Central Oregon rental market grows tighter

Vacancy rate below 1 percent creates big competition for housing

By Joseph Ditzler / The Bulletin

Published Apr 19, 2014 at 12:01AM / Updated Apr 19, 2014 at 12:04AM

Finding a place to rent became a full-time job for Bre Aasland when she decided this year to move out of her parents’ home, where she lived three years after returning to Bend.

“I would like to live on my own but I can’t find someone that will take my money,” said Aasland, 25, who works in accounting and marketing for Bend Garbage & Recycling Inc. “I think just this year alone, I’ve been to about five different walk-throughs and before I can finish filling out the application it’s rented out.”

In Central Oregon the vacancy rate shrank to 0.7 percent this year, lower even than the 1 percent rate last year, according to annual survey results released Friday by the Central Oregon Rental Owners Association and Housing Works.

The survey, conducted earlier this year, found just 29 vacant units out of 3,376 surveyed in Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson counties.

The demand for any rental unit — apartments, duplexes, single-family homes — is creating sharp elbows among would-be tenants in Central Oregon.

“A friend told me he’d gone down to Deschutes River Woods for a manufactured home for $1,200 a month,” said Kenny LaPoint, housing director of Housing Works, which manages subsidized rental properties for low-income renters and provides qualified renters with vouchers. “It was like an auction. Eight people were waiting to rent it.”

With demand, rents have climbed. A two-bedroom apartment in a complex of five or more that rented for $704 a month in 2013 goes for $770 this year, according to the survey. A three-bedroom home in Bend that rented for $1,110 in 2013 now goes for $1,221.

Rental owners association President Kevin Restine said rents have climbed but are not inflated. Low tenant turnover, in fact, tends to keep rents “conservative,” despite demand, he said.

Still, “Things are moving at warp speed,” Restine said. “The best thing a tenant can do is to look early and often … and make themselves as attractive as possible,” by having good credit and rental histories, he said.

New apartment complexes or rental homes could be years away, said Andy High, vice president of government affairs for the Central Oregon Builders Association. The time lapse between proposing a project to the city and actual construction can take a year or more. Plus, available land on which to build in Bend, for one, is scarce.

But higher rents may encourage builders to erect more apartment complexes, High said.

“That’s been a problem with apartment complexes: Could you make it pencil out to get the financing?” he said. “Now we’re at the point where we’re seeing that. A fair amount of people are trying to make things work.”

In Bend, just one new apartment complex is under construction, the 104-unit Sage Springs on Boyd Acres Road. But that complex, due for completion in June, is 100 percent reserved, according to its leasing agent.

Four other proposed projects in Bend are months if not years away from breaking ground. And on the horizon, plans to expand the Oregon State University-Cascades Campus will create further demand for rental housing.

“It’s now profitable to own investment property again, and that’s going to spur another wave of people providing housing,” Restine said.

In the short term, investors may be enticed again to buy property they can rent for a steady income, said Dan Seim, a Bend real-estate blogger and office manager for Preferred Residential, his wife Becky Seim’s firm. Even though home prices have climbed since 2012, buyers are still willing to spend on an investment property, he said Friday.

“You can make the deal work just about any way as long as it will rent,” Seim said. “It’ll rent as long as owners are not too greedy about how much rent they get.”

The tight rental market results, in part, from the Great Recession and its aftermath, Restine said. Foreclosures turned many homeowners into tenants after 2008, creating a demand for rental property. The recession nearly extinguished new construction, as well, so few new homes, rental or otherwise, were built.

Meanwhile, some homeowners still await foreclosure actions on properties on which they’ve made no mortgage payments in years, said LaPoint. Resolving those cases will free some properties for sale as rentals but may create new tenants.

Meanwhile, Aasland said she’s moved in with a friend until she can find a place of her own. She considers herself a good prospect as a renter: good job, clean credit. She hopes to find something at $850 a month, tops.

“I’ve been pretty annoyed but I’m pretty mellow, so it hasn’t been that big of a deal,” she said. “It’s not that I’m a poor applicant, it’s just that there’s so many people looking that you have to be in the right place at the right time.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815,