If you’re looking to add an extra bedroom to your property, building a certain kind of tiny home in Bend just got one step easier.

The city on Thursday announced a program for accessory dwelling units, also known as ADUs, that are built with pre-approved plans. The program offers property owners the option to skip a step of the permitting process if they use the city’s free plug-and-play set of plans instead of going to a designer to get custom plans.

“If somebody wants to use that plan rather than starting from ground zero on a plan of their own with a designer, this plan is available at no charge,” said Kerry Bell, the city’s middle income housing coordinator.

The number of approved permits doubled the year after the city loosened its restrictions in 2016, and over 600 ADUs have been permitted in Bend since then, according to city statistics. But, ADU production is not a cure-all for Central Oregon’s housing shortage. Just under 60 ADUs were completed in 2022 — a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of housing units needed in the city.

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Still, expanding opportunities to build them can be a useful avenue for housing Bend’s growing population of smaller-sized families, said Jesse Russell, CEO of Bend small home developer Hiatus Homes.

“While ADUs are much smaller and really mostly meant for probably one or two people, that’s a good portion of our workforce,” Russell said. “Now, I don’t think this is the complete answer to the housing problems we have in Bend, but it’s certainly one of the solutions that should be incentivized.”

Incentivizing that development by making it cheaper and quicker is precisely the goal behind the pre-approved plans.

“Our goal is to incentivize density and diverse housing types, expedite housing unit production and look for ways to save time and costs through improvements and that’s what the goals are here for the city,” Bell said.

The plans for the one-bedroom unit can’t be changed, other than to choose between two different roof styles.

Bend’s pre-approved ADU option is modeled on a similar program currently in place in Eugene. Like city officials have done there, Bell said the city of Bend hopes to expand the number of pre-approved ADU plans available over time and offer connections to designers and builders with the right experience for a homeowner’s needs.

Eugene has issued seven pre-approved ADU permits since early 2022, all of which have been the free city-designed option that Bend’s pre-approved plans are based on, according to Annie Loe, a Eugene city planner.

To Russell, the pre-approval program could be particularly beneficial right now as interest rates are rising and encourage more people to consider improvements to their property.

“As interest rates go up, the person who is locked in on their mortgage at a low interest rate is less likely to sell their home and buy a new home because they’re gonna have a new rate on that home,” Russell said.

“So there are people that have equity in their home and one way to to increase that equity is to build an ADU in your backyard.”

Russell hopes Hiatus can be a part of future phases of the fast-track program, with the ability to offer the company’s own plans in the city’s set of pre-approved options.

“We want to offer our plans and have them be pre-approved by the city, but, we want to be able to build our own plans because we want to ensure that a customer is getting the quality of build that we can assure by building it,” Russell said.

The plans and more detail about using them are available on the city’s website.