Portland, Oregon — Eastside
Upgrade Properties buys overlooked homes — the ones with water in the basement and good bones under it — and rebuilds them properly. Then we sell them to people who plan to stay.
Three homes open this month. Private viewings Thursday through Sunday, by appointment.
Available · Offers reviewed 14 April
Creston-Kenilworth, Portland
$689,000
Built in 1926 as a two-bedroom bungalow, then badly subdivided in the nineties. We pulled out the second kitchen, opened the back wall to the garden, and rebuilt the whole south side in cedar. The original fir floors were under three layers of vinyl the entire time.
Available · Open house Sundays 11–1
King, Portland
$524,000
A narrow 1911 four-square that had been a rental for thirty years. Nothing was structurally wrong with it, which is rare. We replaced the knob-and-tube wiring, reinsulated the attic, and left the leaded glass and the original newel post exactly where they were.
Under contract · Backup offers welcome
Buckman, Portland
$438,000
Top-floor corner in a 1962 six-unit building. We took it back to studs: new windows on the west wall, a proper kitchen with a real hood, and a bathroom that no longer shares a wall with the neighbour's shower. The building's boiler was replaced the same year.
We do everything ourselves except the trades we can't legally do. No wholesalers, no assignment contracts, no "we buy houses" sign on a telephone pole.
Cash offer within four days of walking the property. We buy with the roof, the furnace and the foundation as-is — no repair credits, no renegotiation after inspection. If we've misjudged the numbers, that's our problem, not the seller's.
Every project gets a full permit set before a single wall comes down. We work with Marisol Reyes at Fieldnote Architecture on anything structural. Permits in Portland take what they take; we plan for eleven weeks and are pleasantly surprised when it's eight.
Sewer line, electrical panel, insulation, drainage. This is where the money goes and where most flips cut corners. We don't. Our average renovation spend is $186,000 per house, and about two-thirds of it is invisible when we're done.
Kitchens, bathrooms, light. We keep original details wherever they survived and we don't fake period features that were never there. If a house was built in 1962, it gets a good 1962 kitchen, not a fake Victorian mantel.
Every listing comes with the full scope of work, the permit numbers, and the name of the contractor who did each trade. Buyers get a two-year workmanship warranty. We've never had a claim.
Upgrade Properties started in 2016 with one house on SE Harold Street and a borrowed truck. Nadia Okonkwo had spent nine years as a commercial project manager and was tired of buildings nobody lived in. The first project took fourteen months and made $11,000. The second one took seven and made considerably more.
We're six people now: Nadia, our site lead Dov Halberstam, a bookkeeper, a designer who works with us project by project, and two carpenters who have been here since 2019. We deliberately stay small. Four to six houses a year is the number where we can still be on site every day.
We buy almost entirely on the east side of the river — Foster-Powell, Creston, Powellhurst, Montavilla, Cully. It's where we know the soil, the sewer laterals, and which blocks flood. We've turned down more deals than we've taken.
Selling a house on the east side, or want to see one of ours? Either way, this reaches Nadia directly.