All Forum Posts by: Robert Laird

Thanks for all the responses! 

@Kevin E. "I think if you have money at the time you will be able to purchase cheap wasteland to build on after insurance companies pay out current home owners but the cheap prices won't last through the initial rebuilding." I totally agree. This goes along the same vein as @Scott Arpan

 who said, "Bottom line, there will be a lot of great opportunities for those with cash to buy up all the damaged properties."  This was my original thought when I first read the article. After the earthquake hits, there are going to be a lot of motivated sellers in Portland. 

Geological time is very different from human's perception of time, however if it does hit, and it is the big one, I would me more concerned about the water too as @Zach Schwarzmiller mentioned. 

In the meantime, I think the article is a bunch of hype and a concern to be on the back burner. I haven't lost sleep since this was written that's for sure. Investors should still think about earthquake preparedness in their homes for the long run, but it shouldn't change investing strategies on the day to day. 

@Troy Fisher

 Thanks for the comment! If the earthquake does hit in our lifetime and it damages a lot of the real estate in the area, how do you think it would change the market? I wasn't involved in real estate during Hurricane Katrina, but I would expect a similar result. 

Keywords: Portland, Oregon. Seattle, Washington. Oregon Coast. Washington Coast. 

Has anyone seen this article? "The Really Big One"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-r...

I know the New Yorker is a bit lengthy to read start to finish, so I included some quotes from the article that I found to be pertinent. My general question to all bigger pockets members is as follows: If the bad publicity created by movies such as “San Andreas” and stigmas produced in our culture about the San Andreas fault/1989 Loma Prieta earthquake do not reduce the prices of California real estate currently, how should investors, homeowners, etc. in Oregon, Washington and California feel about the Juan de Fuca plate/the Cascadia Fault expected earthquake to be the big one? Geological time is very different from human perception of real estate markets. Will this article and the trickle of publicity on this subject change anything about real estate markets in these areas? If ‘the big one’ ever does hit and a large portion of the homes are damaged, how do you think this will effect the market? All thoughts and comments are welcome :)

Quotes:

"Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing 'the big one.'"

"Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland."

"In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million."

"...we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten."

"'I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland'—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. 'Let’s just say I would rather not be here.'"

"Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals."

"On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own."

( Kathryn Schulz 2015   - - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-r...)

Would love to hear everyones feedback. Comments, ideas, opinions, criticism, what ever Brandon and Joshua allow.

-Rob

Hey Rob!

Welcome to BP and we will see you when you are back! Also fantastically dashing name if I do say so myself :)

-Other Rob

It is official! Eventbrite works great! Hope to see a lot of familiar faces 

I should be around most of the summer and would also be interested in meeting some of the other PDX bigger pockets members. I am sure I will see some familiar faces there :)

Keep me posted on when and where this get organized. Thanks!

How many people are you looking for? I am definitely not going to move to Ohio, however I might know someone in the area who would be interested in the position. I will refer them to you

I am going to have to back Jay on this one. I do EXACTLY what he says in his post for all the reasons he mentioned. 

"One financially sound move is to move to the Vancouver Wa. area... No state income tax.. then you simply drive 10 minutes across the Columbia river and do all your shopping in Oregon which has no sales tax..."

So I have the best of both worlds. I still know the Portland market because I live in Ladd's Addition and then I drive up the I-5 20-30 min to my office in Vancouver. The income tax/sales tax situation is nice, cheap office space in Vancouver is a plus, and Portland is one of the hottest markets in the United States right now. Also, Portland properties are cheaper when compared to some hot California markets. I grew up in the Bay Area and was going to move home to do sales and get a tiny 1 bd studio with my girlfriend. However, after months of research we couldn't find anything cheap enough to rent and survive off of our salaries. Even in Ladd's, we are paying a fraction of what we would have to pay in California. This makes it easier to invest as well when $1,000,000 gets you four single family homes instead of one. 

Just my two cents, either way there are tons of amazing markets across the US right now and really cool towns to live in for an extended period of time. 

Hey Bigger Pockets,

Today I was hanging out with one of our hard money lenders and told him about BiggerPockets. After I told him the gist of its networking abilities, he told me: "Sounds like Picking Pockets!!" Hahaha, but I digress.

This particular hard money lender is looking for mobile home parks to buy and other hard money lenders who might want to lend on mobile home park deals. Due to his animosity towards BiggerPockets, I immediately thought I would shout out to the forums to prove him wrong. If anyone has any ideas or thoughts about mobile home parks, or the thought that networking on BiggerPockets is the same as Picking Pockets! Comment below, would love to hear what people have to say. 

Keep the deals flowin,

Rob