Buying a home in Portland

The condo gap, which is the biggest number on this page

Portland's median sale price inside the city was $534,709 in June 2026, down 1.7% from a year earlier, per Redfin. Over the same stretch the region's median condo sale was $325,000 for full-year 2025, down 3.0% from $334,900 the year before, per RMLS data compiled by the Portland Appraisal Blog. That's a gap of more than $200,000 between the typical house and the typical condo, in the same city, at the same time.

So why doesn't every first-time buyer in Portland just buy a condo? A lot of them try. The reason it doesn't work as often as the price gap suggests is that condos are exactly where mortgage financing breaks, and the cheapest ones are frequently the ones it breaks hardest on. That's worth understanding before you fall in love with a listing.

Here's what the 2025 numbers look like, and they describe a buyer's market with a very particular shape:

Two of those rows matter more than the rest. Months of supply at 6.74 is solidly a buyer's market (roughly six months is the conventional dividing line), and it's concentrated: the Portland Appraisal Blog describes persistent long-term oversupply specifically in the Pearl District and downtown. Multnomah County accounts for 66.2% of all regional condo sales and the City of Portland alone for about 61%, so this is a Portland story more than a metro one.

And then there are the dues. Average monthly HOA dues jumped 13.04% in a single year, to $497.10, the sharpest annual increase in recent years. That number goes straight into your debt-to-income ratio the same way a car payment does. So a five hundred dollar HOA payment is costing you real borrowing capacity, and a building that's about to raise dues again is costing you more than the listing says it is.

The dues are also split, not evenly distributed. About 26% of 2025 condo sales carried dues between $0 and $299, and those are the affordability winners. The long tail of high-dues buildings shrinks the buyer pool and stretches marketing times, which is part of why the average cumulative days on market went up almost 32%.

Which Portland condos are actually financeable, and why the cheap ones often aren't

This is the part almost nobody writes down, so I'm going to spend some space on it. A condo loan approves two things: you, and the building. You can be a perfect borrower and still get declined because of the homeowners association's balance sheet, and that decline usually arrives late, after the appraisal, after the inspection, after you're emotionally committed.

What the lender looks at on the project side, in rough order of how often it kills a deal:

• Litigation. If the association is suing the developer or a contractor over construction defects, most conventional and FHA financing stops until it's resolved. Portland has a lot of buildings from the mid-2000s condo wave and this comes up more than you'd think.
• Reserves and deferred maintenance. The lender wants to see the association actually funding its reserve account, and a recent reserve study that doesn't describe a building falling behind on major components. A big special assessment that's been voted but not collected is a problem.
• Owner-occupancy share. Too many units rented out and the project stops qualifying for the better financing, because agency guidelines treat a heavily investor-owned building as a different risk.
• Single-entity ownership concentration. If one person or one company owns a large block of the units, that's a project-level concern regardless of how nice your unit is.
• Insurance. The master policy has to actually cover what the guidelines require, and master-policy premiums in Oregon have been moving fast enough that some associations have quietly reduced coverage to hold dues down.

Now put that next to the price data. What makes a Portland condo cheap? Frequently it's one of the five things above. A building with pending litigation, thin reserves, a looming assessment, or a high investor share prices below the market because of those things, and those are the same things that make it hard to finance. So the discount you're looking at is often not a bargain, it's the market pricing in a financing problem you'd inherit.

Non-warrantable simply means a project that doesn't meet Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac's condo rules. Those loans exist, I place them, and they carry a larger down payment and a higher cost. See non-QM lending for how that category works generally. Bottom line, a condo is a very good entry point into Portland ownership and I'd like more people to use it, but only after somebody has read the building's finances.

Measure 50, and why a sale does not reset your property taxes

If you take one thing off this page, take this one, because it's the mistake that produces payment-shock phone calls six months after closing.

In Oregon, buying the house does not trigger a reassessment. That's different from California and from most of the country, and it means you cannot estimate an Oregon property tax bill as a percentage of the purchase price. Do that and you will sometimes be off by a factor of two, in either direction.

