A clearer Oregon Real Estate Law page: property timeline, county records, and before leverage slips

Oregon's land use planning system is unlike anything else in the United States, and it shapes every dimension of Oregon real estate law from farmland in the Willamette Valley to urban development in the Portland metro to coastal property on the Pacific. Oregon Senate Bill 100, enacted in 1973 under Governor Tom McCall's leadership, established the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) and required every Oregon city and county to prepare a comprehensive land use plan consistent with 19 statewide planning goals. Among these goals, Goal 3 (Agricultural Lands) and Goal 4 (Forest Lands) establish a framework for protecting farmland and forest land from conversion to urban uses that has no equivalent in California, Washington, or any other state. Oregon's system of Exclusive Farm Use (EFU) zones across the Willamette Valley means that a buyer of agricultural land in Marion, Linn, or Polk County is acquiring property with dramatically limited development potential — not just as a practical matter but as a matter of enforceable law. Building a single-family house on EFU-zoned land is permissible only within tightly defined exceptions (owner-operator of the farm, farm employee housing, certain senior housing) that require land use approval from the county planning department and, in contested cases, from the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

Oregon's trust deed foreclosure system — the non-judicial foreclosure framework of ORS 86.752 through 86.815 — moves significantly faster than judicial foreclosure states and provides a meaningful anti-deficiency protection for borrowers in residential properties. After a borrower defaults on a trust deed, the trustee must provide a notice of default and give the borrower a minimum 120-day cure period — a window in which the borrower can reinstate the loan by paying arrears plus fees. If the borrower does not cure, the trustee schedules a public trustee's sale not less than 120 days after the notice of default. The trustee's sale itself — conducted in the county where the property is located — results in transfer of title to the highest bidder (which is often the lender bidding the balance of the debt). Under ORS 86.797, a lender who forecloses non-judicially on a residential property of 1 to 4 units occupied by the borrower as their principal residence CANNOT pursue the borrower for a deficiency judgment after the trustee's sale. This anti-deficiency rule, combined with the absence of a post-sale redemption period under non-judicial foreclosure, creates a clean outcome: the lender gets the property, and the borrower's mortgage liability is extinguished.