Sisters Rental Market: Q2 2026

The Bottom Line: Sisters is the smallest and thinnest rental market we cover, and this quarter it handed single-family landlords a short, tight leasing window rather than a durable rent surge. Asking rents ran up hard through spring, peaked near $3,050 in April, then gave most of it back to roughly $2,450 by late June, so the pricing power was real but is already fading. Apartments are leasing in 48 days and the local job market is strengthening, which keeps demand firmly underneath the market. The smart move is to lease into today’s tightness at a grounded price rather than chase the spring peak, protect good long-term tenants, and underwrite 2027 for the 40-plus units of new supply now entering the pipeline. And in a market with only nine active listings, treat any single large swing as a possible sample-size mirage until a second signal confirms it. This is a “lease the window, underwrite the supply” quarter.

Sisters is the smallest rental market we cover, and that is exactly what makes it interesting. A town of roughly 3,000 people does not have a rental “market” in the way Bend does. It has a few hundred tracked units and, on the single-family side, about nine houses listed for rent at any given moment. When a market is that thin, one aggressive listing can swing the average, one project breaking ground can reshape the supply picture, and one quarter of data can tell you more than a year of Bend numbers would.

The thinness is not an accident of the data, it is the town itself. Roughly three in four Sisters households own their home rather than rent, according to U.S. Census Bureau ACS 5-year estimates, well above the Oregon norm, and the median resident is close to 50 years old with nearly 39% of the population aged 65 or over. That is an older, owner-heavy community with a small renter pool sitting on top of about 1,591 total housing units. For a landlord, that demographic shape is the reason a single vacant house moves the averages so much: there simply are not many rental transactions in a given month to average across.

So this quarter, read Sisters less like a spreadsheet and more like a weather report. The pressure is shifting.

Here is what changed from Q1 to Q2, what our own data says versus the public sources, and what a small landlord should actually do about it. This quarterly builds directly on our earlier reads of this small, lifestyle-driven market: our Sisters Q1 2026 quarterly set the baseline, and our April 2026 monthly update flagged the tightening that Q2 has now confirmed.

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The Headline Number Comes With an Asterisk

If you pull up Zillow today, you will see a clean, confident story: the average asking rent for houses in Sisters is $2,800, up $100 month-over-month and $100 year-over-year, as of the June 29 update. On its own, that reads like a market climbing calmly higher.

The problem is that the chart directly beside that number tells a different story, and it is the more honest one. Zillow’s own “rent over time” line shows single-family asking rents climbing hard through the spring to a peak near $3,050 in April, then falling sharply to roughly $2,450 by the end of June. That is not a market gently rising. That is a market that ran up on spring demand and then gave a chunk of it back as the peak leasing season passed.

Both things are technically true. The “+$100” is a snapshot comparison of two single points in time. The falling line is the trend. When they disagree, the trend is what you underwrite around. So the real Q2 read is this: Sisters SFH asking rents spent the quarter high and finished it cooling, ending roughly flat to slightly up from a year ago. The pricing power was real in April. By late June it was fading.

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Why does this matter more in Sisters than it would anywhere else? Because with only nine active listings, the “average” is fragile. The price range on those nine houses runs from $2,325 all the way to $4,000. A couple of high-end homes sitting on the market can prop up the headline number while the typical, rentable, mid-market house is actually leasing for less. That is the gap between what landlords are asking and what tenants are paying, and in a market this small it is wide.

What Tenants Are Actually Paying

Asking rent is the price on the listing. In-place rent is what signed leases actually collect. In Sisters right now, those two numbers are living in different neighborhoods.

Across the broader single-family rental segment (houses, townhomes, and condos, which gives us a bigger and steadier sample than houses alone), in-place rent sat right around $2,420 in Q2, essentially flat from Q1’s $2,418. Meanwhile asking rent on new listings in that same segment jumped from $2,778 to $3,031, a 9.1% quarter-over-quarter increase.

Sit with that split for a second, because it is the most useful thing in this report. Landlords listing new units pushed prices up almost 9% in a single quarter. Tenants signing leases did not move at all. That is the signature of a market where owners are testing ambitious numbers on turnover while the units that actually lease clear at a much more grounded price. Some of that gap is seasonal (spring listings always come in hot), and some of it is the small-sample noise you get from a handful of premium homes. But the direction is clear: the pricing power is on paper more than in the bank.

There is a longer-run version of the same split worth understanding. Census ACS 5-year data puts the median gross rent across all existing Sisters renters at roughly $1,350, while your current single-family listings are asking around $2,800. That is not a contradiction, it is the whole game. The $1,350 figure blends in long-tenured renters, smaller units, and mobile homes (which make up about 8% of Sisters housing stock), and it reflects leases signed years ago under lower rents and Oregon’s renewal cap. The $2,800 is what a house costs a brand-new tenant today. A new single-family tenant in Sisters is effectively paying about double what the existing renter base pays. That gap is exactly why turnover pricing matters so much here and why the rent cap, which governs renewals but not new leases, pushes the economics toward capturing gains when a unit turns rather than through annual increases on a sitting tenant.

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Rent Growth: Strong on Paper, Bounded by Law on Renewals

Put the growth figures side by side and the picture sharpens. On the turnover segment, asking rents grew 9.1% quarter-over-quarter. On the cleaner Zillow houses series, year-over-year growth landed near +3.7%. Those are two different lenses (one is a three-month turnover snapshot, the other a twelve-month view), and both are worth holding in mind.

Here is the practical wrinkle. Oregon’s 2026 rent stabilization cap is 9.5% for the year, applying to annual increases on existing tenancies in buildings 15 years or older. When your turnover asking rents are already brushing up against 9% quarter-over-quarter, the cap starts to matter. It does not limit what you can ask on a vacant unit going to a new tenant. It does limit what you can raise on the family already living there. That divergence, uncapped turnover pricing versus capped renewal pricing, is quietly steering the economics of this market toward capturing gains when a unit turns over rather than through renewal increases.