Here's the mechanism. Every Oregon property carries two values:

• Real Market Value (RMV), which is what the property would sell for today.
• Maximum Assessed Value (MAV), which is a synthetic number that can grow at most 3% per year.

Your Assessed Value is the lower of those two, and assessed value is what you're taxed on. So where did MAV come from? Measure 50, passed in 1997, rolled each property's 1997–98 assessed value back to 90% of its 1995–96 value and froze that as the starting point. Every year since, MAV has grown by no more than 3%, while market values have grown far faster. That gap has been compounding for nearly thirty years now.

Which brings us to the thing that catches buyers. Two identical houses, side by side, same street, same market value today, can carry very different tax bills. The one that's been standing since 1990 has a MAV compounded up from a mid-1990s number, often somewhere around 40% to 55% of what the house is worth today. The one that was built, substantially remodeled, or subdivided since 1997 got a brand-new MAV set at the time of that event, at a value much closer to market, because new construction, additions, remodels and subdivisions are the statutory exceptions to the 3% cap. The newer house can pay two to three times the tax on the same market value.

That's why I quote the actual bill from the county assessor's parcel record, never a rule of thumb. It's also why a new-construction or heavily-renovated Portland house needs a hard look at the tax line before you set an escrow payment.

Measure 5 sits on top of all this and caps rates, at $5.00 per $1,000 of real market value for education and $10.00 per $1,000 for general government. When the calculated tax runs past those caps it gets "compressed," meaning reduced proportionally, with local option levies compressed first. Statewide, compression cut $189 million, or 1.9% of the tax extended, in FY 2024-25. Compression bites hardest where assessed value is closest to market value, which is exactly where the newer homes are.

One more counterintuitive piece. A falling market usually doesn't lower an Oregon tax bill. Clackamas County says it plainly: "A reduction in RMV will not mean a reduction in taxes unless the RMV is reduced below the AV." With assessed value sitting near half of market value across much of the metro, prices would have to fall by half before your bill moved at all.

Notice what's going on there. Multnomah has by far the highest nominal rate in the metro, $23.56 per $1,000 against Clackamas at $17.68, but it also has the lowest ratio of assessed value to market value at 49.7%, and the two partly cancel out. That's the whole Oregon system in one row.

Pre-1940 houses, and what they do to an appraisal

This section is my own read on the local housing stock rather than anything I can point you to a data source for, so take it as twenty-two years of looking at Portland files rather than as research.

Portland's inner east side is dominated by pre-1940 stock. Craftsman bungalows, Old Portland foursquares and English cottages fill Laurelhurst, Irvington, Alameda, Sunnyside, Richmond, Sellwood-Moreland, Woodstock, Concordia and the Alberta and King neighborhoods. They're the reason people move here. They also carry a recognisable list of underwriting problems: knob-and-tube and ungrounded wiring, cast-iron sewer laterals, unreinforced masonry chimneys, buried oil tanks that need decommissioning, and basement conversions that were never permitted.

What that does to a loan, in order:

1. The appraiser calls it out. On a conventional loan an appraiser can note conditions "subject to" repair, and on FHA and VA the property standards are stricter, so peeling paint on a pre-1978 house or an inoperable furnace becomes a required repair rather than a note.
2. Somebody has to pay for the repair before closing, or the lender holds a repair escrow, which not every loan program permits and not every seller will agree to.
3. Unpermitted square footage doesn't count. A finished basement bedroom without permits usually can't be included in the gross living area, which changes the appraised value and sometimes changes the loan.

So if you're buying a 1912 bungalow, the answer isn't to avoid it, it's to plan the financing around it. Renovation lending exists for exactly this, and the renovation and ADU financing page covers how 203(k) and the conventional renovation products handle repairs rolled into the purchase loan.

