Oregon Public Broadcasting

A new Bend-area industry report shows that central Oregon’s rate of commercial building vacancies remains near historic highs.

The Compass Commercial report for the first three months of the year shows 19 percent of local office space is empty.

That’s more than double the rate considered healthy.

Darren Powderly is a broker at Compass Commercial. He says everyone's been talking about the slowdown in commercial real estate as “the next shoe to drop.”

Darren Powderly: “Along with ‘another shoe to drop’, another cliché is ‘the bigger the party the bigger the hangover.' Central Oregon was one of the best real estate success stories in the country, and in some respects this is uncharted waters. But real estate is a cyclical business, so this will work itself out.”

Bend and central Oregon real estate brokers and developers have already dealt with a double whammy: a collapsed housing market and a slowdown in new home construction.

Housing prices are back where they were a decade ago.

And the city of Bend says permits to build just 8 new homes were filed in April. That number was above 800 in August of 2006.