Oiling the Cogs of the Housing Industry

Amid an ongoing housing crisis, homebuilders, first-time homebuyers and the building appraisal industry are on their way to earning big wins not just in Oregon, but throughout the country.

Two bills, either authored or co-authored by U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum (OR-05), are aimed at building more houses, decreasing housing costs and speeding up the licensing and certification process for home appraisers, who are too few to meet demand throughout the U.S.

The end goal is to cut away red tape that has, in part, let unaffordability and a dwindling housing stock outpace folks’ housing needs and budgets — especially in Oregon. These bills strive to offer relief to a state where nearly half a million housing units will need to be built over the next 20 years, according to a report published by the Department of Administrative Services in 2024.

The bipartisan Appraisal Industry Improvement Act, of which Bynum is the co-author, will help address the nationwide shortage of licensed home appraisers to improve access to housing by consolidating appraiser trainee education, therefore speeding up the construction process. This bill is co-led by Byron Donalds (R-FL).

The Accelerating Home Building Act, which Rep. Bynum authored and enjoyed bipartisan and bicameral support, aims to build more houses, at lower cost, across the county. It is co-led by representatives Bryan Steil (R-WI), Chris Pappas (D-NH) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA).

The two bills, which were cleared by the House and passed by the Senate, still have some baking to do. The House will create a conference committee to negotiate the bills into finality before they arrive on the president’s desk. That time frame is not yet clear, a spokesperson for Bynum’s office told the Source.

Bynum, who represents portions of Central Oregon in Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District, says these bills are two big steps toward addressing the affordable housing crisis in Oregon and beyond.

To understand how these bills would pave that road, the Source spoke with the City of Bend’s Housing Department, scoured the national Appraiser registry and chatted with a local appraiser to see how these bills might bring affordable, middle housing to more people.

Appraisal Industry Improvement Act

One of the ways homebuilding is hamstrung is by what some describe as a national dearth of real estate appraisers, and the bottleneck that appraiser trainees must navigate to become bonified.

The appraisal regulatory system has only been around since 1989, when Congress established it in the wake of the mid-1980s savings and loan crisis. The system has three components: The private sector (represented by the Appraisal Foundation) and state and federal governments.

The current standard for becoming a licensed appraiser is restrictively high, said Jim Park, the executive director of the Congressional Appraisal Subcommittee from 2009 to 2024, in conversation with Housing Wire in January. To compound that, about 4,000 appraiser trainees nationwide are without the requisite supervisor, whose guidance is required to submit sample appraisals to each state’s respective appraisal board to see if they comply with the uniform standards of professional appraisal practice.

The national median age of an appraiser hovers around 60 years old, Park said. In its most-recent report, published in 2023, the Appraisal Institute counted about 70,000 active appraisers throughout the country. Only about 12,000 appraisers are licensed in more than one state. Oregon has 1,286 active appraisal licensees, according to a recent search of the Appraisal Subcommittee Registry, with about 60 in Bend. Nationwide, Park says appraisers are in short supply in rural and inner-city areas.

This is where the Appraisal Industry Improvement Act comes in.

Complimenting the Accelerating Home Building Act, the appraisal bill would add state-credentialed trainee appraisers to the national appraiser registry run by the Appraisal Subcommittee. It would also let state-licensed appraisers do appraisals in connection with mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which would free up appraiser availability for about 19% of overall single-family mortgages in 2025, according to National Mortgage Professional. That would speed up the construction and home-buying processes along the way.

Currently, only state-certified appraisers who are listed as active on the FHA Appraiser Roster are eligible to do appraisals for FHA-insured mortgages. Of state-certified appraisers, there are about 67,000 nationally and fewer than 1,200 in Oregon, according to 2025 ASC data.

And perhaps most crucially, the appraisal bill would institutionalize a trainee-supervisor structure for an industry that has long relied on organic mentorship to grow new appraisers. Since 1989, that mentorship rested on the generosity of a licensed or certified appraiser to supervise a trainee as they acquire enough skills and experience hours to submit sample appraisals to their respective state appraisal board for licensure. In the meantime, trainees have been left to negotiate with the appraiser whether they get paid a minimum wage, a fee percentage or even work for free, says Bend appraiser Kern Costelow. On top of that, the supervising appraiser assumes full responsibility for those sample appraisals, ensuring that they comply with the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. Aside from cheap labor, there’s not a lot of incentive to build up the next generation of appraisers.

The owner of Accelerated Appraisal Services, Costelow got his start by working as an assistant under another appraiser until he earned his state appraisal license in 2006. This supervisor-trainee dynamic is about to age out of the industry; Costelow says Central Oregon appraisers aren’t lacking in number, yet he places most as nearing retirement age.

“A lot of certified appraisers don’t want to take on trainees, because they may have already trained a couple and they’re tired of doing it,” Costelow said, adding that he trained his brother-in-law, who has operated ProWest Appraising in Central Oregon since 2008. Costelow points to a law change in October 2009 that prohibited him — an appraiser with a state license, not one with more-advanced certifications — to train up new appraisers. The Appraiser Bill, however, would re-allow state-licensed appraisers like Costelow to take on trainees.

“Here is Bend, I typically get two or more calls a month with prospective appraisers who want to be apprentices,” Costelow said. “Since they changed the law in 2009, I can’t train anyone. If this new bill is going to let state-license appraisers take on trainees again, it will let way more trainees get their licenses. They won’t have this roadblock.”

