Redmond Rental Market: May 2026

Redmond has always been Central Oregon’s value play. While Bend commands the headlines and the higher rents, Redmond has quietly offered families the thing Bend increasingly cannot: a single-family home at a price a working household can actually reach. That positioning is exactly why this month’s data deserves a close read. As of May 2026, Redmond’s rental market is splitting in two, and the single-family side is the story.

Single-family home rents are down. Apartment rents are not. That divergence, nearly ten points of separation between the two segments over the past year, is unusual enough that it tells us something real about who is renting in Redmond right now and what they can afford. Let’s walk through the numbers, then get to the supply development that may quietly reshape the back half of 2026.

Single-Family Rents: Down Again, and the Decline Picked Up Speed

The headline figure first. The average rent for a single-family home in Redmond sat at $2,400 per month in May 2026, according to Zillow. That is down $55 (-2.2%) from April and down $250 (-9.4%) from May 2025, when the same homes were renting closer to $2,650.

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The shape of this decline matters more than the headline number, so it is worth slowing down on. This is not a market in freefall. Through the first five months of 2026, Redmond single-family rents have actually been fairly stable, hovering in a tight band between roughly $2,370 and $2,455. The dramatic-sounding 9.4% year-over-year drop exists largely because we are comparing today against an elevated May 2025, when rents were riding a peak that summer would push even higher before the market corrected hard in the fall. In other words, the big annual number is mostly a story about how high 2025 was, not how fast 2026 is falling.

That said, the month-over-month figure deserves attention too. A 2.2% dip from April to May tells us the softness has not fully bottomed out, and the broader trajectory since last summer is clearly downward. The takeaway for landlords is calibration rather than alarm: rents have reset to a lower, steadier plateau, and pricing a unit to 2025’s peak is the surest way to watch it sit empty.

For context on why rents are softening rather than climbing, look next door at the for-sale market. The typical Redmond home is now valued at about $501,000, down 5.6% over the past year per Zillow’s Home Value Index. Sales volume has cooled too, with April closings down sharply against the prior two years. The sales market and the rental market are telling the same story in different dialects: prices peaked, supply caught up, and both buyers and renters now have room to be choosy.

Days on Market: The Slowest of the Three

Here is a comparison that may surprise Redmond landlords. Single-family rentals in Redmond are spending an average of 57 days on market before leasing, based on current Zillow listings, and that is the longest lease-up time of the three Central Oregon markets we track most closely.

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Put that next to its neighbors and the picture sharpens. Prineville rentals are flying off the market in about 9 days. Bend, despite carrying the region’s highest single-family rents at around $3,200, is leasing homes in roughly 49 days. Redmond sits at 57. The gap between Bend and Redmond is modest, but the direction is worth noting: the value-priced market is taking slightly longer to fill its homes than the premium one. That tells us Redmond’s softness is a demand-side story, not a pricing one. Lowering rents alone has not made these homes move faster than Bend’s pricier inventory, which points to a renter pool that is simply more cautious and more selective right now.

A quick word on what this metric captures, because it is easy to misread. The 57-day figure reflects how long single-family homes currently listed have been on the market. Think of it as the temperature of the market right now. The practical takeaway for a Redmond landlord is straightforward: budget for roughly two months of marketing time, and recognize that vacancy is expensive. A $2,400 home sitting empty for 57 days is about $4,500 in lost rent. Because price cuts alone are not dramatically accelerating lease-up in this market, the homes that do move quickly tend to be the ones that show well, list with strong photos, and price sensibly from day one rather than chasing the market down after weeks of sitting.

Vacancy: The Hardest Number to Pin Down

Vacancy is the metric everyone wants as a clean percentage and the one single-family rentals stubbornly refuse to provide. There is no tidy total-inventory denominator for SFH the way there is for an apartment complex with a known unit count. What we have instead are indicators, and they line up consistently.

Zillow showed 40 single-family rentals actively available in Redmond as of late May 2026. Set against an active single-family rental base of a few hundred homes, that points to a vacancy pool in the low-to-mid single digits as a percentage: enough available supply to keep gentle downward pressure on pricing, but well short of a glut. The market also holds inventory that never shows up on a single platform at any given moment, so the true number of homes between tenants is somewhat higher than any one listing count suggests.

The directional read: this is a renter’s market at the margins, not a collapse. It is precisely the kind of “adequate supply meets cautious demand” balance that produces slow rent softness and longer marketing times rather than a dramatic crash.

The Multifamily Counterpoint: Apartments Are Holding the Line

Now for the contrast that makes this month interesting. While single-family rents fell, Redmond’s apartments went the other direction.

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Multifamily asking rents averaged $1,797 in May, up a slim $7 (+0.4%) from April and up $22 (+1.3%) year-over-year. Those are not eye-popping gains, but in a month where the single-family segment dropped nearly ten percent annually, modest growth reads as genuine strength. Apartment occupancy improved to 94.3% in May, up from 93.9% in April, nudging vacancy down to 5.8%. Year-over-year, occupancy is softer (it was nearly 97% in May 2025), but the recent monthly improvement suggests the apartment market is finding its footing.

Why are the two segments diverging? The most likely explanation is affordability-driven substitution. Redmond’s median household income is about $90,000, well below Bend’s $113,000. At $2,400 a month, a single-family home consumes roughly a third of gross income for a household earning the local median, and that is before utilities and the higher heating, yard, and maintenance costs that come with a detached house. For a budget-conscious family, a $1,797 apartment with concessions starts to look a lot more sensible. When some of Redmond’s newer apartment communities are dangling move-in incentives like a free month, the math tips further. In short: tenants appear to be trading down from houses to apartments, which simultaneously pressures SFH rents and props up MFH demand.

