Redmond Rental Market: August 2026

Central Oregon Rental Market Report · August 2026

Monthly market report from Legacy Property Management

The Bottom Line: The average asking rent for a single-family house in Redmond was $2,500 in August 2026, the seasonal peak, flat against June and about 7 percent below August of last year. Underneath that flat headline, the number of houses available to rent doubled from 26 to 52 in one month and total marketed supply rose 23 percent, most of it likely spillover from a for-sale market carrying five to six months of inventory. Apartments, by contrast, are up 3.7 percent on the year. Rent has already started its seasonal slide, so September is the month to lock in renewals and price vacant houses to move.

Single-Family Houses

If you only looked at the headline, August was uneventful. The average asking rent for a house in Redmond was $2,500, the same figure the market touched in June and the high point of the year. The Redmond rental market in August 2026 did exactly what it did in 2025: it topped out in August. The difference is the altitude. Last August the peak was about $2,690, so the market is running roughly $190, or 7.1 percent, below a year ago. A quick definition, because it matters for everything that follows: asking rent is what vacant houses are listed at, not what sitting tenants pay.

Month over month, the figure is best described as flat. Zillow revised its July read down to roughly $2,420 after the fact, which makes August look like an $80 bounce, but against the $2,500 we reported for July it is a wash. Either way, the summer produced no pricing power. Rents climbed out of an April dip, reached $2,500, and stopped there twice. The early September snapshot already shows the turn: as of September 1 the average asking rent had slipped to $2,398, about $100 below August. That is a partial-month reading and it will revise, but it lines up with last year's pattern to the week. In 2025, Redmond house rents fell about 9 percent between August and November.

Now the part of the market that actually moved. On August 4 there were 26 houses listed for rent in Redmond. By September 1 there were 52. Over the same stretch the average days on market fell from 83 to 51, and that drop needs a translation. When a wave of new listings hits, each one starts with a clock at zero and the average resets downward. It says nothing about houses leasing faster. Our check for this is a simple one: multiply listings by days on market to get total inventory-days, the amount of marketing time sitting on the market at once. That figure rose from 2,158 to 2,652, up 22.9 percent. Supply loosened. The lower days-on-market number is a side effect of the new inventory, not evidence of demand. A house listed today should still be underwritten to a six-to-eight-week lease-up, not a seven-week average that a batch of fresh listings produced.

We do not publish a true vacancy rate for Redmond houses, because nobody can observe an empty house that is not listed. What we can measure is listed availability: houses on the market divided by the stock of detached rental houses in the Redmond ZIP code, which Census data puts at roughly 2,300 with a defensible range of about 1,900 to 2,700. Against that base, listed availability was 1.6 percent in late June, tightened to 1.1 percent in early August, and jumped to 2.3 percent on September 1. Treat the level loosely and the change seriously. The denominator barely moves month to month, so when the percentage doubles, that is the listing count doubling, full stop. Even at 2.3 percent, Redmond is still tighter than Bend, where listed availability sits near 3.1 percent. But the direction changed hard in August, and the direction is what you price to.

The $2,500 average is a midpoint, not a floor. Of the 52 houses listed on September 1, just over half asked less than $2,500, about a dozen asked under $2,000, and a small tail ran from $4,000 to $6,500. The distribution now shows two clusters, one around $2,300 and a second, newer one around $2,900. A standard three-bedroom house in decent condition is competing in a band of roughly $2,200 to $2,900, and the top of that band is now crowded with newer inventory. If your house is dated, it is competing at the bottom of the band against a dozen sub-$2,000 houses and against apartments.

Two more single-family figures round out the picture. Our internal tracking of leases actually signed puts in-place rent for a Redmond house at roughly $2,420, within $100 of the asking average. Sitting tenants are already paying close to market, which means there is very little easy upside left on turnover and a real downside if a house sits empty into October. On tenancy, there is no clean single-family statistic for Redmond, so we work from a proxy: retention in professionally managed Redmond apartment communities runs about 68 percent a year, which implies an average stay of roughly 3.1 years. Houses typically hold tenants longer than apartments, so treat three years as a floor for a well-kept Redmond rental house and something closer to three and a half to four years as realistic when the rent is at market. A tenant in year two of a lease that is within $100 of market is worth more than the $50 a month you might squeeze on renewal.

