Oregon Small Business Association

Flopping Houses leads to Real Estate Fraud

By Oregon Small Business Association,

“Buy low, sell fast” is an increasingly popular tool to make quick cash in a slow real estate market. The tactic is called Flopping and it is growing in popularity. It is also considered real estate fraud. The National Association of Realtors estimates that 12 percent of existing home sales are short sales and among those 1% are Floppings, potentially costing lenders $50 million this year. Later this summer two Connecticut real estate agents will be in federal court to be sentenced for “Flopping”. Flopping houses is essentially the opposite of “Flipping”, where the property’s value is deflated and then sold for the true value. Read more »

Shoe trend catches Nike Off Guard, but expect a classic NIKE rebound

Nike, the footwear innovator, originally scoffed at the idea of the new trend in toning shoes. Now it seems they are paying the price for a missed opportunity as business is booming for the popular women’s athletic shoes with sales up 25% for May.  Adidas’s Reebok and Skeckers dominate the toning market, with Reebok’s share of U.S. woman’s athletic footwear jumping to 6.7%, or $90.3 million and Skecher’s share tripled to 17%, or $225.7 million.  Nike, still in the top spot for U.S. woman’s athletic footwear, saw its share dropped 7.2% points to 31%, or $412 million.  Nike continues to see a major lose in market share for Women’s sales, down 30%, to 22%.

A survey by SportsOneSource shows that six of the top 10 athletic shoes are toning.  A year ago none of the top ten shoes included toning shoes.  The explosion in popularity of women’s toning shoes has exceeded their expectations, and adidas’s CEO, Herbert Hainer, believes Reebok could sell 5 million pair of toning shoes this year.  In fact, last fall when Reebok intensified their advertising, Foot Locker couldn’t keep up with the demand. Read more »

San Francisco Home Values Rise 50%, What About Portland?
By Oregon Small Business Association

In San Francisco, home and condominium sales jumped 50 percent in the first quarter of 2010 from last year. According to a multiple listings analysis by Terradatum, the median price rose 5.4 percent, to $685,000. The Bay Area home values increased 16 percent in March illustrating the biggest jump of any city in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home-Price Index. The 20-city composite measure climbed 2.3 percent. Experts believe San Francisco’s unique attributes help keep home prices high and that as the tech sector recovers, buyers will pay top dollar.

Despite Portland’s unique attributes, the metro area has not been as fortunate as San Francisco. Although Portland is not a particularly bad market in comparison to the rest of the nation, the city is likely to complete 2010 without too much appreciation or depreciation of home values. Read more »

Oregon Small Business Association,

Portland lost 23,000 jobs according to the U.S. Census Bureau. suffering a 2.82% decline. The greatest declines came from Las Vegas, Wichita, Sacramento and Cape Coral (FL) with over a 4% decline in workers. The single biggest raw number declines came from Chicago (-101,500), Los Angeles (-85,200), New York (-73,400) and Detroit (-57,000).

Portland rated high in recession rebound

Not all news is bad. Forbes put Portland in the top 20 cities to ride out the recession. Here is what they said about Portland; Read more »

Google reveals Oregon’s economic impact and advertisement revenue splits
By OSBA,

Earlier this week Google Inc. announced the amount of economic impact that Google had on each state in 2009. In Oregon, 28,500 advertisers and publishers benefitted to the tune of $510.5 million, either by placing their ads on Google or by placing Google advertisements on their site.  And 80 non-profits benefitted with $1.3 million donated by the search giant. 

Recently, for the first time, Google disclosed their revenue splits with search and content publishers. In a blog post on Monday, Google says it pays publishers 68% of the revenue Google collects from advertisers for content ads that appear on the publishers’ sites.  Google said it pays publishers 51% of revenue for search ads.  Previously Google had been unresponsive in requests to reveal it’s revenue splits.  Read more »

The Hillsboro Chamber is a Lead Community Partner in Developing the Job Seekers Support and Networking Group
By Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce,

As a lead partner in the community, the Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce has successfully developed Job Seekers Support and Networking.  The free and open program is designed to inform and engage those adversely affected by Oregon’s challenging job market.  By connecting job seekers with available resources, we hope to maintain the area’s competitive advantage of skilled professionals.  Every Tuesday from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M. participants are exposed to various topics of discussion led by local experts and given valuable networking opportunities for professional growth and development.  Read more »

By Oregon Small Business Association,

The latest national newspaper circulation numbers show that only newspaper out of 25 largest to increase readership was the Wall Street Journal. The Oregonian performed the best out of the other top 20 newspapers.

Biggest circulation drops among top 20 newspapers ranked by drop size (1)

Los Angeles Times —14.7%
Chicago Sun-Times — 13.9 %
Houston Chronicle —13.8 %
USA Today -13.6%
The Washington Post — 13.1%
Daily News of New York —11.3%
The Arizona Republic of Phoenix —9.9 %
Chicago Tribune —9.8 %
Newsday of Long Island, N.Y. — 9.1 %
The New York Times -8.5%
The Plain Dealer of Cleveland — 8.1%
Star Tribune of Minneapolis — 7.7 %
The Philadelphia Inquirer —5.9 %
New York Post —5.9%
St. Petersburg Times — 1.5 %
THE OREGONIAN — 1.8%
The Wall Street Journal + 0.5% * increase*
Read more »

Portland pain #6 in bankruptcies, loses 37,00 jobs, key store By Oregon Small Business Association Business wrap-up It has been a string of bad news for Portland in the past 30 days.   Nationwide bankruptcies have increased by 52% according to Equifax.    Among the bankruptcy leaders is Portland, ranked at sixth highest, and Oregon ranked as 12th highest among states.   In further bas news, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported that Portland lost 37,200 jobs in the last year.  The job count went from 834,100 to 796,900. The job loss came after news that the popular Saks Fifth Avenue was leaving downtown Portland.  The store plans to close completely by July 31st.  In much lesser impact news but still a downer, Portland lost its long-standing rank of the nation’s friendliest bike city to Minneapolis. Read more »

Case study on how Pixetell changes Office Phone

Pixetell has dramatically changed the way Mark Friel does business.  The vice president of Pacific Real Estate Partners in Portland, OR, says Pixetell has replaced the telephone for many of his transactional communications. “Sending someone a Pixetell is, in many cases, much better than a phone conversation,” he says. “When I need to reference something specific on a document, plan or drawing, it is much easier and clearer to do it with a Pixetell. Being able to capture the cursor movements makes it easy to show someone what you want done.”
Read more »

Growth in Green Energy Sector Pushes Expansion of Vancouver, WA Vocational School

NW Renewable Energy Institute: Due to the high demand for qualified wind turbine technicians, Northwest Renewable Energy Institute (NW-REI) of Vancouver, Washington has expanded its available classroom space from 9,026 square feet to 14,526 square feet. NW-REI offers a six-month Wind Turbine Technician training course, and this expansion provides additional classrooms to accommodate the rise in numbers of enrolling students.

“Having additional classrooms allows us to accommodate more students “says Tracy Rascoe, Director, regarding their recent expansion. “We have had such a strong response from applicants wanting to enroll in the program that we had to expand the space much sooner than we anticipated. We are fortunate that additional space was available adjacent to our current classrooms. We considered this when we signed our original lease, knowing that we’d expand if the demand was there. The demand is definitely there,” says Rascoe. Read more »