Sisters Rental Market: September 2026

Sisters Oregon Rental Market Report · September 2026

Monthly market report from Legacy Property Management

The Bottom Line: The typical Sisters house asked $2,700 a month in September 2026, up $100 from August and $100 from a year ago. Rents on existing house leases held near $2,590, so landlords are asking only about 4% more than current tenants pay. Zillow's October average of $3,900 is not a rent spike. The houses priced near the local norm leased, and the expensive ones are what's left, sitting an average of 84 days.

For small landlords the playbook is simple: price vacancies to what houses lease for, not what they list for, lock in renewals now with modest increases, and with mortgage rates at 7.4%, hold what you own rather than buy on leverage.

Sisters Rental Market September 2026: Rents Back at $2,700

The Sisters rental market in September 2026 bounced back from a soft August. The average house asked about $2,700, up 3.8% from August's $2,600 and up the same 3.8% from September 2025. In our August Sisters report we flagged an early $2,700 reading as one landlord's pricing decision rather than a trend. The full September chart point landed at $2,700, so the bounce held, but it only recovers August's dip. Rents have spent most of 2026 moving inside a band between roughly $2,500 and $2,800.

Because Sisters is a small market, we only treat a move as a signal when a second measure agrees with it. This month two of three do. Rents rose and the average listing spent less time on the market, while the number of houses for rent went up. That makes September's gain real but modest. Zillow's broader rent index for Sisters, which tracks the same homes over time across all rental types, has barely moved since February, staying within about 1% the whole way. Same-home rents in Sisters are flat, not climbing.

Watch the seasonal pattern. Last year Sisters house rents fell nearly 10% between August and October before snapping back in November. If 2026 follows the same path, the next two months are the weakest window of the year to bring a vacant house to market.

Why Zillow Says $3,900

If you looked up Sisters rents in early October, you saw an average of $3,900, up $1,200 in a month. That number describes which houses happen to be listed, not what rent is doing. On September 1, six of the 11 listed houses were asking between $2,600 and $2,700. By October 5 most of those were off the market. Only about one in five listings now sits in the $2,400 to $2,700 range, while more than half ask $3,400 or more, and one asks $12,500.

Put plainly, the right-priced houses are leasing and the upper tier is waiting. Even with the $12,500 listing removed, the October average would still sit near $3,300. That gap between the listing pool and the leasing pool is the most useful thing in this month's data for anyone pricing a vacancy.

Supply: More Houses, a Shorter Clock, the Same Total

On October 5, 15 houses were listed for rent around Sisters, up from 11 on September 1. Current listings have been on the market an average of 84 days, down from 114, the longest we had recorded. Those two numbers move in opposite directions for the same reason: new listings arrived and reset the average clock while some of August's long-sitting houses finally leased or came off the market.

The cleanest way to read it is inventory-days, which multiplies the number of houses listed by how long they have been sitting. That figure was 1,260 on October 5 against 1,254 a month earlier, essentially unchanged. Supply turned over this month; it did not grow.

We do not publish a vacancy percentage for Sisters. The town's rental stock is small enough that any estimate would carry more error than signal, and Zillow's Sisters search reaches past city limits. Listings and days on market are the honest gauges, and right now they say the market is not tight at the top end. An 84-day average is far longer than Bend or Redmond.

What Sisters Tenants Actually Pay

Rent on existing house leases, the in-place rent tenants are paying today, averaged about $2,590 in early September across the 50 Sisters houses we track, essentially unchanged from August. That is higher than the roughly $2,440 we cited in August because we tightened the measure: it now covers detached houses only, where the August figure mixed in other rental types. On the new basis, August and September are the same. Three-bedroom houses, which make up most of the market, averaged about $2,590 as well, up only a fraction of a percent since June. With asking rents at $2,700, the gap between what landlords ask and what current tenants pay is about 4%. That leaves little built-in upside when a house turns over. Across the wider Bend metro, new house leases this summer still came in roughly 8% above the previous tenant's rent, so an older Sisters lease that hasn't been adjusted in a while may have more room than a recent one.

Who Can Afford a Sisters House

A $2,700 rent is roughly a third of the median household income in Sisters, which Census data puts near $94,500. The median renter household around Sisters earns closer to $44,000, which means most existing renters cannot step up into a single-family lease. A $2,700 house needs a household earning roughly $97,000 to $108,000 a year, depending on whether the landlord screens at three times rent or 30% of income.

That puts house demand squarely on newcomers. Sisters grew about 1.9% in the year to July 2025, the fastest of the three Central Oregon cities, according to Portland State University's population estimates. People moving in earn a median of roughly $109,000, only slightly more than the people moving out, and nearly four in ten residents are 65 or older. Demand is steady, but it is not getting richer, which is why rents have hit a ceiling rather than a floor.

How Long Tenants Stay

Sisters tenants stay about three years on average. Census data shows about 43% of renter households in the Sisters ZIP code moved in before 2020, and local apartment renewal rates near 69% point to the same three-year rhythm. At today's 84-day average on the market, every turnover can cost close to three months of rent before make-ready costs, so keeping a good tenant is worth more than chasing an extra $100.

Apartments: Full Enough, but Discounting

Sisters apartment rents averaged about $1,765 in the third quarter, down about 2% from the spring and roughly 7% from a year ago. New apartment leases are signing only about 2% above what the previous tenant paid. Apartment owners are keeping units filled by holding rents back, which tells you the lower-income end of the Sisters renter pool is stretched.

The gap between a house and an apartment is now about $935 a month, with houses renting for roughly 53% more. That premium is large enough that some house tenants will trade down if they have to. New supply adds to it: Trinity Place's 40 workforce apartments were framed in August and should begin leasing in spring 2027. Those units compete mainly with apartments, not houses, but they give price-sensitive renters another option.

