Tree Farm Homes for Sale

Short-term rental potential in Tree Farm varies by HOA rules, community covenants, and Oregon regulations. Ask for the current rental guidelines before you assume what is permitted or what it could earn.

The Tree Farm is a 533-acre neighborhood just west of Bend's city limits, bordered by US Forest Service land and Shevlin Park. It holds fifty homesites of about two acres each, laid out as a cluster development so that more than 400 acres of the property stay open space. Zoning would have allowed larger homesites spread across the whole property; the Miller family chose to cluster them and leave most of the land undeveloped.

The land has a long logging history. Pine mills arrived in Bend in the early 1900s and this property was one of the first logged. Bill Miller bought it in 1955 from a sheep rancher who had owned it since the 1920s, and the Miller family ran it as a working tree farm for six decades, with the last harvest in the 1990s. In 2014 the Millers partnered with Brooks Resources and the partners of West Bend Property Company, the developers of NorthWest Crossing, formed The Tree Farm LLC, and began land use planning.

Land use approval was appealed, and the developers worked with the opponents until the appeal was withdrawn in February 2016. Development of the homesites took six months. Sales opened on October 1, 2016, to a database of more than 1,100 interested buyers; after a single round of bidding, 32 homesites were spoken for, and by the end of 2016 only seven remained. The last homesite sold in October 2017. The developer describes the setting as rural in feel yet close to schools, shops and restaurants.

The neighborhood was built as a Firewise Community from the start. In May 2016 an 82-acre prescribed burn of its open space was carried out with the Deschutes National Forest, the Oregon Department of Forestry and Bend Park and Recreation District. In August 2017, 328 acres of open space on the western part of the property passed through the Trust for Public Land to Bend Park and Recreation District as an expansion of Shevlin Park. A federal Community Forest Grant paid half of the appraised land value and The Tree Farm LLC donated the other half.

Shevlin Park itself has a long public history. It began as 350 acres given to the City of Bend in December 1920, and the park district added land in a series of acquisitions from 1977 through 2017. It now covers 981 acres, of which about 50 are developed, with Aspen Hall and a picnic shelter at Aspen Meadow. Wildfire is part of the story here: in 1990 the Awbrey Hall Fire burned 22 homes on Bend's west side, and Brooks Resources points to it as the reason The Tree Farm's master plan carries landscaping and building material requirements alongside the Firewise program.