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Days on Market: The Reliable Tightness Gauge

Because a clean vacancy percentage is not something we can responsibly compute in a market this small (more on that below), days on market becomes the number to trust. And here Sisters is telling a split story between its two housing types.

On the single-family side, homes are taking a while. Zillow pegs the June average at 106 days, and the broader turnover segment actually lengthened from 107 days in Q1 to 118 days in Q2. That is the small-sample effect again: when a few higher-priced, slower-to-lease houses dominate the listing pool, the average time-to-lease stretches out even if underlying demand is fine.

The multifamily side is the opposite. There, days on market compressed from 72 down to 48, a 33% drop in a single quarter. Apartments in Sisters are leasing fast. That divergence is the tell: demand for shelter in Sisters is strong, but it is finding the more affordable multifamily product first and treating the premium-priced single-family listings with more patience.

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Average Tenancy: The Sticky-Tenant Story

We do not have a measured single-family tenancy length for Sisters specifically. What we can anchor to is the multifamily retention rate, which sits at 68% annually, implying an average tenure of roughly 3.1 years. Single-family tenants nationally stay put longer than apartment tenants, often 3.5 to 5 years, so Sisters SFH tenancy plausibly runs north of three years.

For a landlord, that stickiness is the quiet asset in this market. Turnover is expensive: it means vacancy, marketing, make-ready costs, and, in Sisters, a 106-day average re-lease clock. A tenant who stays three-plus years is worth protecting, which loops directly back to the rent-cap point. Pushing a renewal to the legal maximum on a good long-term tenant, in a market where the replacement takes over three months to find, is often the wrong math.

The Bonus Metric: A Permitting Freeze Just Ended

Every quarter one data point drives the narrative underneath everything else. This quarter it is supply, and the story is dramatic.

Sisters recorded zero total housing permits in every single month from January 2023 through October 2025. Thirty-four straight months of nothing. Then the dam broke:

• November 2025: 1 single-family unit
• December 2025: 4 single-family plus 43 multifamily units, driven largely by Trinity Place, a 40-unit workforce apartment community that broke ground March 12, 2026
• April 2026: 5 single-family plus 3 multifamily units

That pushes trailing-12-month permits to roughly 56 units, versus essentially zero a year earlier. For a town of 3,000, that is a large relative supply injection. It will not touch your rent roll this year (Trinity Place, a 40-unit workforce rental community, does not lease until spring 2027), but it absolutely belongs in your 2027 pro forma.

And there is more queued behind it: Sisters Habitat for Humanity’s Larch Commons, a roughly 27-home cottage and townhome development, is in the building stage over the next few years. (Worth noting: Larch Commons units are for sale to income-qualified buyers, not rentals, so they compete for households more than for your tenants directly, but they still pull demand out of the rental pool.)

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The labor market underneath all of this is firming, which supports rental demand. Deschutes County unemployment fell to 4.4% in both April and May 2026, down from a 5.7% January peak and now sitting below the statewide Oregon rate of 4.8%. Employed persons across the county have risen every month this year, and county median household income reached roughly $99,700 in 2024, up from about $95,400 the year before, per FRED and Census data. Sisters itself skews higher-income than the county on paper (median household income near $94,500 at the place level, with the caveat that small-town Census estimates carry wide margins of error), which fits its profile as a lifestyle and second-home destination rather than a workforce-affordable town. A tightening county job market is the demand-side counterweight to the coming supply, and it is part of why apartments are leasing in 48 days.

Why This Matters for Small Landlords

Here is the whole quarter in one thought: Sisters just left a multi-year supply freeze and stepped into a short, tight window before new competitive product arrives, and single-family pricing power is already showing cracks at the top end.

The evidence points the same direction from several angles. Multifamily days on market compressed by a third, apartment occupancy tightened, in-place rents grew, and the local job market strengthened, all landlord-favorable. But single-family asking rents ran up in April and gave much of it back by June, the asking-versus-paying gap is wide, and premium houses are sitting for over 100 days. The demand is real; it is just being disciplined about price on the single-family side.

So the playbook for the next two to three quarters is specific:

1. Price to the middle, not the ceiling. With nine listings spanning $2,325 to $4,000 and a 106-day average lease-up, an aspirational number does not earn a premium, it earns carrying costs. Every extra month a $2,800 house sits empty erases roughly a full month of whatever rent increase you were holding out for. Price it to lease, not to impress.
2. Capture growth at turnover, protect good tenants on renewals. The 9.5% cap binds your renewals but not your vacant-unit pricing. In a market where re-leasing takes three-plus months, a sticky three-year tenant is worth more than a maximized renewal increase. Push rents when a unit turns; be strategic when it renews.
3. Underwrite 2027 for softer conditions. Trinity Place’s 40 units lease in spring 2027, with Larch Commons and further pipeline behind it. That is a meaningful share of Sisters’ entire rental stock arriving in a compressed window. Build your 2027 pro forma with softer occupancy and slower rent growth assumptions baked in, and stress-test it. The landlords who lock in solid tenants at fair rents now, before that supply lands, will be the ones sitting comfortably when it does.

Sisters rewards patience and pricing discipline more than any market we cover. Right now it is handing thoughtful landlords a good window. Use it deliberately.

Legacy Property Management provides investor-focused property management across Central Oregon. Whether you own one Sisters rental or are building a Central Oregon portfolio, we bring the same data-driven, investor-first approach to pricing, leasing, and long-term strategy. Questions about your Sisters, Bend, or Redmond rental? Reach us at [email protected] or (541) 508-5815.