Homing in on Portland’s neighborhood housing markets – They’re not easy to track but here’s your guide to Cedar Hills and a leg up on the rest of the west side

The Portland Business Journal has good news for lots of homeowners on Portland’s west side. The zip code 97229 (Forest Heights, Bethany, Cedar Mill) continues to be one of the Metro area’s hottest neighborhoods and 97225 (Cedar Hills & Raleigh Hills) broke into the ranks of the top 10 in the 1st quarter of this year.

I feel fortunate to have had a front row seat on the trends. I recently listed homes in the areas (two in Cedar Hills and one in Cedar Mill) and repped buyer clients in the sale of a 4^th in Cedar Mill. On average, the three listings sold in 2.3 days at 99.5 percent of asking price.

I aim to be a realtor of choice for area residents. So last month I created a quarterly newsletter on real estate activity in Cedar Hills. Market data is readily available for cities, towns and zip codes. But that’s not the case for neighborhoods, though they’re probably a more meaningful affiliation for most people.

So my work was cut out for me. I did my best to copy by hand the intricate boundaries of Cedar Hills from the map published by its homeowners association in a small search window on the Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS) website. I decided to include two small islands surrounded by the neighborhood (Forest Hills Village and Lynnridge) and two areas on its fringes (Belvidere and 2015-13 Partition Plat). I delivered or mailed Homing in on Cedar Hills to about 300 homeowners and linked it to a Facebook ad for digital access.

While working on the newsletter, I consulted Q2 neighborhood rankings for context. I wondered if 97225 had kept its spot among the top 10. But it proved impossible to track that trend because at the time Portland Business Journal published the so-called “Heat Index” – overall rankings based on equal weighting of volume of sales, speed of sales, and average sale price – only in the 1^st and 3^rd quarters of the year.

I reached out to Brandon Sawyer, the journalist on the hottest neighborhoods beat, to ask if he could share the info and to suggest that the Heat Index be published every quarter. He not only obliged on both counts, but wrote me into his August 21 article.

It turns out 97229 and 97225 slipped in the overall rankings, taking 6^th and 29^th place in Q2. Still, not bad. And 97225 took 7^th for average sale price – 2 places ahead of 97229.

If I can answer any questions about your neighborhood market or you’d like to “subscribe” to Homing in on Cedar Hills, dear readers, drop me a line (catherinequoyeser@kw.com or 503-705-5725). The next issue comes out in October and I’m thinking of launching a counterpart for Cedar Mill.