ABOUT

Do you want honesty, integrity, responsiveness, and first-hand floating home expertise working for you?

Meet Portland Floating Homes

Portland Floating Homes’ Principal Broker, John Wesley McPherson, Jr., has personally bought and sold a floating home for himself, rented a floating home to live in, has gone through a to-the-studs renovation of a floating home with permitting through the City of Portland, had the float on his floating home replaced, and more. Previously, he spent 20 years structuring complex financial transactions and negotiating through brokers.

After recognizing that floating home clients needed data-driven solutions to help them reach their goals in this highly-specialized market, John started helping clients with some of the same skills he used previously to assist them with pricing strategies and competitive negotiations in this niche market.

We help buyers and sellers of floating homes 365 days a year.

We provide services and value that other individual brokers working by themselves at smaller brokerages cannot. We can achieve more for you and with quicker response times than single brokers working alone. We really can be in two places at once.

John Wesley McPherson, Jr.Chartered Financial Analyst & Principal Broker

John is the Principal Broker for our team and has spent over 20 years negotiating transactions totaling millions of dollars daily though brokers to provide clients with the best financial results possible. The breadth of his first-hand floating home owner experience, coupled with the depth of his financial valuation and negotiation skills deliver results for you.

We help clients with homes on land and water.

Our clients appreciate that we have the expertise to help them with floating homes, but also help them buy or sell their homes on land as well. Single-Point-Of-Contact service for both transactions means less time our clients spend communicating with various stakeholders and less room for miscommunication or missed deadlines. Our expertise works for you.

The Portland Floating Homes Story

by John Wesley McPherson, Jr.

An adventurer at heart, I bought my floating home in 2013.

It was far from move-in ready, and having had several complete renovations of homes on land under my belt, I didn’t anticipate that doing the same work over water could be any more challenging than that.

But, when I started the real work of a full float replacement and a to-the-studs renovation with an addition, I quickly realized that I was alone in this adventure.

There simply were no reliable online resources for floating homeowners in Portland.

Through trial and error, during the last several years, I learned to navigate each new thing that came my way…replacing the float, floating home design factors and mechanics, floating home code compliance, the City of Portland permitting process for floating homes, the rules of our moorage, and the Oregon laws that protect floating home owners.

During all of this, I have gained an immense amount of really invaluable first-hand experience of what is required to take a floating fixer-upper and transform it into a home where I can sit back and enjoy the river views from the deck.

Because of my background in finance and business, I soon saw a pattern with both floating home owners who wanted to sell and potential buyers who were interested in buying – there was a true lack of any floating home market data for them to base decisions on. Pricing strategies for homes listed by real estate brokers without floating home expertise ranged from highly overpriced to steals, and buyers were oftentimes overpaying for homes because they were represented by brokers who weren’t familiar with the most important factors when valuing a floating home. A floating home seller or buyer should not lose equity nor overpay just because their broker is winging it with what it likely the largest asset in their portfolio.

With my 20 years of financial experience leading complex transactions – buying, selling, evaluating and negotiating millions of dollars every day through brokers – and my real estate experience selling homes on land and water, I started Portland FloatingHomes to deliver unparalleled floating home real estate expertise and data-driven pricing strategies to you.

But that didn’t seem like enough. I recognized that if an experienced home renovator had struggled and taken a few missteps along the way during floating home ownership, then others likely had done the same. Rather than keep all the things I had learned to myself, it became clear to me that I wanted to share them by creating a central resource for others who were interested in learning about floating homes, and owners who wanted to spend less time blazing a trail and more time enjoying their homes. For years, we have been conducting research, creating guides, and developing informational resources to help take all the guesswork and mystery out of the experience. We built PortlandFloatingHomes.com – a free online resource for you. Enjoy.

Our Real Estate Network Provides Depth and Breadth of Service

PORTLAND FLOATING HOMES is the floating home focused arm of The Portland Team, a team of brokers with Premiere Property Group, LLC.

THE PORTLAND TEAM is a real estate team, led by John Wesley McPherson, Jr., CFA and Principal Broker, that serves clients in residential and commercial real estate – single family houses, condominiums, apartment complexes, investment properties, floating homes, floating home moorages, and marinas. The Portland Team partner network serves the entire Portland metropolitan area including Tigard, Hillsboro, Gresham, Scappoose and St. Helens.

PREMIERE PROPERTY GROUP, LLC is the largest Realty company in Oregon and SW Washington with over 1,000 agents, eleven offices, and over 2 billion dollars in local real estate sales annually.

Being a part of the largest locally-owned brokerage in the region extends our service area far beyond the reach of a single, independent broker working in a franchise.
Over $2 billion in annual real estate sales means that we have proven expertise in every scenario that could arise from a real estate transaction.
Access to a network of over 1,000 real estate agents means that we have first-hand knowledge of what is coming on the market and resources to get the job done. It also means that we can accommodate nearly any schedule; if we personally are not available to show a property to you we can arrange for someone from one of our offices to assist us.
Eleven convenient offices in Oregon and Washington: West Portland, Lloyd Center, Hollywood, Lake Oswego, Gresham, Sunnyside, Yamhill County, Salem, Bend, Vancouver (WA) and Battleground (WA) – means that we have local brick and mortar presence convenient to where you live or want to live.
Awarded one of the Top 50 Fastest-growing, Local, Private Company according to the Portland Business Journal for the last three consecutive years means that we are adding competitive resources and tools to serve your real estate needs every day.
Serving several real estate areas – Residential, Rural Properties, Land, Commercial Real Estate Services & Property Management – means that if you have a real estate need, we can get it done for you.