Bend company Navis seems to constantly be in hiring mode these days.

The tourism-related business added about 40 new workers over the last year, and wants to add 80 more by January, including 60 in its growing call center, which helps vacationers book hotel reservations across the country, said Bill Schlosser, vice president of marketing.

“The economy has certainly helped in the last year,” Schlosser said. “Resort and vacation rental companies’ business is picking up.”

Customer service representatives are in high demand at companies like Navis and across Central Oregon, according to a recently released Oregon Employment Department study.

High Desert employers posted nearly 700 ads seeking customer service representatives through the Employment Department’s online database, more than any other occupation.

The Employment Services Job Order Summary Report analyzed job openings posted to the database between Oct. 1, 2012, and Sept. 30, by employers in Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson counties. It also compared Central Oregon job posts with others across the state, and how many were full-time or part-time.

Its findings highlighted some of the gaps between the local economy and the rest of Oregon, several economists said.

Just 71 percent of Central Oregon job posts were for full-time work, compared with 80 percent for Oregon as a whole. And many occupations in high demand locally were among the lowest-paying jobs available.

Of the roughly 6,000 job posts over the one-year time period, nearly 40 percent were for retail, customer service, food preparation, janitorial services or housekeeping positions.

Last year, Deschutes County retail employees earned an annual average wage of $26,600, gross, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Customer service workers took home $32,600 on average.

For food service, janitorial and housekeeping positions, average yearly pay was between $15,100 and $17,800. Deschutes County’s median income for a family of four is $52,962.

To an extent, Central Oregon’s status as a tourism hub attracts retail and hospitality jobs, while its distance from Interstate 5 makes it a tougher draw for many of the state’s higher-wage manufacturing, engineering and financial-service jobs that cluster around the Portland area, said Damon Runberg, a regional economist with the Oregon Employment Department.

“It’s a lot easier to put a manufacturer on the I-5 corridor or along the Columbia River,” Runberg said.

Statewide, manufacturing positions — including management positions at manufacturing companies — came with an average annual pay of $62,000 last year.

But more than 60 percent of the state’s population lives around Portland, Salem and Eugene. For a lot of big regional companies that make and ship products, operating along the I-5 corridor is “cheaper and quicker,” Runberg said. “No matter how you slice it, Highway 97 is not the most conducive trucking route” for moving finished goods.

Some of the state’s highest-paying jobs seem to be passing Central Oregon altogether.

According to the study, employers posted more than 2,000 openings for accountants and financial managers across Oregon, but just 50 of them came from Central Oregon.

There were more than 2,300 posts for software developers, but just five in Central Oregon.

Jobs are created based on demand in an area, said Josh Lehner, senior economist with the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis. Central Oregon’s status as a tourism hub is undeniable, so it makes sense that the area would see more openings for food service and retail work than manufacturing and technology jobs. Lower-wage positions also tend to have higher turnover, as employees leave for other opportunities. More of those jobs are also part-time.

“Bend has obviously had some strong population growth over the years,” Lehner said. “But if you want to support those higher-wage jobs, you need even more growth.”

Expanding Oregon State University-Cascades Campus into a four-year school could help in the long run.

Still, not all of the Central Oregon openings paid low wages. Jobs in the medical field seem to offer the most opportunity for Central Oregon job seekers to earn $40,000 a year or more.

According to the study, Central Oregon employers posted 417 openings for health and social assistance jobs between Oct. 1, 2012, and Sept. 30. Those ran the gamut from nurses and medical assistants to laboratory technicians, pharmacists and emergency medical technicians.

The average health and social assistance job paid $49,800 in Deschutes County last year, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.

Local health care providers are driving that growth. Bend Memorial Clinic has increased its workforce from 600 to 627 over the last year, said Christy McLeod, the clinic’s chief marketing officer. St. Charles Health System posted about 100 job openings on its website in the month of October.

Bend Memorial’s hires included a new vascular surgeon in July, as well as additional support staff in its cardiology unit.

“There are a lot of people in our area who need medical care,” McLeod said. “We just can’t seem to keep up the pace.”

The developers of a planned apartment complex near Southwest Bond Street and Wilson Avenue, east of the Old Mill District, could start building next spring.

Brad Fraley and Timothy O’Byrne want to build five apartment buildings on the 6-acre former Brooks-Scanlon executive office property, near the Bond and Wilson roundabout. The apartment buildings could include as many as 198 total rental units.

