With winter settling in over a cold residential real estate market, some Central Oregon builders are rolling out the deals to get something — anything — to move.

Oikos Homes will pay your mortgage interest for six months if you buy one of their empty homes on Empire Boulevard. The starting price: $355,000. Mountain Crest Homes will give you $50,000 in home furnishings if you take one of their townhomes on The Bluffs at the Old Mill off their hands, for $699,000 or more.

And Woodhill Homes, a builder of multiple subdivisions in the region is, in effect, partially converting itself into a landlord for the winter to keep its cash flows moving.

Woodhill has enrolled four buyer-renters into its lease-to-own option, a deal that lets buyers take up to two years to convert a leased home into a full sale in exchange for a small down payment, co-owner Jay Campbell said. It has contracted with a property manager to help take care of the 12 to 14 unsold houses that are now in its rental pool in the four subdivisions it’s building in Bend and Redmond.

The builder will probably sell 50 homes this year, Campbell estimated, but that’s only about half of its early year target. Meanwhile, with its construction pace pared to the minimum, the rents and lease-to-owns help keep the bills paid.

“We are in the business of buying and selling homes, but this is what we have to do today in order to see tomorrow,” Campbell said.

Woodhill isn’t the only builder trying to navigate through a frigid sales environment. Sales of single-family homes on an acre or less were down 27 percent through the third quarter of this year in Bend, compared with the same time last year, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors.

In Redmond, the volume plunged 48.3 percent.

In dollar amounts, the downdraft has been sizable. In Bend, $522 million worth of new and existing homes sold through the third quarter of this year, down $156.3 million from the peak of the boom in 2006. In Redmond, sales are down $95.9 million, 44.4 percent off the 2006 peak.

Meanwhile, with an overhang of unsold homes that would take about a year to clear off at current sales rates, buyers are in the driver’s seat.

Which has been a godsend to Eric and Dianna Jonsson.

Several years ago, when the Jonsson family lived in Dallas, Ore., Eric Jonsson, a veteran of the first Gulf War, inexplicably started bleeding from the ears and nose. About $115,000 in medical bills later, the family was bankrupt.

Jonsson, 43, moved his tile business to Central Oregon in 2004, and the family has been slowly rebuilding its finances ever since, trying to repair their credit history car loan by car loan while renting houses and hoping for the best.

Last November, he said, he spotted an ad for Woodhill’s lease-to-own program. He and his wife put $7,000 down on one of the company’s $295,000, 2,250-square-foot Redmond houses and agreed to pay $1,450 per month on a lease for up to two years. If they convert the lease agreement into a sale, $250 per month of their payments, along with the $7,000, will be credited against the sale price at closing.

Jonsson said his family loves the house — it’s roomier than any of their rentals, and the wood floors, slate-tiled fireplace and well-appointed bathrooms are all the couple and their pair of teenage children need.

He likes what the arrangement has done for his credit, too. He said mortgage brokers have told him that building a track record of making regular payments on a house he already occupies will likely clear his way to a loan approval once he’s ready to close on the deal, despite the bankruptcy.

Jonsson said he hopes to close on a loan by the end of the year. By that time, he figures, the monthly payment credits will add up to around $3,000 to add to the $7,000 he’s already put down. His mortgage brokers figure they can get his monthly payments, including taxes, down to about what he’s paying now on Woodhill’s lease.

“You wouldn’t think somebody who had declared bankruptcy two years ago would be in a house this nice,” he said. “I guess what I would say to people is that there’s hope. Don’t feel like there’s nothing but gloom, and just because something happened to you in life, that you are never going to be able to buy a home and enjoy that part of the American Dream.”

Woodhill is setting its monthly lease-to-own rates about $300 above market rents in their various neighborhoods and crediting buyers for that amount at sale, Campbell said. Lease terms generally give the tenants up to two years to complete a sale. While it’s under lease, Woodhill acts like any other landlord, doing all the maintenance and repairs and paying the property taxes.

Woodhill is looking for ways to “retool” its least-expensive Bend houses in Woodhill Park off Empire Drive in an attempt to kick-start sales with minimum $199,000 prices on their 1,200-square-foot models, down from the $229,000 they’re charging now, says co-owner George Hale. Meanwhile, he and Campbell are trying to keep their building pace down to what they know they can sell.

“If there’s no demand, it’s kind of silly to go out there and keep building homes,” Hale said.

Lease-to-owns give the builders some protection because they can generally keep the occupant’s down payment and extra lease payments if they walk away from the lease before it converts to a sale, said Bill Berger, principal broker at the Bend branch of The Hasson Company Realtors.

But it carries significant risks, too, and not many builders have engaged in it so far in the region.

The tenants could trash the house and move out, leaving the builder with a house that’s been converted from brand-new inventory to second-hand, at best.

Or, their tenants could walk away from the deal if the value of the house declines by more than their down payments are worth — leaving the builders in worse shape than they were at the start.

On the other hand, it beats paying taxes and maintaining upkeep on an empty house through a long, cold winter.

“If they’ve got cash to give to the bank, then that is the upside to it,” Berger said.