If a house in Bend won’t sell, and renting just won’t deliver enough money, why not turn it into a vacation rental?

People who own Bend homes are doing just that at a rate not seen since Bend city planners started approving properties for vacation-rental status in 2006.

“The amount that you get from a vacation rental is a lot higher than just a month-to-month rental,” said Tabitha Dahl, a Bend real estate broker who secured city approval last month to use her house, built in 1918 on Northwest Riverfront Street, as a vacation rental. She charges $150 per night.

Four people Dahl knows on Riverfront Street have done the same thing, she said.

The Old Bend Neighborhood, where Dahl’s house is located,is a short walk from breweries and other attractions in downtown Bend, and visitors can end river floating trips right behind the house, which is about three blocks south of Northwest Galveston Avenue, Dahl said.

Other property owners seem to be on the same wavelength. Of the 29 homes people proposed as vacation rentals in Bend between January and July of this year, more than half were on, or within, three or so blocks of the Deschutes River.

Twenty-seven of the 29 were on Bend’s west side, and 22 were in the northwest quadrant.

The city counts 156 existing vacation rentals to date, Nita Williams, an employee in the city’s finance department, wrote in an email.

A home must meet certain requirements for a planner to give it the OK, according to the Bend Development Code.

Prior to approval, it must have one off-street parking space per bedroom and be registered to pay transient room taxes.

Once approved, no more than two people per bedroom plus two other people may stay in a vacation rental at any given time. It must maintain a guest logbook. And customers may not use tents, travel trailers or recreational vehicles in association with a vacation rental.

Applying costs $429.48, excluding additional fees, according to a city price list.

Vacation rentals are on the rise around Oregon. More have opened every year on average since 2006, with 825 in the third quarter of last year, according to a May report from the state Department of Revenue. Lodging providers must pay a 1 percent state lodging tax, in addition to any local transient lodging tax, according to the Revenue Department.

With more vacation rentals becoming available in Bend, more people are staying in them. The percentage of tourists renting houses and condominiums went up from 17 percent of all lodging properties to 24 percent from 2009 to 2012, Visit Bend President and CEO Doug La Placa wrote in an email.

Aaron Henson, a senior planner for the city, has an explanation for the bump he’s seen in vacation-rental applications.

“In 2006, 2007, when the requirement was new, there probably weren’t a whole lot of people aware of the requirement,” Henson said. “In 2008, 2009, 2010, there were a lot of people losing homes (to) foreclosure, so there were some local and out-of-town investor types that were snapping up homes that are suitable for vacation rentals at good prices and cleaning them up and getting them ready for that type of use. And then now, we’re seeing kind of the fruits of that.”

Greg Sweet didn’t purchase the home on Northwest Milwaukee Avenue that he turned into a vacation rental in June. He’d built it himself, and he wasn’t getting many good offers to buy.

“We just decided it might be kind of neat to try it, so we did,” Sweet said.

Since he started advertising it on a vacation-rental website, it’s been full about 75 percent of the time, attracting guests from Willamette Valley cities and even Canada. But, depending on how things go in the coming months, Sweet might do something else with the property.

“If it’s just dead all winter, we’re not going to be doing it next year, because there’s a lot of overhead,” he said.