They want to develop in three separate phases, starting with one or two of the buildings, in the area closer to Southwest Bluff Drive.

Late last month, they submitted planning documents to the city of Bend, proposing to split the land into three separate parcels. It’s a step they have to take in order to get bank financing to build, Fraley said.

“We want to phase this in,” he said. The whole 6-acre property is “just too large of a piece (of property) to finance” in a single phase.

He and O’Byrne picked up the land in a property exchange back in 2005. They set to work drawing up plans for a $127 million development, anchored by a luxury hotel and condominiums. The project was dubbed “The Village.”

The 2008 real estate crash halted the project, however. Last year, the bank that financed them looked to foreclose, after saying the developers were delinquent on two loans totaling more than $8 million. Fraley and O’Byrne managed to renegotiate the loan terms, and in October 2012 announced the scaled-back apartment project.

It may not have the eye-popping features or price tag of The Village, but Fraley said the apartment plan could fit a real need for rental housing in the city.

They haven’t settled on an exact number of apartments for the five buildings, or how many bedrooms and bathrooms will make up each unit. But they’re likely to come onto the market in the middle of the city’s price range. A small cafe and private gym are also likely.

The average rent for a two-bedroom Bend apartment was $704 in the first quarter of the year, according to a market survey by the Central Oregon Rental Owners Association.

That survey also put Central Oregon’s rental vacancy rate at just 1 percent, the lowest in six years of surveying by the rental association.

“One thing we’ve noticed is there aren’t really any studio apartments in Bend,” Fraley said, adding they could target some studios in their apartment plan.

Brian Dioguardi got a text message just before noon Sept. 13. Then another. Four or five more followed in quick succession.

Friends wanted to know if Dioguardi, the owner of Baldy’s Barbeque, had heard the news. Oregon State University-Cascades Campus had just picked the site for its four-year university, and it was right in the backyard of Baldy’s west Bend restaurant.

“I probably got six or seven emails and texts,” Dioguardi said, “people wanting to let me know, telling me to get ready to be busy.”

Bend city leaders say the university project could give Central Oregon more than a four-year college. The college is already seen as a lift for west Bend businesses between Simpson and Newport avenues. And OSU-Cascades is just one of several big projects in the works.

Three years from now, west Bend figures to be home to a recreation pavilion with a winter ice-skating rink, a whitewater surf park, a 114-room hotel near the Old Mill District, a 34-acre park in NorthWest Crossing’s neighborhood expansion and a 45,000-square-foot grocery store off of Southwest Colorado Avenue.

The Galveston Avenue business corridor could also get a major renovation in coming years, though no firm decisions have been made.

“Each of these is going to be important to the city,” Bend Mayor Jim Clinton said. “Not just the west side.”

The picture isn’t all rosy. City public works officials are racing the clock to upgrade Bend’s water and sewage systems. They’re also looking to control expected traffic increases as the projects spring up. The city is months away from starting a major upgrade to its westside regional pump station on Northwest Portland Avenue, said Tom Hickmann, Bend engineering and infrastructure planning director.

As Bend’s population boomed from about 20,000 in 1990 to nearly 80,000 today, water and sewer infrastructure has been an ongoing issue. Most of west Bend’s wastewater goes through the westside pump station. Upgrading it to handle more wastewater is crucial if west Bend is going to keep growing, Hickmann said. Public works officials hope to start the upgrade next spring, and have it done in mid-2015.

“You have some pretty serious economic implications if we aren’t able to continue to expand our ability to serve (west Bend) with sewer capacity,” Hickmann said.

The city also is vying for a state grant to fund an Integrated Transportation and Land Use Plan study for central and west Bend. The study would pinpoint ideal roadway improvements and places to target more pedestrian and bike traffic, said Nick Arnis, Bend transportation engineering manager.

Officials expect to know early next month if the city will get grant funding for the project.

West Bend’s ‘evolution’

Over the last two decades, change has seemingly been the only constant in west Bend. Clinton moved to Bend in 1995, and remembers the west side of town basically ending at 14th Street.

“The change now isn’t as significant as what happened in the past 10-15 years,” Clinton said. The proposed changes “are more like an evolution.”

The evolution could be lucrative. Several large pieces of undeveloped land near the college site became much more attractive when the OSU-Cascades site was announced, said Darren Powderly, president of Compass Commercial Real Estate Services.