For investors, the read-through is worth stating plainly. On a pure rent-trend basis, multifamily fundamentals in Redmond are currently healthier than single-family. That does not make SFH a bad hold, particularly given the supply story below, but it does argue for patience and realistic pricing on the single-family side.

The Bigger Divergence: Bend Is Rising While Redmond Falls

Zoom out from the segment story and an even sharper split appears at the city level. While Redmond single-family rents fell $250 over the past year, Bend’s went the other way entirely. The typical Bend house now rents for about $3,200 per month, up $100 from April and up $205 (roughly 7%) year-over-year. So in the same twelve months that Redmond shed 9.4%, Bend added about 7%. Two cities barely twenty minutes apart are moving in opposite directions, and the gap between them has widened to roughly $800 a month for a single-family home.

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That widening spread is the regional version of the same affordability story playing out inside Redmond. As Bend rents climb past $3,000 and keep going, the households priced out of Bend have historically done exactly what you would expect: they look to Redmond, where a house still rents for a quarter less. In a normal cycle, that spillover demand would be lifting Redmond rents too. The fact that it is not, that Redmond is softening even as its pricier neighbor heats up, tells us the pressure on Redmond right now is less about Bend and more about Redmond’s own renter pool reaching the ceiling of what it can pay. Redmond’s median household income sits near $90,000 against Bend’s $113,000, and that income gap is the wall this market keeps running into.

There is a forward-looking angle here worth holding onto. If Bend rents continue rising while Redmond stays flat or soft, the value gap between the two cities grows more pronounced every month. At some point that spread becomes compelling enough that priced-out Bend renters and relocating newcomers increasingly choose Redmond, which would put a floor under Redmond rents and eventually push them back up. Bend’s strength, in other words, is a leading indicator worth watching. It is part of why we read Redmond’s current softness as a cyclical dip rather than a structural decline.

Tenancy Length: Where Single-Family Still Wins

One area where we lack clean Redmond-specific single-family data is average tenancy length, so let’s be transparent about that. What we can see is the multifamily retention rate, which is running about 61.6%, implying an average apartment tenancy of roughly 31 months, or about two and a half years.

Single-family rentals almost always retain tenants longer than apartments. Families settle in around schools, put down roots, absorb the friction of moving a whole household, and simply stay. A reasonable estimate for Redmond single-family tenancy is in the three-to-four-year range, though we flag this as an informed estimate rather than a measured figure. The investment implication is the quiet upside of the single-family segment: even in a soft-rent environment, a good tenant who stays three years sharply reduces the turnover and vacancy costs that erode returns. In a market where filling a vacancy takes 57 days, retention is worth real money.

This Month’s Bonus Metric: The Supply Pipeline Just Got Thinner

Every month one story tends to drive the narrative underneath the headline rent figures. For May 2026, it is supply, and there is a concrete, recent development that crystallizes it.

Two major affordable housing projects in Redmond have been delayed after Oregon Housing and Community Services prioritized developments along the I-5 corridor. The clearest example is the Habitat for Humanity Ward Commons homes, a set of energy-efficient two- and three-bedroom single-family homes that were originally slated to reach the market in Fall 2026. With state Local Innovation and Fast Track (LIFT) funding redirected to projects in Portland, Salem, and The Dalles, those homes may now not be ready until 2032, and Redmond may have to wait for the next funding round in 2027 to make progress.

That single development sits on top of a broader permitting pullback. Single-family permits in the Redmond area ran about 205 units over the trailing twelve months, down roughly 26% from the prior year’s 278. Total residential permits, single-family and multifamily combined, fell about 25%. Developers are pulling back across the board, partly in response to the same soft-demand signals showing up in the rent data, and partly because of the funding and regulatory headwinds now delaying shovel-ready projects.

Here is why a landlord or investor should care. The soft rents of today are a present-tense problem, but the thinning pipeline is a future-tense opportunity. Less new construction entering the market in 2026 and 2027 means less competition for tenants down the road. Redmond’s population continues to grow at about 1.5% annually, and Deschutes County remains one of Oregon’s fastest-growing counties. If demand keeps climbing while new supply stalls, the current oversupply could flip toward undersupply by late 2027, putting upward pressure back on rents. The Ward Commons delay is a small, specific data point, but it points the same direction as the permit numbers: the supply that would have softened rents two years from now is not getting built on schedule.

What This Means If You Own or Are Buying in Redmond

For current single-family landlords, the message is patience paired with realism. The next couple of quarters may bring continued rent pressure, so price new vacancies to the market rather than to last year’s peak, and protect the tenants you have. A renewal at a slightly lower rate beats two months of vacancy at $2,400. The thinning supply pipeline is working in your favor on a 12-to-24-month horizon, so the goal is to weather the soft patch without giving up good tenants or taking on avoidable vacancy.

For prospective investors, this is a watch-and-position market rather than a rush-in market. Multifamily currently shows the stronger rent trend, and value-add single-family properties may be acquirable at a discount in this environment. The supply constraint building underneath the surface is the reason to keep Redmond on the list rather than cross it off. Entry points in the second half of 2026 may prove well-timed for owners thinking in years rather than months.

Navigating a market that is splitting in two takes local data and steady hands. At Legacy Property Management, we track Central Oregon’s submarkets month by month and partner with investors and owners across Bend, Redmond, and Sisters to price right, fill fast, and protect long-term returns. If you own a Redmond rental or are weighing one, reach out and we will walk through your numbers together.

Data sources: Zillow Rentals data (average rent, days on market, available listings, year-over-year and month-over-month change, rent-over-time series), last updated May 30, 2026; Zillow Home Value Index (home values); Oregon Housing and Community Services / Central Oregon Daily (supply pipeline); and regional permit records. Figures reflect May 2026 and are deemed reliable but should be independently verified.