Bend Premier Real Estate Blog

If searches on our website are any indication of the market, potential home buyers are still looking for deals in Bend real estate.  Almost all home buyers today (over 90%) are spending time on websites like ours searching for real estate.  Over the past 2 weeks, the most popular home searched on our website was a single story 3-bedroom home listed at $239,900.  In fact, 7 of the top 10 searches were for homes under $300,000 with an average price of $289,000.  And the location of these popular homes is Bend except for the most searched property; this home is located in La Pine.  Although the average price of homes searched on our site is almost identical to the national average home price of $289,900, it is understandable that people are looking for a deal when you consider the average home price listed for sale in our Bend MLS in December 2015 was $564,000, and the average sold price $371,000. For more information on home sales tren...

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One of the hot selling items on Amazon.com right now is the St. Joseph Home Seller Statue Kit.  According to tradition that sellers say goes back thousands of years, burying the statue in the yard of your home and saying a prayer to St. Joseph will always bring a quick offer on your home for sale.  But it is important that you bury the statue in the right spot, lest you accidently help your neighbor sell their home quickly, and upside down so St. Joseph will work "extra hard to get out of the ground, and into a safe comfortable home."  Reviews on Amazon.com where this kit is often sold include comments such as "I put this in my front yard and the next day we had an offer on our house," and "My house sold in 2 1/2 hours and had 3 other offers, sight unseen the same night. Enough said!!!!" But, of course, they were also many reviews with the sentiment similar to this seller - "Bought this hoping our house would sell quickly because we were that desperat...

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After many months in the design stage, we are proud to launch our new real estate website today! You can now view our website on your desktop or any mobile device with our fully responsive design, and our state-of-the-art platform allows users quick access to large photos, home amenities, school information, property history, and even taxes and homeowner fees. Some brand new features include a free home evaluation, similar to Zillow's Zestimates, our exclusive "hidden inventory" of homes, a brand new "lifestyle" search, and even a listing of upcoming "open houses." And, of course, we still have all our other great features including our buyer and seller resources.  We certainly hope that your make our new website your primary resource for searching real estate in the Bend area, and that Bend Premie...

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This month Bend Premier Real Estate has taken another major step in minimizing our environmental footprint by converting to "paperless" transactions and implementing "cloud" storage of our many thousands of real estate documents we produce each year. Other green programs include extensive recycling programs, a large number of "virtual" brokers at both our offices, and many of our agents now carry eco-friendly professional designations including Accredited Earth Advantage Brokers and NAR's Green Designation. At Bend Premier we understand and talk green.

When comparing Bend Real Estate trends from 2005 with those of 2015, we are seeing significant increases in home prices, a serious lack of inventory (especially in the lower end), and many homes for sale receiving multiple offers. The MLS Trend report from June 2015 shows that this imbalance of supply/demand in the market has resulted in an increase of about 22% in the average price per square foot of Bend single family homes between 2005 and 2015.

So what is different in the conditions now versus the bubble of 2005/2006? During the Bend housing bubble, lending practices were designed to provide loans to the maximum number of people. No doc loans were common and buyers could even finance their down payment. Buyers often flipped properties they had just closed on as the demand for these properties continued to escalate and values continued to climb. These practices were unsustainable, however, and the crash happened when over extended homeowner...

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