Compass is talking with a developer considering building on 10 commercial acres adjacent to the Safeway on Southwest Century Drive, Powderly said. A college just across the street would make it an extremely valuable piece of property.

OSU-Cascades plans to open in fall 2015, with new buildings likely being added to the campus in the following years.

School officials project 3,000 to 5,000 students enrolled by 2025. As the college gets up and running, it could bring new companies to Bend, just as OSU’s main campus in Corvallis drew major employers like Hewlett Packard.

“The OSU-Cascades campus is going to be an economic engine for Bend,” Powderly said.

He said the business parks along Southwest Colorado Avenue, products of the 2000-07 building boom, could be ideal homes for those companies. Nearly one-fifth of west Bend office buildings are vacant, according to a recent market survey by Compass.

Recruiting new businesses would create jobs. Five to 10 years out, it could spark new demand for office building construction in Bend, Powderly said.

Dioguardi is already wondering if he has enough space. The Baldy’s owner opened a Redmond restaurant in 2011 and expanded in east Bend last year. The business is less than 10 years old, but already employs 100 people in the summer and about 80 during other months. Thousands of hungry students walking around between September and June may alter those plans.

The college “will definitely change the dynamic of that area,” Dioguardi said. “I’m very excited.”

The first version of Oregon’s foreclosure mediation program helped only a small handful of homeowners.

The revamped version, launched in early August, shows some signs of improvement.

Officials with NeighborImpact, the Central Oregon nonprofit handling local foreclosure mediation cases, say one Deschutes County homeowner has a face-to-face meeting scheduled with his or her lender in October. Two other cases are pending and could be scheduled in the coming weeks.

Those aren’t big numbers by any stretch, said Lynne McConnell, associate director of NeighborImpact’s HomeSource division. But they’re an improvement from the initial mediation program, which lenders bypassed almost entirely after it became law in July 2012.

Between July 1, 2012, and June 30, NeighborImpact handled just two mediation cases.

“There are a lot more possibilities this year than last year,” McConnell said.

The new law requires lenders to file a mediation request before foreclosing. Besides the one scheduled session and the two pending cases, lenders have initiated 36 other mediation requests in Central Oregon.

Lenders pretty much bypassed the first mediation program, which only applied to nonjudicial foreclosures. They chose to file foreclosure cases in local circuit courts rather than sit down with homeowners.

The retooled mediation program closed that loophole, and lenders are participating now. More than 670 mediation requests have come in across the state since Aug. 4, according to Oregon Department of Justice figures, more than double the number that came in during the 13 months prior.

Homeowners going through mediation have to gather documents like tax returns and bank statements, said Shelley Nelson, a NeighborImpact default-intervention coordinator who helps local homeowners prepare for mediation.

There’s also a $175 participation fee for the homeowners, and several fees for lenders totaling $525, which help the state run the program.

McConnell said it’s possible the fee for homeowners could have people thinking the program is a scam when they get notices about it in the mail.

She said anyone with questions or concerns should contact NeighborImpact.

“We don’t charge fees to meet with clients,” she said. “They’re welcome to come in. We’re doing more one-on-one meetings with (mediation) coaches and clients.”

Standing outside the office of Plus Property Management, clutching a stack of apartment applications, Malcolm Heald looked a little defeated.

The Central Oregon Community College student’s landlord raised the monthly rent on his west Bend duplex by $30 earlier this year.

Since July, Heald has been scouring local rental listings and Craigs-list ads looking for something — anything — in Bend for $550 or less.

“I thought I’d be able to find something easy, but I guess that was pretty naive,” Heald said.

Rental prices have increased across the city over the last year, as the supply of available properties has dropped alarmingly low.

Data from New York-based real estate research firm Reis highlight the price uptick playing out across Bend, Deschutes County and the state.

An average Deschutes County apartment cost $704 a month to rent in the second quarter of the year, according to Reis data. That’s up from $690 in the third quarter of 2012, or a roughly 2 percent increase.

Meanwhile, the vacancy rate — the percentage of all apartment units available — dropped from 3.7 percent to 3.2 percent over that time.

Those changes may not seem earth-shattering. But the trend is putting pressure on local rental companies to raise prices while waiting for new inventory, several property management officials said.

The survey only covers apartment buildings, so it doesn’t take into account rental homes and other properties.

Earlier this year, the Central Oregon Rental Owners Association said the region’s rental vacancy rate was just 1 percent, after surveying more than 4,500 properties of all types across Deschutes County.

