The once white hot Real Estate market in Bend Oregon has cooled enough to make the short list of best values for places to retire.
Taken from Businessweek here is what they had to say about Bend Oregon.
“Central Oregon’s largest city is a onetime timber town that turned to tourism—skiing, camping, hiking, and fishing in the nearby Cascade Mountain Range—for growth. Then, in the late 1990s, Bend became one of those sleepy mountain towns, like Bozeman, Mont., and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, that started popping up on “Best Places to Retire” lists. Construction boomed, the population doubled (to 75,000)—and so did housing prices.
Bend still has everything that made it so livable in the first place, including clean air, views of snow-capped mountains, and a mild climate that keeps it sunny and dry most of the year. But the influx of Californians, which contributed to the real estate boom, has slowed to a trickle. Just 106 single-family homes were sold in September—two-thirds fewer than in the same month in 2005. The town now has a 15-month inventory of homes for sale. “There’s a slump in the market, no question,” says Michael Caba, an appraiser at Bratton Appraisal Group.
The best deals are in high-end homes that developers built on speculation. Bill Berger, who runs the local office of Hasson Company Realtors, has watched the asking price of one new 2,700-square-foot house sink from $579,000 in February to $439,000 now. It has oak floors, a great room with fireplace, and a master bedroom on the first floor with French doors opening to a deck with mountain views. “Prices got too high,” he says. “Now they are coming back to reality.”"
Click here for the full Business Week article
