Buying a home in Bend

The affordability problem, stated plainly

I'd rather lead with the bad part. Bend is the least affordable market in my entire service area, and it isn't close.

To be clear about the vintage of that price: the $699,000 median is as of April 2026, from Beacon Appraisal Group, up from $688,000 in March. Beacon publishes monthly, so by the time you're reading this there's a newer number. Ask me and I'll pull the current one rather than leaving you with a stale figure.

So what does that table actually say? Bend homes cost about 31% more than Portland's on a median income only about 6% higher. That gap can't be explained by local wages, and it isn't. It's explained by demand that comes from somewhere else: second homes, remote workers on out-of-area salaries, retirees arriving with equity from more expensive markets, and investors. A buyer earning a Bend income is competing against income earned in Seattle, the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

That's an uncomfortable thing for a mortgage broker to say out loud, so let me say the useful part next. It means the qualifying conversation in Bend is different from the one in Portland. Reserves matter more, the gap between what you'd like to buy and what you qualify for is usually wider, and Redmond is a real answer rather than a consolation prize. More on Redmond below.

The market itself, as of April 2026, was moving fast on thin inventory: 13 median days on market (down from 18 in March), roughly 3 months of inventory against 470 active listings, 149 sales, and $342 per square foot, down from $354. Prices holding up on volume rather than on strength, in other words.

The longer arc, per Beacon: Bend's median was below $150,000 in 1997, peaked at $396,000 in 2007, and sits near $700,000 in early 2026. That's roughly 75% growth measured from the 2007 peak over about twenty years, and Beacon's appraiser characterizes the current market as "more stable... rather than significant swings."

The property tax offset, and what it does to your DTI

Here's the part that partly rescues the affordability picture, and I don't see anybody else making this argument with numbers attached.

Deschutes County's typical effective property tax rate is about 0.68% of market value. Multnomah County's is about 1.17%. On a $700,000 home that's a difference of roughly $3,400 a year, or about $283 a month, in escrow.

Why is Deschutes so much lower? Not because the nominal rate is low, since at $16.61 it's roughly in line with the suburban counties. It's because Deschutes has the lowest ratio of assessed value to real market value in the group, at 40.7%. Oregon's Measure 50 caps growth in assessed value at 3% a year, market values in Bend have grown far faster than that for decades, and the gap has compounded further here than anywhere else in my service area.

And $283 a month of escrow is not a rounding error. It's payment that goes to principal and interest instead, which is real borrowing capacity in a debt-to-income calculation. So the price-to-income comparison overstates the gap between Bend and Portland once you look at the whole payment rather than the purchase price.

Also worth knowing: a sale does not reset assessed value in Oregon, so you inherit whatever the previous owner's assessed value happened to be. The full mechanism is written out on the Portland page, and it applies identically here.

A higher FHA limit than Portland gets

Small difference, interesting reason. HUD sets FHA limits by metro area, and Deschutes County is its own MSA rather than part of Portland's, so it gets its own calculation based on local prices. Bend homes cost more than Portland homes, and this is one of the few places where that shows up in federal data rather than in conversation.

On conforming, Deschutes sits at the national baseline of $832,750, the same as every county in the Portland metro. Above that you're into jumbo, which at a $699,000 median comes up more often here than in most Oregon markets.

One warning on geography: Crook County (Prineville) and Jefferson County (Madras) are different counties with different limits and different assessors. Don't extend the Deschutes figures to them, and ask me for the specific county before you write.

Short-term rentals, and the permit that doesn't convey

If any part of your plan involves renting the house out short-term, read this section twice. It's the single highest-value thing on this page and it's where I see buyers get hurt.

Inside the City of Bend

First, a correction to a number that circulates constantly. The separation requirement is 500 feet, not 250. The 250-foot figure is the neighbor notification radius, which is a different requirement entirely. If somebody quotes you 250 feet for separation, they haven't read the rules.

• Type I (not subject to the separation rule): infrequent rentals of 29 days a year or fewer with a maximum of 4 rental periods; owner-occupied room rentals of up to 2 bedrooms; and whole-house rentals in commercial and mixed-use zones.
• Type II (subject to the 500-foot rule): whole-house rentals used 30 or more days a year, or more than 4 periods annually, in residential and mixed-use riverfront zones. 500 feet of separation is required between whole-house short-term rental properties, measured radially from property boundaries.
• Owner occupancy is not generally required, except in the owner-occupied room-rental category where it's the premise.

Costs, from the city's 2025–26 fee schedule: a Land Use Permit at $1,380.26 for Type I or $3,840.31 for Type II, plus a 4% surcharge. An Operating License at $360 initially and $260 to renew, annually, with proof of use. A Transportation Supplement of $204.80 a year for whole-house rentals or $110.59 for other types, adopted May 7, 2025 and effective July 1, 2025. And a room tax of 10.4% of gross revenue.

Those costs go into the operating math, and lenders looking at rental income want to see them accounted for rather than ignored.

Outside city limits, in unincorporated Deschutes County

Here I'm going to tell you what I don't know, because the alternative is worse.

I can confirm the tax side only. Unincorporated Deschutes County charges an 8% transient room tax, and Oregon adds a 1% statewide lodging tax, for 9% total. Any owner or operator of a short-term rental unit, meaning one rented for 30 days or less at a time, full-time or part-time, must register and collect it.

On the land-use question I'm not going to publish anything, and here's why. The pages you'll find by searching, with headlines saying the county prohibits short-term rental stays in unincorporated rural areas, date from April 2020 and read as COVID-era emergency public health orders about rental stays, not permanent land-use rules. Those orders have almost certainly expired. Repeating those headlines as current law would be wrong and would badly mislead a buyer, so I'd rather have a gap here than a confident error.