The rest of the map looks different. Outer southeast, around Powellhurst and Lents, and much of St. Johns and North Portland, is postwar ranch stock, which underwrites much more easily. West of the river, in the West Hills, Hillsdale and Multnomah Village, homes are older, pricier and on steeper ground, which brings landslide and steep-slope overlay questions into the appraisal.

Portland also has an unusually deep ADU market, and following the Residential Infill Project the city allows middle housing (duplex through fourplex) on most residential lots. That matters both to house-hacking buyers and to appraisal comparability, since a fourplex-eligible lot doesn't always appraise like the single-family house sitting on it. Confirm the current rules and any recent amendments at portland.gov before you build a plan on them, because that ordinance has been amended repeatedly and I'd rather you check than take my word for the details.

Loan limits in Multnomah County

The good news is that this part is simple. Multnomah County sits at the national baseline, and so does every other county in the metro.

The baseline went up $26,250 for 2026, from $806,500, because FHFA's expanded-data house price index rose 3.26% from the third quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025. Limits rose in all but 32 US counties. FHA's 2026 limits apply to case numbers assigned on or after January 1, 2026.

Because HUD sets FHA limits by metro area rather than by county, Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Columbia and Yamhill counties in Oregon, plus Clark and Skamania in Washington, all share the same $701,500 FHA ceiling. A buyer in Portland and a buyer in Vancouver get the identical number. Above $832,750 you're in jumbo territory, which is a different underwriting conversation.

Down payment help in Portland, and how to get in line

I'm writing this section as "how it works and how to get in line" rather than "apply today," and that's deliberate. These are budgeted programs delivered through partner organizations, funding runs out at different times in different places, and neither agency publishes an open-or-closed status on its program page. Nothing here is available until the organization administering it tells you it is. Confirm before you count on it.

Portland Housing Bureau Down Payment Assistance Loan

This is the most generous program in my entire service area and it is badly under-marketed. Terms, from the city's own program page:

• Up to $80,000 to $100,000, depending on the funding source and where the property is.
• 0.00% interest (an APR of 0.012%), on a 30-year term.
• Fully deferred. No payments at all until the home sells, the first mortgage is refinanced, or it stops being your primary residence.
• Forgiveness schedule: 50% forgiven at year 15, then 3% a year through years 16 to 29, with the remaining balance forgiven at year 30, as long as you keep occupying the home and stay in compliance.
• Income at or below 100% of Portland area median income, adjusted for household size. Some funding sources cap at 80% instead.
• First-time buyer required, meaning no ownership in the past three years.
• The property has to be inside Portland city limits, and single-family, which explicitly includes existing condos and townhomes.
• Delivered through five community partner organizations, not by the bureau directly.

Homes in the Interstate Corridor Urban Renewal Area require participation in the N/NE Homeownership Preference Policy, a separate program addressing displacement in North and Northeast Portland with its own eligibility rules. If you're looking in that area, ask about it specifically.

Now connect that back to the condo section. The bureau's program allows existing condos and townhomes, and the median condo sale is $325,000. So $80,000 to $100,000 of deferred, forgivable, zero-interest assistance can turn a 3.5%-down FHA condo purchase into something close to 30% down. That combination is specific to Portland and it changes what's possible for a lot of people.

Oregon Housing and Community Services

Statewide, and separate from the city program. OHCS funds local partner organizations to deliver down payment assistance of up to $60,000 or 20% of the purchase price, whichever is less. Veterans may use up to 10% of it for lender-required repairs, and 25% of the funds are set aside for eligible veterans and their families.

It arrives as a grant, a forgivable second lien, or an amortising second lien, depending on which organization is administering it. Eligibility runs to first-time and/or first-generation homebuyers with income at or below 100% of area median, plus completion of first-time homebuyer education and a meeting with a certified housing counsellor. You apply to the partner organization serving your county, not to OHCS.

OHCS also runs first-mortgage products that can be paired with that assistance, and the pairing can cover up to 100% of your cash to close, meaning down payment, closing costs, prepaids and related loan fees. I'm not publishing the specific percentage and income-limit figures for those, because the only document I could find carrying them was last updated in February 2023 and I don't trust three-and-a-half-year-old program numbers. Call OHCS or ask me and we'll get the current ones.

