How Redmond Airport Expansion May Shape Home Prices

Pull up three different sites for Redmond's median home price this summer and you'll get three different answers. Redfin says homes sold for a median of $470,000 over the three months ending May 2026, down 10.1% from the year before. Zillow puts the typical home value at $501,307 as of late spring, down 5.6%. A market report built on Realtor.com data lands somewhere else again, with sold prices ranging from $469,619 to $520,000 and a median list price near $554,389. County-level MLS data pegs the May 2026 median at $496,500, down 5.43% from $525,000 in May 2025.

None of these numbers are wrong. They're measuring slightly different things, over slightly different windows, from slightly different pools of transactions. But if you're comparing Redmond to Bend right now and trying to decide what the market is actually telling you, that spread matters less than a bigger contradiction sitting sixteen miles from downtown: while every one of those price trackers shows Redmond softening, Redmond Municipal Airport is in the middle of a $180 million construction project built on the bet that this region keeps growing for another decade.

What a falling median actually measures

The instinct when you see a median price drop 5 to 10 percent is to assume homes are losing value. In Redmond right now, that's only part of the story.

Price per square foot in Redmond sits at $304, down just 1.5% year over year, a fraction of the drop showing up in the median. That gap between a fast-falling median and a nearly flat price per square foot is a tell. It usually means the mix of what's selling has shifted toward smaller or lower-priced properties, not that comparable homes are worth meaningfully less than they were a year ago. Add in inventory: active listings were up close to 30% year over year as of June 2026, with roughly 573 homes on the market, a real release of supply after several years where Redmond simply didn't have enough listings to meet demand. More entry-level and mid-market homes changing hands pulls the median down even while the value of any given three-bedroom on a quarter acre holds fairly steady.

Here's how the same market read differently depending on the source, for the record:

Absorption rate, a measure of how many months it would take to sell through current inventory at the current sales pace, rose to 4.82 months in May 2026, up from 4.01 months a year earlier. That's a market moving from tight to balanced, not one falling out from under itself.

A bond market's read on where this goes

Whatever the median is doing month to month, the airport authority made a much longer bet. Redmond Municipal Airport served 1.2 million passengers in 2024 and is projected to top 1.7 million by 2036, a forecast that extends nearly a decade past the terminal's own completion date. Passenger counts have already more than doubled over the past ten years, which is the pressure the current $180 million project is meant to relieve.

The funding structure is worth a second look. The project draws on $90 million in bonds and airport revenue, $45 million in federal funding, $35 million in airport cash, and $10 million in additional grants, with bond repayment backed by airport-generated revenue rather than local property taxes. That distinction matters. It means the people underwriting this project are betting specifically on continued passenger growth at RDM, not on the general credit of Deschutes County taxpayers. Two more federal contributions landed this year alone: $3.8 million from the FAA in February and another $3.5 million announced by Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Representative Janelle Bynum shortly after.

Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang, who sits on Redmond's airport committee, put it plainly to The Bulletin when construction broke ground:

"If we've learned anything from watching the airport over the last 20 years, it's probably just going to keep growing."

What's landing this year, not in a projection

Some of this is already visible on the ground, not just in a forecast. This month, gates 6, 7, and 8 closed as crews build a temporary underground tunnel to keep baggage moving during construction, with departing passengers from those gates rerouted through Door 4 along a marked outdoor path. Airport Director Zachary Bass said the tunnel is essential to keep operations running while the terminal expands around them.

The building itself topped out in July 2026, using mass timber in the roof and ceiling structure with a glulam beam supplied by TimberLab, built by Skanska and designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects and RS&H. When it opens, expected in late 2027 with full construction wrapping into early 2028, it adds a new second-level concourse, seven boarding bridges, and roughly double the current seating.

The route map is already shifting ahead of that opening. Breeze Airways began nonstop service to Las Vegas in March 2026. United added daily nonstop flights to Chicago O'Hare and Santa Barbara. Dallas and Burbank service arrived in the past couple of years as well. And the terminal's food and beverage program, awarded to Tailwind Hospitality, will bring Sisters Coffee, Bend Brewing Company, Sparrow Bakery, and Peet's Coffee & Tea into the new concourse when it opens.

There's a bit of history worth knowing here too. Bend and Redmond once wouldn't even agree on a shared airfield between the two cities, and Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch still needles the industry a little for the old habit of calling it "Bend-Redmond," which he called "a little annoying." Redmond built and named its own airport, and it's the one now absorbing the investment.

The Bend gap, and why it may not hold at this size

The reason most buyers look at Redmond in the first place is price. On Redfin's closed-sale data, Redmond's median runs $469,619 against Bend's $704,114, Sisters at $647,113, and Prineville at $412,253. Redmond sits roughly a third below Bend, which has been the core of its pitch to buyers for years.

That gap was priced on today's airport, today's terminal, today's seating and gate count. Once the new concourse opens with double the capacity and a broader route map, one of the underlying differences between living in Redmond and living in Bend, ease of getting in and out by air, starts to shrink. Nobody can promise how buyers will price that shift once it's fully realized, but the historical logic is straightforward: a meaningful piece of any location's price gap tends to reflect convenience, and convenience is exactly what a $180 million terminal is built to change.

What this means if you're weighing Redmond against Bend right now

A softening median and rising inventory usually read as a buyer's market, and in the near term, that's a fair description of Redmond. Days on market have actually improved even with more supply on the market, sitting at their lowest level since 2022 by some measures, which suggests well-priced homes are still moving efficiently even as the headline price cools.

The harder question is what happens once the terminal opens and the route map matures. Nobody can time that with precision, and a home purchase shouldn't be made on a construction schedule alone. But if you're comparing what a dollar buys in Redmond against what it buys in Bend, it's worth knowing that comparison is happening in a window before the region's biggest piece of new infrastructure has finished landing, not after.

A few questions that come up often

Does Redmond's falling median mean homes here are worth less than last year? Not necessarily. Price per square foot has moved much less than the median, which points to more lower-priced homes selling rather than a broad decline in value for comparable properties.

When does the new terminal actually open? The airport's own materials target late 2027 for the new terminal, with construction reporting pointing to full completion in early 2028.

Is Redmond still meaningfully cheaper than Bend? Yes. On recent closed-sale data, Redmond runs close to a third below Bend's median, though that gap is worth watching as airport capacity and connectivity change over the next couple of years.

If you're trying to make sense of what Redmond's numbers mean for your specific timeline, whether you're comparing it to Bend, weighing a move now against waiting, or trying to figure out what a given listing is actually worth in this market, Erica Callfas can walk through the specifics with you. Let's Connect.