Sisters Rental Market: August 2026

Central Oregon Rental Market Report · August 2026

Monthly market report from Legacy Property Management

Where the Sisters rental market landed in August

Zillow's monthly chart for houses in Sisters puts August 2026 asking rent at about $2,600. That is roughly $100 below the $2,700 we reported for July and about $200 below where Sisters houses were asking in August 2025: a 3.7 percent monthly dip and a 7 percent annual decline. Asking rent is what landlords are listing at, not what sitting tenants pay, and we will get to the difference below.

One housekeeping note. Zillow revises prior months as listings close out, and its chart now reads July closer to $2,750 than the $2,700 we published. So the true step down may be closer to $150 than $100. In a market with somewhere between nine and sixteen houses listed at any given time, that distinction is not worth arguing over. What matters is the direction, and the direction was down in a month that historically rises.

Here is the part that keeps us honest. Sisters is a small-sample market, and we treat every rent move, up, down or sideways, with the same skepticism until a second signal agrees with it. This month the evidence is split. Days on market jumped 34 days, which agrees with softer pricing. The listing count fell by five, which does not. Our read is that the August decline is real but not fully confirmed, and the rent line should be understood as sitting inside a band of roughly six percent in either direction.

You will also see a $2,700 figure from Zillow's summary box dated September 1, showing rent up $100 month over month. That is the early September snapshot, not August. We report the month that has closed. September is ten days old.

The seasonal pattern is the other reason not to chase that September number. In 2025, Sisters house rents peaked in August at about $2,800 and slid roughly 9 percent by October before recovering into winter. August has now proven to be the seasonal top in all three Central Oregon markets we cover, and Sisters is starting this year's slide from a lower base. If you have a lease expiring between October and January, the time to lock in the renewal is right now, while the comps still show $2,600 to $2,700 rather than whatever October brings.

The houses that did not lease

The most useful metric in this report is not the rent. It is what we call inventory-days: houses listed multiplied by their average days on market, which tells you how much total marketing time is sitting out there. It is our standing check against being fooled by a listing count or a days-on-market figure on its own.

In late June, Sisters had 9 houses listed averaging 106 days, for roughly 954 inventory-days. By August 4, right as the fire was winding down, that had jumped to 16 listings averaging 80 days, or about 1,280 inventory-days, a 34 percent increase in marketed supply. On September 1 the count was back down to 11 listings, but the average days on market had climbed to 114 days, and inventory-days came in at 1,254. Essentially flat.

Read that sequence carefully and the story writes itself. Sisters did not add rental supply in August. It failed to clear the supply it already had. Five listings came off the market, most likely leased or withdrawn, but the ones that remained kept aging. A falling listing count paired with rising days on market is inventory getting older, not inventory getting absorbed.

Our working explanation is the fire. The Akawa Butte Fire ran from July 16 through early August, burned about 27,500 acres northeast of town, put large parts of north and west Sisters under evacuation notices, and effectively froze the leasing window during the two weeks that are normally the busiest of the Sisters year. Houses that would have leased in late July sat. By September they were 100-plus days old, and 114-day-old listings do not command the rent they asked for in July. That is the mechanism behind the $100 dip, and it is a better explanation than any sudden change in what Sisters renters can afford.

For context, houses in Bend averaged 48 days on market on the same September 1 pull and Redmond averaged 51. Bend and Redmond both added marketed supply in August, with inventory-days up 5 percent and 23 percent respectively. Sisters held flat, but only because nothing new arrived while July's listings kept aging.

Why we do not publish a vacancy rate for Sisters

Every month someone asks for the Sisters vacancy percentage, and every month we decline. Here is why, in plain terms.

The best available count of detached rental houses in greater Sisters, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for ZIP 97759, is about 152 homes, with a margin of error of plus or minus 71. The real number could be anywhere from roughly 80 to 220. Divide 11 listings by 152 and you get 7.2 percent. Divide by 220 and you get 5 percent. Divide by 80 and you get nearly 14 percent. Any single percentage we published would be decoration, not measurement, and a landlord who priced off it would be pricing off noise.

We have seen third-party estimates for Sisters single-family vacancy in the 20 to 28 percent range this year. Those figures come from small tracked panels, not from the housing stock, and they should not be used for underwriting. For a market where eleven houses are listed, we report what we can actually count: listings, days on market, and inventory-days. Tracked month over month, those three tell you more about supply pressure than any percentage would.

Where a Sisters house actually competes

The $2,600 average hides a useful shape. Of the 11 houses listed on September 1, six were asking between $2,600 and $2,700. The range ran from a $1,200 floor to a $5,000 ceiling, and those two tails roughly cancel each other out, which is why, unlike Bend or Redmond, the Sisters average is a usable pricing anchor rather than a number inflated by luxury listings.

A standard three-bedroom house in Sisters is competing in the $2,400 to $2,900 band. If you are pricing at $2,600 to $2,700 you are in the thick of the cluster with five other houses, so condition, yard, and pet policy decide who leases first. Above $2,900 you are competing with the $5,000 listing for a very thin pool of qualified renters.