Apartments

Redmond apartments are having a better year than Redmond houses. In-place apartment rent is about $1,787, up 3.7 percent year over year, the typical asking rent for a vacant apartment is just under $2,000, and occupancy is holding near 96 percent, down about a point from a year ago. Retention is that 68 percent figure from above, which means roughly one in three apartment leases turns over in a given year. A caution on reading these numbers: they come from a tracked panel of managed communities, and the panel's month-to-month readings drift as properties enter and leave the sample. Treat them as direction, not as a precise monthly series. The direction is clear enough: apartment rents up, apartment occupancy softening slightly, house rents down.

The supply side explains the softening occupancy. The Bend metro area, which includes Redmond, permitted roughly 1,280 multifamily units in the twelve months through July, and a good share of the 2025 permits are delivering into the market now. That is the 2026 apartment delivery wave, and it is why apartment operators are protecting occupancy with modest concessions even as their rent rolls grow. For a house owner the takeaway is not about apartments themselves. It is that the renter who cannot quite qualify for your house has more, and newer, alternatives than they did a year ago.

The Segment Premium

Set the two segments side by side and the gap is the story. A house asks $2,500; an apartment asks about $1,977. That is a premium of roughly $520 a month, or 26 percent, for a yard, a garage, and no shared walls. A year ago, with houses at $2,690, the premium was closer to 36 percent. It has compressed by ten points in twelve months, entirely because the house side fell while the apartment side rose. That eleven-point spread in year-over-year change is the clearest signal in the data that Redmond's softness is a single-family problem, not a rental market problem. Renters have not left Redmond. Some of them have traded down from houses into apartments, where a $1,977 two-bedroom is a real alternative to a $2,500 three-bedroom.

Who Rents What

The premium compresses because of who can pay it. Census data for Redmond puts the median renter household's income at roughly $60,000, against about $96,000 for the median owner household and $84,000 for the city as a whole. Now run the arithmetic on a $2,500 house. At the standard screen of three times rent, a tenant needs about $90,000 a year; at the 30 percent affordability line, about $100,000. In other words, the household that qualifies for the average Redmond rental house earns more than the median Redmond homeowner, and about $30,000 to $40,000 more than the median Redmond renter. That is not a survey of who actually lives in Redmond's rental houses; it is what the rent implies. But it explains the ceiling. The pool of households that can qualify for a $2,000 apartment is several times larger than the pool for a $2,500 house, and the house pool is not growing. Net migration into Redmond over the past year was essentially flat, a few dozen households on net, though the households arriving carried noticeably higher incomes than those leaving. Demand for houses at $2,500 rests on income growth, not population growth, and Redmond's wages are not growing fast enough to carry rents higher.

The For-Sale Market

The sales market is the standing section in this report for a reason: it is where this month's rental supply came from. Redmond is carrying somewhere between five and six months of single-family inventory, a balanced-to-soft market by any standard definition, with roughly 200 to 270 active listings against 40 to 60 closings a month depending on the source and the cut. The median sale price sits in the $480,000 to $520,000 range and is down year over year in every source we checked, by anywhere from 1 to 10 percent depending on the window. The more useful detail is what is selling and what is not: closings under $450,000 are up sharply this year while closings between $450,000 and $750,000 are down by roughly a third. That middle tier is precisely the three-bedroom, two-bath house that makes up most of Redmond's rental stock. Well-priced homes still move within a few weeks, but the median listing has been sitting for two to three months.

On the rent-versus-own question, renting remains cheaper by a wide margin. A buyer of a $500,000 house with 10 percent down at today's rates near 6.5 percent, plus taxes and Central Oregon insurance, is looking at roughly $3,200 to $3,300 a month against a $2,500 rent. That $700-plus gap is why the households that would otherwise buy your house are choosing to keep renting it, and why holding a Redmond rental beats selling one into this market. It is also why a mid-tier house that does not sell becomes a rental.