Bonus Metric: Mortgage Rates Hit 7.40%

The number driving this fall is the mortgage rate. Freddie Mac's 30-year fixed average reached 7.40% on October 8, its seventh straight weekly increase and the highest since November 2023, according to Freddie Mac's weekly survey. It was 6.43% in early July.

For Sisters that has three effects. First, it keeps would-be buyers renting. Owning the median Sisters home, which sold for about $710,000 in the third quarter, now costs roughly $4,590 a month with 20% down, taxes, and basic insurance. That is about $1,890 more than renting the average house. At the start of the quarter, when rates were 6.43%, the same house cost about $4,220 to own and the gap was about $1,520. The rate move alone added roughly $370 a month to the cost of owning and widened the gap by about a quarter in one season.

Second, it makes buying a rental with a loan a losing trade on paper. A $2,700 house on a $710,000 purchase produces a gross yield of about 4.6% before any expenses, well below a 7.4% mortgage. Third, it can push sellers who can't get their price into becoming landlords, which is one plausible source of the upper-tier rental listings now sitting in Sisters.

The For-Sale Market

Sisters home sales held up better than prices. The third-quarter median sale price was about $710,000, down 4.4% from a year earlier but up about 4% from the spring and well off the $650,000 low set at the start of the year. Sales rose to 35 for the quarter, compared with 26 a year ago, and homes that sold had been on the market a median of just 11 days, against 35 a year earlier. With 50 houses listed against 118 sales over the past 12 months, inventory sits near five months, a balanced market.

Momentum faded late in the quarter. July closed 19 sales, and the homes that sold had been listed about a week. August and September closed only 8 sales each, and the median time on market for sold homes stretched to 35 days and then 57 days. Monthly median prices bounced from $753,000 to $682,000 to $735,000 over those three months. Single-month figures in Sisters swing hard on a handful of sales, so the quarterly numbers are the ones to trust, but the late-quarter slowdown lines up with the climb in mortgage rates.

The Bigger Picture for Sisters Landlords

The regional economy is steady. Deschutes County unemployment was 4.5% in August, below Oregon's 5.1%, though payroll jobs in the Bend metro were up only 0.1% from a year earlier. Population is growing faster than jobs, which keeps rental demand intact but limits how far rents can stretch.

Building is shifting toward houses, and away from Bend itself. Single-family permits across Deschutes County reached 1,600 over the 12 months through August, up 17%, but permits inside the Bend area fell about 13% over the same stretch, so the growth is landing in Redmond and the smaller towns. Apartment permits countywide slipped about 8% and slowed sharply this summer. Most new houses are built for sale, not rent. In Sisters the bigger supply risk is conversion: the Sisters ZIP code holds roughly 1,700 seasonal and vacation homes against about 520 renter households, and short-term rental listings around town have grown over the past year while revenue per listing has gone flat. If even a small share of those owners switch to long-term leases, Sisters house supply could rise quickly.

Insurance remains the cost to watch. The Akawa Butte Fire, started by lightning on July 16, burned about 27,000 acres north of town and destroyed two homes. Oregon's insurance regulator has extended its pause on cancellations and nonrenewals in fire-affected ZIP codes, including Sisters' 97759, through October 29. When a similar wave hit in 2025, about 200 Sisters-area homeowners received nonrenewal notices from one carrier.

On the legal side, Oregon set the 2027 rent increase cap at 10%, up from 9.5% in 2026, with homes first occupied within the past 15 years exempt. In Sisters the cap is not the constraint. The market is.

How Sisters Compares

Sisters sits between its neighbors on price: about $300 above Redmond's $2,398 and $400 below Bend's $3,100. Its listings wait the longest of the three, an average of 84 days against 61 in Redmond and 52 in Bend. Sisters has the strongest population growth of the three but the smallest income gain among newcomers, which is why it behaves like a market with willing tenants and a firm price ceiling.

Sisters Rental Market Q3 2026 in Review

The third quarter was flat where it counts. The average Sisters house asked $2,688 across July, August and September, down 2.8% from the second quarter and essentially even with the third quarter of 2025. The spring figure is inflated by April's thin-sample $3,000 reading. Measured against May and June alone, Q3 asking rents were up about 1.4%. In-place rents on existing leases rose from about $2,490 to $2,590 on paper, but that came from a shift in the mix of two- and four-bedroom homes. For the same mix of homes, they were flat.

Supply loosened over the quarter. Listings grew from 9 at the end of June to 15 in early October, and total marketed supply, measured in inventory-days, rose about a third, much of it during the July fire window. Meanwhile mortgage rates climbed nearly a full point, county unemployment edged down, and apartment permitting in the Bend metro dried up. As always in Sisters, a few percent either way is within normal noise.

Why This Matters for Sisters Landlords

Put the pieces together and Sisters looks like a market with plenty of tenants and very little pricing room. Houses priced near $2,600 to $2,700 lease. Houses priced well above that wait, and there are more of them heading into the slowest season of the year. Rents already take about a third of the typical household's income, newcomers are well-off compared with current renters but no wealthier than the people they replace, and same-home rents haven't moved since winter.

The takeaway: In Sisters, your tenant is worth more than your next rent increase. A three-year tenant at a fair renewal beats an 84-day vacancy every time, and at 7.4% mortgage rates the best investment most local owners can make right now is in keeping the houses they already have full.

The rate story cuts both ways. High rates protect rental demand by keeping buyers renting longer, but they also make new leveraged purchases lose money from day one and may add more owner-landlords to the upper end of the market. For existing owners, that argues for holding, renewing early, and pricing vacancies with discipline.