What sitting tenants actually pay

Asking rent is the leading edge. In-place rent, meaning what tenants under existing leases are paying, is the base, and we track it from an internal panel of managed homes across the Central Oregon market. Sisters in-place rent sat at about $2,440 in the most recent June read, essentially flat month over month. That is almost exactly where Redmond's in-place figure sits, around $2,420, and well below Bend's roughly $2,900.

So the Sisters premium over Redmond shows up in asking rents, at $100 to $200, but has not shown up in signed leases. The gap between what Sisters landlords ask ($2,600) and what sitting tenants pay ($2,440) is about $160, or 6.6 percent. That is a modest turnover upside, not a large one. A tenant who leaves over a $160 increase and takes 114 days to replace costs you far more than the raise was worth.

How long tenants stay

There is no direct measure of single-family tenancy length in Sisters, and we are not going to invent one. The multifamily retention proxies we have seen this year run from the high 60s to mid 70s percent, which would imply average tenancies of three to four years. We use three years as a working floor for houses and would not underwrite anything longer.

The reason for caution is a counter-signal in the Census data: about 24 percent of Sisters residents moved in the prior year, compared to roughly 14 percent for the Bend metro. Sisters may turn over faster than the region, not slower, driven by second-home churn and workforce that follows jobs to Bend and Redmond. Retention figures above 75 percent, and implied tenancies above four years, have shown up in some third-party data this year. We do not consider them credible for a town with this mobility profile.

The apartment side of Sisters

Sisters is often described as having no apartments. That is wrong. Buildings with five to nine units are the single largest rental category in greater Sisters at about 171 units, more than the detached houses, and what happens there sets the floor under the whole market.

Directionally, apartment rents in Sisters are drifting down. Our panel shows in-place apartment rents around $1,780, off roughly 1.5 percent over the trailing year, with asking rents down closer to 4.7 percent. Operators are discounting to fill units. We treat panel figures as direction only, not as a monthly signal, because the tracked sample shifts from pull to pull.

What Sisters does not have is the apartment delivery wave that is pressing on Bend. Deschutes County permitted roughly 1,300 multifamily units over the trailing twelve months and nearly all of them are in Bend and Redmond, where large complexes are in lease-up and operators are cutting rate. Bend's large-complex apartment average sits near $1,920 and is barely moving year over year. Sisters' only delivery of any size is Trinity Place, the 40-unit workforce project framed as of mid-August and on track to lease in spring 2027. Forty units is about 8 percent of all renter households in greater Sisters arriving in one building, restricted to households at 60 to 80 percent of area median income. It will not compete with a $2,700 house directly. It will compete hard with a tired $2,300 house, and it is one more reason the bottom of the Sisters house market is under more pressure than the top.

The house premium over apartments

A Sisters house at $2,600 asks roughly $820 a month more than a Sisters apartment at $1,780, a premium of about 46 percent. Two cautions on that number. The apartment figure is an in-place rent, since no reliable asking-rent level exists for Sisters apartments, so the true asking-to-asking premium is probably a bit narrower. And Bend's house premium runs 55 to 75 percent, so Sisters houses are priced closer to their apartment alternative than Bend houses are.

That matters because the trade-down is live. A renter weighing a $2,600 house against a $1,800 apartment is looking at about $800 a month, or nearly $10,000 a year. That spread caps how far house rents can rise before the household takes the apartment, and it is part of why Sisters house rents stalled in 2025 and slipped in 2026 even as the town kept attracting higher-income movers.

Who rents a Sisters house

No public source measures Sisters house renters directly, so what follows is arithmetic, not a survey. At a three-times-rent screen, a $2,600 house requires about $94,000 of household income. At the 30 percent rent-burden line it requires about $104,000. Sisters' median household income, all households including owners, is about $94,500. Renter households earn less than the overall median almost everywhere, so the typical Sisters renter is at or below the line a $2,600 house requires.

The people moving to Sisters skew the other way. Our market-estimate data shows inbound households earning roughly a third more than outbound households, around $134,000 against $100,000, with most of the movement being intra-metro reshuffling to and from Bend. The samples are small and we treat this as directional. But it describes a house-renter pool that is thin, affluent, and mobile: dual-income professionals in transition, many of whom will buy within two or three years. That is a good tenant who pays on time and a hard tenant to keep past one renewal, which is exactly what the mobility figure above says.

The for-sale snapshot

The for-sale market is the other half of every Sisters rental decision, and we now track it every month. Redfin puts the Sisters median sale price at about $647,000 over the three months ending May, down 10.4 percent year over year, with homes selling in about 45 days versus 27 a year earlier. Zillow's home-value index reads higher at roughly $797,000 and is down 5.2 percent. Depending on the source, Sisters prices are off somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, and days to sell have roughly doubled. Active detached inventory against the recent closing pace works out to roughly 3.8 months of supply, which is balanced and tilting toward buyers, not the tight seller's market Central Oregon ran through 2022.