More on all of this on the first-time buyer page.

The numbers, in one place

Those first two rows are both true and they don't contradict each other, but you shouldn't put them side by side without an explanation. The $555,000 figure covers the RMLS region, which includes higher-priced suburbs, and the $534,709 covers the City of Portland alone. Different geography, different month, different methodology. Redfin, Zillow, RMLS and the appraisal firms all compute medians differently, which is why I've footnoted the source on every number rather than blending them.

The population line deserves an honest mention too. Portland is down 2.7% since April 2020, one of the few large American cities still below its 2020 count. I'm not going to pretend that away. What it means for a buyer is less competition than the 2021 market had and more negotiating room, which is not the worst environment to be shopping in.

Want to see what it means for you? Run the affordability calculator and then the rent-versus-buy calculator, which counts maintenance, selling costs and what your down payment would have earned invested, and which will sometimes tell you to keep renting. The weekly market update covers what's moving rates.

Common questions

Should I buy a condo in Portland?

Maybe, and the building decides it more than the unit does. At a $325,000 median against a $534,709 house median, a condo is the realistic entry point for a lot of buyers, and with 6.74 months of supply you have room to negotiate. But get the HOA budget, reserve study, minutes and insurance certificate before you're in contract, and let me check the project's financing status while you still have options.

How much will my property taxes be?

There's no way to answer that from the purchase price. Oregon taxes assessed value, a sale doesn't reset it, and two identical houses on one street can pay very different bills depending on when each was built or remodeled. Send me the address and I'll pull the actual parcel record from the assessor.

Is Portland losing population a reason not to buy?

It's a reason to negotiate, not a reason to sit out. Prices are flat to slightly down, homes are still selling in 14 days at 101% of list, and that combination says a market that's balanced rather than falling. Whether it's the right time for you is a question about your job, your timeline and your reserves, and I'd rather talk about those.

Do I need a special loan for a 1920s house?

Usually no, sometimes yes. A well-maintained old house finances like any other house. It's when the appraiser flags conditions, or when you want to fix things as part of the purchase, that renovation financing earns its keep. The variable to watch is whether the repairs have to happen before closing, because that's what forces the issue.

What about the local income taxes I keep hearing about?

Portland residents are in the Metro Supportive Housing Services district and Multnomah County's Preschool for All tax, and there's a $35 Arts Tax on top. The Oregon versus Washington guide lays out all of it, including what changes on January 1, 2027, and what it looks like from the Vancouver side. Talk to your CPA about your own return.

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Sources for the figures on this page: FHFA 2026 conforming loan limit announcement and addendum; HUD press release 25-145 and industry FHA limit tables for the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro MSA; RMLS condominium data compiled by the Portland Appraisal Blog, The 2025 Portland Region Condominium Housing Market in Review (February 2026); Redfin Portland housing market data, June 2026; RMLS Market Action report, July 2026; US Census Bureau QuickFacts, ACS 2020–2024 five-year estimates with income in 2024 dollars and July 2025 population estimates; Clackamas County and Multnomah County property tax explainers on Measures 5 and 50; Oregon Department of Revenue, FY 2024-25 Oregon Property Tax Statistics Report (150-303-405); Portland Housing Bureau Down Payment Assistance Loan program pages; Oregon Housing and Community Services down payment assistance page. Neighbourhood, housing-stock and appraisal characterizations are my own local read from twenty-two years of Portland files, not a cited data source. Nothing on this page is tax, legal or accounting advice, and I'm not a CPA or an attorney. Tax figures are published to help you ask better questions, so run your own situation past a CPA before you plan around any of it. This page is not a commitment to lend and not an offer of credit. Every loan is subject to underwriting, appraisal, program guidelines and final approval, and program terms change without notice. Mark Ruhl, NMLS #105591. Mortgage Express, LLC. Equal Housing Opportunity.