That’s down from a 4.4 percent vacancy rate in 2012, according to rental association figures. Rent on an average one-bedroom apartment in Bend rose from $549 in 2012 to $571 in 2013, while two-bedroom rental rates rose from $629 to $704.

“The market is still very tight,” said Michelle Bunting, president of Bend Property Management Co. “There’s definitely more people looking than there are places to rent.”

Oregon’s other metro areas seem to be grappling with the same problem. Just 2.3 percent of Eugene metro-area apartments were vacant in the second quarter, and 2.9 percent of Portland-area apartments were available, Reis data show. The Salem and Medford areas had 2.4 percent and 2.5 percent vacancy rates, respectively.

Like Bend, the other metro areas have seen their average rental rates increase slightly over the last year.

Several major apartment projects in east Bend could add 489 new apartment units, easing the city’s vacancy crunch. But only one is currently under construction.

In April, construction crews started work on the 104-unit Sage Springs apartment complex, off of Boyd Acres Road and north of Butler Market Road.

It’s expected to be completed in February, with each unit containing two bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Two other proposals came to light in August, though developers haven’t returned calls seeking comment on them.

Bend resident Craig Studwell met with Bend Community Development Department staff on Aug. 22 to discuss his proposal for a 144-unit complex made up of 15 buildings in the southeast part of town between Pettigrew Road and Daly Estates Road.

A week later, Vancouver, Wash.-based Hoviss Development Group met with the city to discuss its plan for four large apartment buildings with a total of 241 units. The group is targeting the site of a former mobile home park on Alstrup Road, which was cleared away in the hope of building a subdivision before the previous owner lost the land to foreclosure when the market crashed.

Both apartment projects would include one-, two- and three-bedroom units, according to blueprints the developers submitted to the city last month.

If they’re built, the projects would be welcome additions, Bunting said, though they’re likely still a ways off.

“When you look back over time in Bend, whenever the rental market gets snug, so to speak, people build more, and it loosens back up,” she said. “That’s the name of the game, how builders know it’s time to build. It’s definitely time.”

SALEM — Oregon State University-Cascades has found its campus.

The university has identified more than 50 acres in west Bend where it hopes to build the state’s newest four-year university.

“The most important thing is this secures the future for both the community and the university, so we can get down to the business of planning a campus that people can be proud of,” said OSU Vice President Becky Johnson, the highest ranking administrator at OSU-Cascades.

It’s a huge step for the university that anticipates enrolling freshman and sophomore students for the first time in fall 2015. The university expects approval Fridayfrom the State Board of Higher Education, Committee on Finance & Administration, of the $12.855 million purchase price.

The property is still subject to environmental impact studies and one parcel will need filling and grading.

But identifying the site is key in helping recruit the first class of freshmen to the area.

“Location matters,” said Wendy Castillo, a senior at OSU-Cascades and president of the student government. “Location is huge.”

The university has agreements to buy two properties adjacent to one another, a total of 56.44 acres. The property is about 2 miles from downtown Bend and about 3 miles from Central Oregon Community College. One parcel, a wooded lot at 1500 S.W. Chandler Ave., is 10.44 acres and zoned for limited commercial use, which means the university can break ground there quickly. Its proposed selling price is $4.98 million.

The other parcel, 46.29 acres at 1707 S.W. Chandler, is zoned for residential use and contains a pumice mine. The proposed purchase price is $7.875 million. The university estimates spending another $4 million to $7 million to fill and level the mine site.

An appraiser reported that although the mine site needs extensive work, “there are simply no other sites as large as the subject property on the West Side that are already within the City and could support such a wide range of potential uses,” according to a summary on the finance committee agenda.

The university considered the Juniper Ridge property north of downtown, but ruled it out, according to campus communications director Christine Coffin, “because of the additional state investment required, lack of nearby amenities that a university campus would require and the timeframe needed to create sewer, water and traffic infrastructure.”

The most immediate and next step, said Kelly Sparks, associate vice president of finance and strategic planning for the campus, is to create a master plan. In coming weeks, the university plans to prioritize what needs to be built and where. University officials said they are still considering buying existing buildings or leasing nearby until something can be built.

“But the immediate need is a living-learning center, so if we bring freshmen here in 2015 they have a place to live at, so that parents feel it’s managed and supervised,” Johnson said. The university hopes to have 3,000-5,000 students enrolled by 2025. It currently has about 1,000 students.