What I'd tell you to do instead: call Deschutes County Community Development, or have a Central Oregon land-use attorney review it, before you build a plan on rural rental income. Given how much money can ride on that answer, it's worth the phone call. Destination resorts are a separate question again, and the governing documents of the resort itself are part of it.

Redmond, Sisters, Sunriver and La Pine

Redmond is where a Central Oregon buyer priced out of Bend actually lands, and it's where first-time-buyer programs and down payment assistance actually apply, because the prices are inside the range those programs were built for. Start there rather than treating it as second best. See the first-time buyer page for what's available.

Sunriver deserves its own conversation, and it's the most broker-specific topic in Central Oregon. A resort community built around vacation rental use brings resort association dues and amenity assessments into your debt-to-income ratio, and it raises occupancy classification questions the moment you say the word rental. Second home and investment property are two different classifications with different down payments, different pricing and different rules about counting the rental income. Add project-level warrantability questions for the condominium and resort properties, plus higher reserve requirements, and this is a file you want scoped before you write an offer rather than after.

La Pine's numbers deserve a note too. It's the affordable end, but 102 days on market and five months of inventory mean you should expect to wait when it's your turn to sell. Know that going in rather than finding out later.

Moving here from Portland

There's a tax case for a Portland-to-Bend move that nobody seems to be writing about, and it's separate from the Vancouver one.

Deschutes County has no local income taxes. There's no Preschool for All equivalent, and Bend is outside the Metro district, so no Supportive Housing Services tax and no Portland Arts Tax either. A high-income remote worker moving from Portland to Bend drops roughly 4 percentage points of marginal local income tax (the 3% Preschool for All top tier plus the 1% Metro tax) while staying in Oregon and keeping the 9.9% state top rate.

And that gap is about to widen. Multnomah County's Preschool for All rates rise by 0.8 percentage points on January 1, 2027, taking the top tier from 3.0% to 3.8%.

Put the tax difference next to the property tax difference and an intra-Oregon move to Bend has a real, quantifiable case, which partly explains why the price-to-income ratio here is what it is. It's a different arbitrage from the Vancouver one, and the Oregon versus Washington guide covers that one in full if you're weighing both.

On down payment assistance: Oregon Housing and Community Services funds statewide assistance of up to $60,000 or 20% of the purchase price, whichever is less, for first-time and/or first-generation buyers at or below 100% of area median income, with education and a certified housing counselor required, delivered by the partner organization serving Deschutes County. Treat that as how it works and how to get in line rather than as apply today, because it's budgeted money, funds run out at different times in different counties, and OHCS doesn't publish an open-or-closed status. Confirm with the administering organization before you count on it. The Portland Housing Bureau program requires a property inside Portland city limits and does not reach Central Oregon.

Run the affordability calculator with the lower Deschutes tax rate in it and you'll see the offset in the payment rather than just reading about it.

Common questions

Is Bend overpriced?

Relative to local incomes, yes, at 7.3 times median household income against Portland's 5.9. That's not an opinion, it's arithmetic. What it means practically is that a lot of buying power here comes from outside the local wage base, and if you're competing on a Bend salary you should plan for that rather than be surprised by it. The lower property taxes claw back some of it, but not all.

Why is the FHA limit higher in Bend than in Portland?

Because Deschutes County is its own metro area for HUD's purposes, and FHA limits are calculated per metro from local prices. Bend homes cost more, so Bend gets $718,750 against Portland's $701,500. Both figures are straight out of HUD's CY2026 file, so you can plan around them.

Can I count short-term rental income to qualify?

Only if the permit situation actually works, and that's the part to check first. Bend permits issued after April 15, 2015 don't transfer on sale, and the buyer has to obtain their own within 60 days of closing, which the 500-foot separation rule can block. Get eligibility confirmed for the specific address before the appraisal.

Are short-term rentals banned in rural Deschutes County?

I don't know, and I'm not going to guess. The results you'll find saying so are from April 2020 and look like expired COVID-era emergency orders rather than land-use rules. Call Deschutes County Community Development or a land-use attorney before you plan around rural rental income.

Should I look at Redmond instead?

Seriously, yes. At roughly $200,000 to $240,000 below Bend it's where the down payment assistance and first-time-buyer programs actually reach, and it's 17 miles up the highway with the region's airport. Inventory there has been the tightest in the region, so be ready to move.

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Sources for the figures on this page: Beacon Appraisal Group Central Oregon market overviews (April 2026 and December 2025) as reported by the Bend Bulletin; US Census Bureau QuickFacts, ACS 2020–2024 five-year estimates with income in 2024 dollars and July 2025 population estimates; Redfin Portland housing market data (June 2026) for the comparison column; Oregon Department of Revenue, FY 2024-25 Oregon Property Tax Statistics Report (150-303-405); City of Bend short-term rental program pages including the 2025–26 fee schedule; Deschutes County transient room tax page; Multnomah County Preschool for All personal income tax page; City of Portland Revenue Division personal tax pages; FHFA 2026 conforming loan limit announcement; HUD press release 25-145 and industry FHA limit tables for the Bend OR MSA; Oregon Housing and Community Services down payment assistance page. Submarket ranges are presented as ranges deliberately because transaction counts there are too low for monthly medians to be meaningful. Nothing on this page is tax, legal or accounting advice, and I'm not a CPA or an attorney. Tax figures are published to help you ask better questions, so run your own situation past a CPA before you plan around any of it. This page is not a commitment to lend and not an offer of credit. Every loan is subject to underwriting, appraisal, program guidelines and final approval, and program terms change without notice. Mark Ruhl, NMLS #105591. Mortgage Express, LLC. Equal Housing Opportunity.