Wildfires are now having an impact on the housing market in Southern Oregon. In Josephine County, the number of homes sold decreased by 11.5 percent, according to the Rogue Valley Association of Realtors. Pending sales for July in Josephine County were down by 7.6 percent from last year. Susan ToKarz-Krauss, President of the Rogue Valley Association of Realtors said ... Read more

Oregon Housing and Community Services has announced funding for the development and preservation of 796 affordable homes through the 2018 federal 9 percent Low Income Housing Tax and HOME awards, which leverage local, state, and private investments, including two projects in Bend and Redmond. This latest round of 13 awards brings OHCS to a record number of units in the ... Read more

Washington County Chair Andy Duyck found himself outnumbered last Monday when he appeared before the Clackamas County Chamber of Commerce to oppose Metro's affordable housing bond. Duyck was only scheduled to debate Metro President-elect Lynn Peterson, who supports the $652.8 million regional property tax bond on the Nov. 6 general election ballot. Read more (from source): ... Read more

Machine learning is making slow but sure inroads into the way building happens in the United States. Like many other opportunity areas, this subset of artificial intelligence that uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to "learn" from data cuts two ways. One executive who's aggressively pushed at the front lines of technology's role in the home building, ... Read more

Two weeks. That's the extra time it took to build a house in 2017 than it did in 2015. Can you imagine delaying a home closing by two days, much less by two weeks? Yet that's where we're at as an industry, according to the National Association of Home Builders. There may be several reasons for this swelling timeline, but few would dispute the role of the industry's labor ... Read more