If you’re considering selling your Oregon property, the time to act is now. Local real estate investors are buying properties in the state and across the nation, but the best buyers are the ones who can close quickly—in one to two weeks. They also have cash and are ready to buy a house in its current condition. These local buyers are often iBuyers like Opendoor and Offerpad or investor groups that partner with iBuyers. The process is similar to a traditional home sale, except that iBuyers will charge you an upfront fee, which the local buyer won’t.
In the 1940s, concern about disorderly county development prompted Oregonians to begin county planning, but as population growth accelerated in the 1960s, the issue expanded beyond rural worries to include urban sprawl as a threat to Oregon’s “unfettered despoiling of the land.” Governor Tom McCall summed it up in a speech to the legislature in January 1973: “Sagebrish subdivisions, coastal condomania, ravenous rampage of suburbia and the wasting of irreplaceable farm land are a shameless attack on our environment and our whole quality of life.”
By the time the state’s groundbreaking land-use law passed in 1973, public awareness of the problem had grown significantly. A wave of citizen activism had produced such legislative innovations as the 1967 Beach Bill, which guaranteed public access to all of Oregon’s 363 miles of coastline—and set a precedent for preserving other environmentally sensitive lands.
The land-use legislation that emerged from the Oregon legislature was far more expansive than the earlier County Planning Acts. It established statewide land-use goals and established the Land Conservation and Development Commission to oversee compliance with these new goals. And it mandated that cities and counties prepare comprehensive plans to guide future growth.
But there isn’t a quick fix to the housing crisis that Rapid Land Sales in Oregon is currently facing, and researchers say it will require a complex web of socioeconomic stressors to be solved. The problem includes a lack of builders, rising material costs and stagnant incomes.
Oregon’s stringent land-use laws may be contributing to the problem. Many of these regulations are designed to protect rural communities from unwanted growth, but the result is that city and suburban areas have much more room for growth while rural communities face limited options when it comes to expanding where they can build houses.
As a result, Oregon has been slow to keep up with its need for housing—a shortfall that some blame on the state’s restrictive land-use laws. But other experts point to the broader national housing crisis and a series of economic factors that have compounded the problem over time.