The Bonus Metric: Listings Doubled

Where did 26 extra rental houses come from in a month? Redmond issued nothing close to that in single-family permits, and new construction does not show up as a rental listing four weeks after it is framed. The plausible source is the paragraph above. When a house does not sell in a five-to-six-month market, the owner's fallback is to rent it. That is what a doubled listing count looks like from the outside: accidental landlords, priced to what they think the house is worth rather than what the market will pay. The new $2,900 cluster in the listing data is consistent with recently purchased homes listed at rents that cover a 2023 or 2024 mortgage.

This kind of supply is cyclical, not structural. It arrives when sales are slow and leaves when sales recover, because those owners want out. But for the next several months it is real competition, and much of it will be newer, better-finished houses than the typical long-held rental. The other supply story this month sits on the exit side of the ledger. Hayden Homes cut the ribbon on July 30 on the first townhomes at Hearthstone at Redmond Ranch, the first phase of a nearly 400-home development in northwest Redmond, with two- and three-bedroom units starting at $374,990. These are for sale, not for rent. A $375,000 new townhome is the exit door for the renter currently paying $2,500 for an older three-bedroom house. Over the next two years, that project is competition for your tenant's next move, not for your listing.

The Backdrop

The employment picture is steady rather than strong. Deschutes County unemployment was 4.8 percent in July, half a point better than Oregon's 5.3 percent, and total county employment is up a modest 0.2 percent year over year. Jobs are not being lost, but they are not being added fast enough to push rents through the affordability ceiling. On the building side, the Bend metro area permitted roughly 1,590 single-family homes in the twelve months through July, up about 13 percent from the prior year, alongside the 1,280 multifamily units noted above, up about 12 percent. The pipeline is healthy and balanced, and the single-family side is running at its strongest pace since early 2024. Redmond's share of that includes Redmond Ranch, which will be delivering for years.

Two policy items to keep in view. Oregon's statewide rent cap for 2026 is 9.5 percent, and the 2027 cap is due from the state by September 30. It is not the binding constraint in a market where rents are falling, but it matters for anyone setting a renewal on a long-held tenant well below market. Second, the state's wildfire emergency insurance order, which pauses policy cancellations and non-renewals, has been extended to September 29. It applies to ZIP codes that were under evacuation notice, so it may not cover Redmond directly, but the trend it points to does: insurance cost and availability across Central Oregon are the most active cost pressure on landlord margins this year, and every renewal notice deserves a hard look.

Why This Matters

Put it all together and the picture is not complicated. Redmond house rents peaked at $2,500 in August, the same month they peaked last year, and they are already sliding. The supply of houses for rent doubled in a month, most of it appears to be homes that did not sell, and it is priced in two clusters, one at $2,300 and one at $2,900. Sitting tenants are already paying near market. Apartments are absorbing the renters who cannot qualify for a house, and the house premium over an apartment has compressed from 36 percent to 26 percent in a year. None of that is a crisis. Redmond remains tighter than Bend on a stock-adjusted basis and its for-sale market is balanced rather than broken. But every one of those facts argues for the same behavior over the next eight weeks: protect occupancy, do not chase rent.

The single most valuable thing in this report: if you have a lease expiring between October and January, the leverage you have this month is the most you will have until next summer. Last year a house that went vacant in October leased in December at 8 to 9 percent less than it would have in August, plus a month or two of lost rent. Send the renewal now.

If you have a vacant house today, price it inside the $2,200 to $2,900 band based on honest condition, not at the top of it, and be prepared to move within two weeks if showings are slow, because 51 other houses are competing for the same renters and more are arriving. Compare your rent against a $1,977 apartment, not just against other houses, if your property is dated or small. And if you are weighing whether to sell a Redmond rental into this market, the numbers favor holding: five to six months of for-sale inventory and softening prices mean you would be exiting into weakness, while the rent-versus-own gap means the households that would buy your house are the same ones choosing to keep renting.