Dalles sales, while not as spectacular, still grew almost 10 percent. The average 2005 price was $145,159, rising to $159,514 in 2006.

Only Goldendale showed a decrease, dipping 17 percent.

The numbers of sales in the smaller Gorge communities are too few to make reliable comparisons. But Salvesen talks about Cascade Locks. She says many people are being priced out of the Portland market. Instead they’re buying in Cascade Locks and Stevenson.

“Last summer a Cascade Locks house listed at $140,000 was setting the market trend. That house sold right away. Now there are six houses listed: the lowest at $168,000 and ranging up to $250,000,” says Salvesen.

And it’s not like sellers sit around waiting for their houses to sell. Average length of time on the market is a week. In many cases, they sell before they go on the market, because a broker will know of an interested buyer.

Salvesen expects the market to slow somewhat: “You may not see a 40 percent appreciation, but it still might be 10 percent. The smaller towns around the Gorge will continue to appreciate due to the cost of housing in Hood River, White Salmon and the Portland metro area.”

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