Portland ADU Tour 2024: Tickets Available Now for Exclusive Look at 10+ New ADUs

Tickets are now available.

This year’s tour in Portland will feature a new set of 10+ ADUs throughout the city, never before showcased on the ADU Tour.

If you have a nifty ADU to show off, let’s talk. I’m looking for creative projects that utilize some of the new zoning allowances in Portland. I’d like to feature tiny houses on wheels, stacked ADUs, cottage clusters, and detached duplexes around the inner east side of Portland. 

Ticketed separately will be a Friday evening (9/6) ADU workshop. And, for the first time, we’re also organizing a private guided bus tour of prefab ADU/THOW factories in the Portland area that same day. Admission is limited to about 50 people for this special event. This guided tour is intended for housing policy wonks, affordable housing providers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to learn extensively about prefabricated ADU development from business leaders who are doing it. 

If you’re interested in volunteering for Portland’s ADU Tour, let me know. We can’t pull off the tour without awesome volunteers. It’s a 3.5-hour commitment and you get a comp pass to the rest of the ADU Tour that you’re not volunteering. 

ADU tours have become quite popular; in the next five months, there will also be ADU Tours in L.A., Redwood City, CA, and Seattle, WA. The ADU tour in Seattle will be held in conjunction with ADU Academy in Seattle on September 20th. 

As long as we’re talking about Portland ADUs, I’m going to include a medley of miscellaneous information about the ADU movement in Portland. 

Rate of ADU Development

The total number of permitted ADUs in Portland is now approximately 4,200, which is substantial for a city of its population. This is mostly attributable to its regulations. Starting in 2010, Portland was ahead of the curve with the strongest ADU codes in the country.

However, the absolute rate of ADU development has declined significantly since 2018. While it is only educated speculation, this is largely because most of the latent pent-up demand to build ADUs in Portland was likely met. 

Meanwhile, other creative forms of small, infill housing were legalized in 2021, such as tiny houses on wheels and fourplexes. The City also started to allow multiple kitchens in single homes by right in 2020. 

In aggregate, while the number of permitted “ADUs” may be decreasing, these alternative, smaller infill housing types in residential zones continue to rise dramatically. 

In our so-called “single-family residential zones”, in a one-year snapshot between 2021-2022, single-family homes represented only 16% of the housing being built!

This is a powerful data point for those who want to understand the economic and environmental potential for strong middle housing zoning reforms.

Charts from https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/rip/news/2023/7/5/new-study-shows-promising-housing-production-results-residential

Leaving aside external economic realities about development from the picture (ie. increased construction costs, higher interest rates, and onerous landlord-tenant laws in Portland), there are simply more attainable housing choices that are addressing the vacuum of needs in residential zones that ADUs once uniquely filled. 

Condoization

While HB 2001 allowed for middle housing land divisions by right, ADUs aren’t considered “middle housing” under Oregon’s state law. So, the easiest way to ‘sell’ an ADU independently is to condoize it. A handful of local developers are now specializing in this. 

There have been 111 condoed ADUs in Portland, according to the Multifamily Housing Inventory. ADU condoization is already very common in Seattle, WA, and Austin, TX, representing over half of their ADU development.

Condoization of ADUs will continue to be an increasingly popular way for professional developers to build ADUs as a commodity housing product. Condoization is a strategy that tends to be used by professional developers, rather than amateur developers. But, some amateur homeowner developers use condoization as a strategy to create co-housing; there will be an example of this on the upcoming ADU tour. And, the forthcoming ADU Academy in Seattle will feature instructors with primarily ADUs-as-condos development experience. 

One benefit of condoization is it circumvents having to be a landlord, which is unfortunately perceived as being difficult in Portland. Rather, the implicit agenda of ADU condoization is homeownership. 

Selling an ADU also allows for the developer of the ADU to realize the full value of the ADU at the time of sale, rather than amortizing the value of the ADU over years of passive rental income gains. 

Analysis of ADU Permits: Not Completed vs Completed

Looking at the ADU permit submission data from 2019, here’s what the 2024 data says: 

• 294 completed
• 17 “under inspection”
• 1 issued
• 11 expired

Out of 273 total permits issued, 9% have not completed the ADU. Given that these permits were issued in 2019, it’s fair to assume these 9% of permitted ADUs will never get completed. 

Looking at the ADU permit submission data from 2020, here’s what the 2024 data says: 

• 224 completed
• 42 “under inspection”
• 5 issued
• 2 expired

Out of 273 total permits issued, 15% are still under inspection. This probably means that a bunch of them will never get completed. But, the others are most likely DIYers who are taking years to finish it, or who ran short of funds. 

A previous analysis of permits in 2017/2018 indicates that roughly 15% of those ADU permits never got built. So, it’s fair to estimate that 10-15% of ADUs permitted in Portland are never actually built. 

RMLS improvements for ADUs

Recently, the MLS used by real estate agents in the Portland metro area added a new set of inputs related to ADUs. 

While I’m not sure what the *best* database fields for ADUs are, the RMLS now includes more robust and granular data on ADUs than other US markets. 

These fields are only visible to realtors who have access to the database, but this is what the input fields look like. 

Eventually, when ADUs take hold across the country due to statewide ADU reforms, public web-based platforms like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin, will likely display elements of this backend data for general use. Currently, the free-form public remarks text field used in national real estate search platforms give false-positive results. However, some local real estate companies are leveraging the ADU-friendly backend of RMLS to provide actual ADU-positive search results.    

About Kol Peterson

Kol is an ADU consultant, advocate and author of Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development. Read more here: AccessoryDwellingStrategies.com and learn about building your own at BuildingAnADU.com. Email at Kol@accessorydwellingstrategies.com

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