Given the aging workforce, Costelow thinks the appraisal bill’s allowance of federal grants to support education and training for fledging appraisers is a good idea. The bill would make funding available to state appraiser certifying and licensing agencies, nonprofits and colleges to carry out appraiser education, including recruitment, retaining services and scholarship assistance.

Presently, for someone to become a registered appraiser assistant in Oregon, an applicant must have completed 79 hours of education (often college courses approved by the appraiser qualification board) before obtaining experience hours for the appraiser license or certificate. For that state license, an additional 75 education hours are required, followed by 1,000 hours of real-world appraisal experience acquired in six months, supervised by someone with a state license. A state-certification requires a bachelor’s degree or, in some cases, an associate’s degree and more course learning, according to the state’s Appraiser Certification and Licensure Board.

To consolidate this supervisor-trainee dynamic would help streamline the new appraiser pipeline.

“By addressing the appraiser shortage …this bill will make important progress toward making it easier, faster, and less expensive to buy a home, especially in rural areas,” Bynum said in a release.

Appraisers make a decent living, Costelow said. He says the general annual income in Central Oregon ranges anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000.

“Some guys figure out how much they can make before they hit that higher tax bracket,” he said with a chuckle. “And they just keep it there.”

Two bills, winding their way through Congress, would streamline pre-approved housing designs, popular in Bend, throughout the country. Credit: Peter Madsen

Housing crunch time
News flash — housing in Oregon is spendy. The Beaver State ranks in the lower 90th percentile of a national study of housing affordability and homebuilding by Realtor.com. That “F” ranking, which Oregon shares with California, Hawaii, New York and New England states, owes to high cost and lack of ample stock.

But Bend officials have been getting crafty in addressing the housing crunch since at least 2021. That’s when the Bend City Council voted on changes to city code prompted by Oregon House Bill 2001. This bill mandated that cities can no longer permit single-family zoning, which meant that duplexes, triplexes and cottage clusters, for example, can no longer be excluded from neighborhoods zoned residential, the Source reported in September 2021. In 2023, the Bend City Council voted against mandatory parking minimums of off-street parking for new housing. It also cut down on the allowable number of short-term rentals on the same lot from seven to one.

When Tina Kotek became governor in 2023, she set a national goal of building about 252,000 homes by 2030 to track with demand and keep costs down. In the U.S. as a whole, there’s a shortage of about 4.7 million housing units, according to a 2025 report by Zillow Group.

In June 2024, the City of Bend received $5 million through a federal grant program called Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing — a slice of a $100-million pie divvied up among more than 20 local governments throughout the country. About $4 million of the PRO Housing grant set up the PRO Housing Fund, which dog-eared cash for land acquisition, infrastructure, homebuyer assistance, new housing construction and other housing-related costs through competitive request for proposal processes, according to the City.

In 2023, the most-recent year available in the City of Bend’s housing supply data, there were 46,712 housing units for 101,478 people. The City has issued permits of 1,571 units since July 2025, with 265 permits granted for affordable housing.

By the (pattern) book
Pattern zoning has only recently gained mainstream traction, helped in no small part by the bipartisan, bicameral cooperation in Congress on two affordable housing packages: The ROAD to Housing Act and the Housing for the 21st Century Act.

Passed in February, both packages involve pattern zoning; Bynum’s Accelerated Home Building Act is a stand-alone bill that was incorporated as a key provision within the broader ROAD Act, as detailed by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The bill establishes a pilot grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Development to pay for the creation of pattern zoning with a focus on the missing middle and workforce housing (duplexes, triplexes and multifamily). It also allows infill construction in lots already partially developed.

The Accelerating Home Building Act is different from HB 2001 in that it doesn’t require anything of states or localities, says a Bynum spokesperson. The Act creates a grant program for state and local governments to create and approve building plans to streamline construction.
It would fund, nationwide, a system that’s already getting results in Bend.

The City of Bend’s master re-issue permit program currently streamlines review of previously approved plans by its owner — often a production builder, says Kerry Bell, the City’s housing production and incentives coordinator. That’s not the same as pre-approved plans offered directly to the public. Since 2024, the City has reissued 184 permits from pre-approved plans, resulting in 281 units getting expedited.

The City has one pre-approved ADU plan (with two roof options) that property owners can use, with four more in development by an architect the City hired with PRO House funding. Those that will be ready this summer, says Racheal Baker, the City’s Housing Design Manager. Pattern book designs let home buyers essentially flip through a catalog of ready-to-build housing designs that the City’s permitting department has already approved as up to code and is suitable for its environs (such as featuring a certain roof that lets snow slough off, for example.)

The Bend City Council adopted a pattern zones overlay district in March 2025. A patterns zone is a special zoning tool applied over existing, base zoning to speed up development with pre-reviewed approval for certain housing types — especially missing middle housing.

And many large-scale developers, such as Hayden Homes, already use pre-approved plans, such as with their Parkside Place development in Bend. Qualifying affordable-home buyers can pick from a pre-approved pattern book of single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes. And that pick-from-a-catalog is a key component of the Accelerating Home Building Act.

“Affordable housing is out of reach for so many Americans,” Rep. Bynum said in a statement. “To fix this, we need to build more homes and strengthen the housing industry’s workforce. My bills provide easier and faster pathways to homeownership.”