Pacific City, OR: An Honest Investment Outlook

What the Price Data Actually Shows -- and Its Real Limits

Two aggregator sources found in this research point to a similar current price level for Pacific City but disagree sharply on the trend behind it. Redfin's most recent trailing-month figure located in this research put the median sale price at $763,000, described as up 55.6% year-over-year; Movoto's separate July 2026 snapshot put the median list price at $755,000. The two land within roughly 1% of each other on absolute level -- a reasonably consistent signal that today's typical Pacific City transaction clusters somewhere in the mid-$700,000s -- but a reported 55.6% single-year increase in a town of 1,109 residents deserves real skepticism as a growth rate rather than acceptance as fact. A market this size closes a genuinely small number of transactions in any twelve-month window; a handful of larger oceanfront, dune-view, or newly built sales landing in one year's trailing window against a prior year with more ordinary, smaller sales can produce a reported median move of 50%-plus without reflecting a townwide doubling in what a typical existing home is actually worth. Treat the 55.6% figure as a real, sourced data point about this specific reporting window -- not as a reliable multi-year appreciation rate to extrapolate forward.

This research did not obtain and does not cite a Pacific City-specific multi-year appreciation percentage, a state-level Oregon home-price index figure, or a national benchmark comparison this session -- Wikipedia, Redfin's own primary pages, and other sources that would normally anchor that kind of longer-run comparison were blocked by this session's network egress policy, and this page states that gap plainly rather than substituting a number from a different market or a different year to fill it.

Rental Income: A Real, Dated Regulatory Fact Should Drive the Underwriting

Pacific City has a genuine, decades-deep vacation-rental identity -- it's a beach-and-dune day-trip and weekend destination within reach of Portland, and its housing stock reflects that history. But the single most important, current fact for anyone underwriting a Pacific City purchase on assumed short-term-rental income is a specific county decision, not a general assumption: on January 9, 2025, the Tillamook County Board of Commissioners created an STR cap-exemption zone covering the developed core of Pacific City -- from the Nestucca River to the ocean, and from Alder Street south to Bob Straub State Park. Properties inside that zone are no longer subject to the countywide licensing cap; 236 of the community's 326 existing licenses, plus 18 of 28 waitlisted applications, already sat inside that zone when it was drawn. Outside that specific boundary, the rest of Pacific City/Woods is capped at 95 total licenses under the county's broader 2023 ordinance, which had limited STR growth in unincorporated areas to roughly 1% above the count already licensed at adoption.

The practical investment implication is direct and address-specific: a parcel inside the January 2025 exemption zone faces a meaningfully more open path to STR licensing than a parcel just outside it, where a buyer may be relying on an existing license transferring with the sale, or entering a waitlist, rather than assuming a new license is freely available. This research did not confirm current license transferability rules (whether an STR license runs with the property at sale or must be reapplied for), the current license fee or renewal cost, or the current transient lodging tax rate specific to unincorporated Tillamook County -- all of which should be confirmed directly with Tillamook County Community Development, and specifically for the parcel in question relative to the exemption-zone boundary, before underwriting any rental-income projection. Anyone treating STR income as a given anywhere in Pacific City without first locating the property relative to that January 2025 zone line is underwriting on an assumption this page cannot support.

What Draws Both Owner-Occupants and Renters Here

The demand case for Pacific City rests on a small number of real, specific draws rather than a generic "beach town" pitch: the Cape Kiwanda dory fleet, a working fishery that still launches directly off the open sand -- a genuinely rare, watchable spectacle that functions as a real tourist draw with essentially no marketing spend behind it; Cape Kiwanda's own offshore Haystack Rock and its towering dune, distinct from (and per several coastal-guide comparisons, taller than) Cannon Beach's better-known namesake, giving the town a landmark that doesn't require competing head-on with a more famous neighbor; and Pelican Brewing's original 1996 oceanfront brewpub, a genuinely award-winning destination brewery (450-plus awards, a 2014 World Beer Cup Champion Small Brewing Company title) that predates and outlasts most craft-beer tourism trends. Those are real, durable, non-generic reasons demand exists here, distinct from simply being "another Oregon coast town."

Risk Factors Worth Weighing Before Timing a Purchase

Three real factors are worth naming plainly. First, market thinness itself is a risk, not just a data-quality caveat: a town of 1,109 residents with a correspondingly small number of annual closed sales means both entry and exit pricing can be harder to benchmark confidently than in a larger market, and a seller may face a genuinely thinner buyer pool and longer marketing time than the headline price data alone would suggest. Second, seismic and tsunami exposure is real and specifically mapped here, not generic disclaimer language: Pacific City sits above the offshore Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) publishes a dedicated "Beat the Wave" tsunami evacuation brochure specifically for this town, distinguishing a more common distant-source tsunami zone from a more severe local Cascadia-source zone -- a buyer should know a specific parcel's inundation-zone status, particularly for anything near Bob Straub State Park and the low-lying Nestucca Spit, before closing, not after. Third, the regulatory environment for rental income is demonstrably capable of changing on a county timeline that a buyer doesn't control: the STR rules governing this exact market moved twice in roughly eighteen months (the 2023 countywide cap, then the January 2025 Pacific City-specific exemption zone), and a buyer underwriting a purchase on current rules should treat the possibility of a further county-level change -- in either a more permissive or more restrictive direction -- as a real, live variable rather than a settled backdrop.

None of these three factors is a reason to avoid the market outright, and none of them is unique to Pacific City in kind -- Cascadia risk runs the length of the Oregon coast, and STR-rule volatility is common wherever county commissioners, rather than a fixed state law, set the policy. They are simply real, current, and specific to this market, and worth pricing into any multi-year hold rather than discovering after closing.

Bottom Line

The best-documented fact on this page is the current price level: two independent aggregator sources (Redfin and Movoto) converge on a mid-$700,000s median for Pacific City as of mid-to-late 2026, giving reasonable confidence in that current price band even though this research could not confirm a reliable longer-run appreciation trend behind it. The single most decision-relevant fact for an investor specifically is the January 9, 2025 Tillamook County STR exemption-zone boundary, which materially changes the rental-income case depending on which side of that line a given parcel sits. This page is informational only. It is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here should be used as the sole basis for a purchase or investment decision -- talk to a local real estate agent, a financial advisor, and Tillamook County Community Development directly about a specific parcel's STR status, and pull your own current comps, before making that call.