Bend’s Housing Market Remains Horizontal

The housing market in Bend seems to be holding steady over the past few years, with a median home price in Bend around $710,000. There are more buyers than sellers right now, but buyers are riding the tide of the economy.

“There was a dip in interest rates, where it went down from 6.5 to just under 6% in February, and we had a huge explosion of buyers in that month,” Brian Ladd, principal broker of the Ladd Group, Cascade Hasson Sotheby’s International Realty, told the Source. But he says that bonanza turned into a trickle in March and April with the invasion of Iran linked to a rise in inflation and interest rates. That caused homebuyers to remain cautious. In May, sales and pending sales began bouncing back, up about 20% compared to a year ago.

“What we’re finding is that buyers are trying to buy, and anytime there’s a stabilization in prices, a stabilization in interest rates, a stable economy, all the buyers start re-entering as quickly as they can, but they just keep getting punched in the face with so many headwinds that it’s just a challenging market,” Ladd says.

Housing prices will likely never go back to the more affordable $300-$400,000 price point of years past, because construction and land costs remain high. But prices have leveled.

“Let’s go back to the pandemic start and we had a huge bump up in prices. But then we’ve had a stabilization in prices ever since about ’21. We’re at the same exact price that we were in ’21, so that’s a five-year timeout in prices,” Ladd says. “And there is almost never a time in history where prices go flat for five years.”

Right now, there’s a four-month supply of inventory in Bend. But Ladd believes there are more people willing to sell their homes, just waiting for the market to heat up. In May, the median time for a house on the market in Bend was 42 days. Ladd says 45% of the homes sold within 30 days, but 22% had been on the market for 120 days. A market analysis for April posted on the Ladd Group’s website finds that cash transactions increased from 23% in 2025 to 33% this past April while the median price remained stable, which may mean that high-end buyers are becoming more value-conscious in their purchasing decisions.

“One of the major trends right now is we’ve seen a huge slowdown in the number of new people arriving here,” Ladd says. “In the last year, there’s almost no new people coming to town.”

Portland State University, which tracks population estimates, shows that Bend’s population has grown by an average of 1.5% each year since 2022, compared to the growth spurt of nearly 9% between 2020 and 2021.

“We have people leaving, and we have some new people coming, but it’s not the rush of buyers anymore,” Ladd says. “What we’re seeing now is people that have been in Bend awhile, couldn’t find a house when they moved here…and the shiny countertops and whatnot are probably a little less necessary than the understanding of where they fit in town. So, it’s a little bit more of nuanced buying than it was before.”

This article appears in the Source June 4, 2026.