The university expects to break ground by spring 2014. The university has raised $24 million for the project — $16 million in general-fund backed bonds, $4 million the community donated and another $4 million from the university. About half is dedicated to purchasing the property. The remainder will go toward site planning and construction.

Johnson said she’s looking forward to really helping people visualize the campus and getting underway with the campus drawings.

“People will get on board and see this will be a great thing for the community,” she said.

The campus fits the bill of what university officials were looking for, including being close to downtown and plenty of hiking and biking trails.

And although Castillo will have graduated by the time the university’s transformation to a four-year institution is complete, she’s excited about the possibilities.

“I’m a single mom,” she said, “and it would be an honor for me to see my daughter in the future go to OSU-Cascades.”

Developers are brushing the dust off a plan to build new homes in the Stonegate subdivision on Bend’s south side, near the Old Back Nine at Mountain High golf course.

Pahlisch Homes started developing the Stonegate neighborhood near China Hat Road and U.S. Highway 97 in 2006, envisioning a gated community with 186 homes lined by walking trails and several ponds, flanking the western edge of the Old Back Nine course. They had discussed buying the golf course as well, but the previous owner held on to it.

Pahlisch had platted 97 home lots and was building there when the housing market crashed in 2008, bringing development to a halt.

The company lost the Stonegate property to foreclosure in 2010, according to Deschutes County property records. Most of the northern half of the property was developed, but the southern half was bare.

David Silvey, president of Tualatin door and window maker Suburban Door Co., bought the land out of foreclosure in 2011, records show. Planning documents filed with the city of Bend this week show Pahlisch Homes is now working with Silvey to develop the final two phases of Stonegate, after the first two phases were built between 2006 and 2008.

Deborah McMahon, a land-use consultant working with Pahlisch, submitted the documents to the city. She said the developers hope to move forward “as soon as possible.”

The documents officially requested that the city determine whether the application is complete or needs to be modified.

“The four phases of the subdivision work together, McMahon said. “These last two phases would complete the trails” that were started on the property before the market crashed.

Of the 97 lots in the first two phases, 76 have finished homes on them, according to a Pahlisch property map dated Aug. 1.

Company president Dennis Pahlisch first proposed building homes on the site in 2004, several years after the former 18-hole Mountain High Golf Course closed after a dispute between the owner and the city, according to The Bulletin’s archives.

It reopened as a nine-hole course for a week in 2008, according to the archives, and then again at the start of the 2009 season.

Rising home prices and new private-sector jobs have turned Bend into one of Oregon’s fastest-growing regions, in terms of economic health, according to a recently released state report.

The Oregon Economic and Revenue Forecast report highlighted the Bend area’s uptick in jobs and housing activity over the last year as evidence of a modest recovery after several dismal years.

“… The hardest hit housing areas of Bend and Medford, which fell the furthest in (the) recession, are now leading the state in job creation rates in the private sector,” states the report released Aug. 28.

The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis issues the quarterly forecast. It’s meant as a tool for local and state leaders to measure economic health and for state budgeting.

A solid 12 months for tourism in Bend is pushing businesses like hotels and restaurants to add new workers, state employment data show. A suddenly hot housing market seems to be creating new construction jobs.

Deschutes County added nearly 2,000 private-sector, or nongovernmental, jobs between July 2012 and July 2013, according to Oregon Employment Department data.

“Tourism-related spending has certainly come back” in Bend, said Josh Lehner, an economist with the Office of Economic Analysis.

As a percentage of the workforce, total private-sector job gains outpaced even the Portland area, from July to July. And while job growth isn’t matching the pre-recession pace, “overall the trends are positive,” Lehner said.

Home-price gains in Bend are far outpacing any other population center in the state. The forecast report showed a 16.7 percent increase in Bend home prices in the second quarter, compared with the second quarter of 2012. Portland had the second highest increase, at 8.2 percent.

Bend is no stranger to fast home-price gains, Lehner noted. The city’s price appreciation rate topped the entire country when the housing market was booming between 2005 and 2007, only to suffer the hardest crash when the market collapsed in 2008.

But Lehner said the new gains aren’t reason for fears of a repeat.

“We’ve been underbuilding for a couple years now,” he said. Home prices have risen as the supply of homes for sale has shrunk, and prices could stabilize as more homes are built.

“Even if the growth rate is really high, I don’t know if it’s worrisome yet,” Lehner said.