AUGUST 2008: AROUND THE STATE
Live-work
units: a tiny, happy place for real estate
STATEWIDE
As bad-news headlines for the real estate industry continue
month after month, one sliver of the Portland metro and Bend
market is actually growing: live-work units, townhomes where
the ground floor is dedicated to commercial and the upstairs to
living.
In the first six months of this year, 60 live-work units have
been sold in the Portland metro area, according to the Regional
Municipal Listings Service. Compare that to 2007 and 2006 when,
respectively, 50 units and 22 units were sold.
On the west side of Bend, Brooks Resources Corporation, the
developers of NorthWest Crossing, currently are building eight
of 30 planned live-work units. Three already have been
sold and interest in the others remains strong, says David
Ford, general manager at Northwest Crossing.
While that number is small, those units are some of the only
ones in Bend. Ford finds the three sales remarkable because of
what he sees as a reticence on the parts of most buyers in the
current market to purchase anything that isn’t 100%
completed.
Despite the higher numbers of sales, developers and marketers
still have to take the current real estate market into account.
The buyer’s hesitancy that Ford sees is the reason the
Kaiser Group has kept their still-under-construction five-unit
live-work building in North Portland off the market, says
marketing spokeswoman Erin Livengood.
“Our thought was to let people actually see it and then
have the ability to close in 30 days rather than months,”
she says.
Regardless of what the real estate market does this year or
next, Shawn Busse, a Portland live-work advocate, thinks the
demand — and community interest — in live-work
units will continue to grow. Busse started his design firm out
of his living room and knows how different it would have been
had he been in a live-work unit.
“It doesn’t require a big outlay of cash to start a
business in one of these,” he says. “It’s a
great model that allows someone to be a business person without
a lot of usual hurdles.”
ABRAHAM HYATT
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