That pulls two ways. Softer prices tempt some renters toward buying, and the affluent, mobile house-renter pool described above is exactly the group that can. But at today's rates, owning the median Sisters house still costs roughly $1,000 to $1,500 a month more than renting one, and that gap keeps the rental case intact for now. Watch months of inventory pushing past six; that is where the buy-versus-rent math starts to bite.

The accidental-landlord read that is showing up in Bend and Redmond, where sellers who cannot get their price list the house for rent instead, is muted in Sisters so far. The listing count fell in August rather than rose. If sale days on market keep stretching into the fall, expect a few of those homes to appear on the rental side by winter.

The bigger supply story in Sisters is not construction at all. Sisters permitted 56 detached homes in the trailing twelve months, and 28 of those recorded in a single month as one subdivision phase. Meanwhile greater Sisters holds about 1,702 seasonal and recreational homes, second homes and short-term rentals, against roughly 152 long-term detached rental houses. That is an eleven-to-one ratio. If just 5 percent of those seasonal homes converted to long-term rental, roughly 85 houses, the detached rental stock would grow by more than half. No permit count can do that. A soft short-term-rental season or a change in the city's 500-foot STR separation rule can.

Bonus metric: the insurance bill arrived before the rent did

The cost line moving fastest for Sisters landlords right now is not maintenance, taxes, or vacancy. It is insurance.

On July 31, while the Akawa Butte Fire was still burning, Oregon's Division of Financial Regulation issued an emergency order requiring every property and casualty insurer in the state to pause cancellations and non-renewals and extend payment deadlines for policyholders in ZIP codes under evacuation notice. That order protected Sisters owners through the fire. It did not change the underlying trend, and it will expire.

The precedent for that trend is already on the record. In early 2025, roughly 200 households in the Camp Polk area north of Sisters received non-renewal notices from one national carrier that chose to limit its wildfire exposure. Replacement coverage for some of those owners came in at roughly double the premium, and one of the town's three insurance agencies closed as a result. That was before this summer's fire put Sisters in a governor's press release. Carriers price on parcel-level risk maps now, and a 27,000-acre fire inside the county is exactly the kind of event that moves those maps.

For a rental owner this is actionable in the next thirty days rather than the next lease cycle. If your policy renews this fall, get quotes from an independent agency now, before the emergency order lapses, and do not default to the Oregon FAIR Plan without shopping first. Document any home-hardening you have done. Since April 1, 2026, all new construction in Sisters and unincorporated Deschutes County must meet the state's wildfire-hardening code, ORSC R327, at a cost of roughly $2,500 to $3,000 per home. Existing homes with ember-resistant vents and defensible space are increasingly getting credit for it, and that documentation belongs in your file. If you are buying, bind coverage before you remove contingencies. We have watched Sisters sales fall through twice on insurance alone.

Two smaller items for the radar. Oregon's Department of Administrative Services will publish the 2027 statewide rent increase cap by September 30; the 2026 cap is 9.5 percent and nothing in Sisters is close to testing it. And the rental registration fee that Bend City Council advanced in August applies to Bend only. Sisters has no equivalent on the table.

The economy underneath all of it

Deschutes County unemployment held at 4.8 percent in July, a tenth below a year earlier and half a point under the Oregon rate, with about 107,000 people employed countywide, up a modest 0.2 percent year over year. Those are county figures, and roughly eighty percent of the county is Bend, so read them as the regional backdrop rather than a Sisters reading. What they say is that demand is not the problem. Nobody is losing a job and giving up a Sisters house. The ceiling is income relative to rent, not employment, and that ceiling has not moved.

Why this matters for Sisters landlords and investors

Put the whole picture together and Sisters in August 2026 is a market where demand is adequate, pricing has found its ceiling, and costs are the thing moving against you.

The demand side is fine. In-place rents are holding at about $2,440, a renter base that earns roughly the town median can just about qualify at $2,600, and the for-sale market is not yet cheap enough to pull those renters into ownership. The pricing side has stalled. Asking rents are down 7 percent from a year ago, the affordability ceiling has not moved, apartment operators a few blocks away are discounting, and the house-over-apartment premium is already thinner than Bend's. The supply side is a coin with two faces: almost no new houses are being built, but a small shift in how second-home owners use their properties could add more rental supply in a year than a decade of permits. And the cost side just took a real hit that has nothing to do with rent.

What that means in practice is simple. Hold your existing tenants. A $100 to $160 increase at renewal is defensible against the comps; a vacancy that runs 114 days is not. Price at the cluster, $2,600 to $2,700 for a standard house, and win on condition. Do not underwrite a Sisters purchase on more than three years of average tenancy or on any vacancy percentage anyone quotes you. And treat your insurance renewal as the most important document you will handle this fall.

Your playbook for this month