One of Bend’s largest employers is eyeing an expansion into La Pine.

iSKY, a customer service call center with more than 500 employees in its Bend office, is looking for space in the La Pine area, hoping to tap a new labor source in the Central Oregon region and to retain more La Pine-area workers currently making the 32-mile commute to Bend, Brian Smith, the company’s senior vice president of operations, said Monday.

The Bend site will maintain its current employment level, Smith said.

The company is still studying the La Pine market to determine how large an employment pool its population will support, Smith said. It also is still searching for a building. ”That will probably be more clear to us in the next 60 or 90 days,” Smith said. ”Then within six months we will see some moves made.”

iSKY is expanding its other two North American call centers in Montreal and Laurel, Md., from about 30 to 40 seats apiece to about 100 seats apiece, Smith said. Bend, its largest center, has about 300 seats, including some that handle multiple shifts.

iSKY’s parent company, TRG Holdings LLC, a privately held business capital group based in Washington, D.C., owns several call center businesses worldwide, Smith said.

Most were recently consolidated to trim costs and streamline operations, but iSKY will continue to stand alone ”to concentrate on high-end customer care.”

The Bend branch handles outsourced customer service phone work for a variety of businesses, including car companies, like BMW, that use follow-up calls to track customer experiences with their products and their dealerships, and financial services companies specializing in loans to small businesses, Smith said. A 2004 company press release listed American Express, BMW, Honda, Owens Corning and Sotheby’s among its clients.

Jobs in Bend start at $10.15 to $11.15 per hour, after a short training period, recruiting manager Bonnie Points said.

The jobs tend to appeal to workers between the ages of 25 and 45, with Internet skills and at least a high school education, Smith said. About 60 percent of the Bend office’s employees are female.

According to the 2000 Census, about 92 percent of La Pine’s 3,500 workers reported commuting an average of 30 minutes to their jobs, said Lee Smith, general manager of the La Pine Industrial Group, an organization that manages local industrial parks. Most of the 50 or so businesses that have located in La Pine’s Newberry Business Park are small construction-related businesses that want a local presence outside Bend, Smith said. Some are simply local businesses that have been lured out of their home offices.

A business that provides fresh jobs, particularly for spouses of primary workers who don’t want to commute, could find a relatively rich labor market, Smith said.

”We don’t have the high-end executive types or anything, but it’s a good, solid work force,” Smith said.” It’s a pretty good untapped labor pool for something like a call center.”

iSKY was the ninth largest private employer in Central Oregon in 2006, virtually tied with Bend Memorial Clinic and with T-Mobile’s call center in Redmond, according to Economic Development for Central Oregon.