Lincoln County

Lincoln County sits at a 3.39% cap rate on a $470,173 median purchase price, with median rent of $2,043 per month and a rent-to-price ratio of 0.52%. Those numbers place it squarely on the appreciation side of the spectrum, not the cash-flow side. The model underwrite assumes a 20% down payment of $94,035, a 6.85% rate producing a $2,465 monthly mortgage, and estimated expenses of $715, landing at negative $1,137 monthly cash flow and a cash-on-cash return of negative 12.62%. Home price appreciation over the past year came in at 0.38%, which is essentially flat. The affordability index of 33 out of 100 signals that this is an expensive market relative to local incomes, which compresses the tenant pool and limits rent growth headroom. Nationally, Lincoln ranks in the 17th percentile across 1,000 counties, and 16th out of 36 Oregon counties, neither a standout nor a disaster, but a county that demands you understand what you're buying into before committing.

Given those numbers, Lincoln is not a county for a buyer whose strategy depends on day-one cash flow. The negative $1,137 monthly shortfall means you are writing a check every month to own this asset, and that shortfall is not marginal, it is structural at current prices and rates. An appreciation buyer could make a case if they believe coastal Oregon property reprices meaningfully over a 7-to-10-year hold, but the 0.38% year-over-year price movement gives no recent evidence of that momentum. The most defensible buyer here is a value-add operator who can find distressed or underleveraged coastal properties and push rents above the $2,043 median through renovation or repositioning, since even modest rent increases materially change the cash-on-cash picture when you're starting from that deep a hole. A second home investor who also wants to monetize short-term or seasonal rentals might find the coastal location relevant, but that thesis depends on data not present here, so it should be underwritten separately. At current leverage and rates, a pure buy-and-hold rental buyer relying on the long-term mortgage needs to carry meaningful reserves.

The data does not include economic anchors or employer information for Lincoln County, so no specific demand drivers can be cited here. What the population figure of 50,334 does tell you is that this is a small coastal market, and small markets carry concentration risk by definition. A thin tenant pool means vacancies can linger, and a single large employer exit or industry downturn can reprice rents faster than in a diversified metro. That dynamic is worth stress-testing in your underwrite even without specific employer data.

On carry costs, the state-average effective property tax rate of 0.97% generates an estimated $4,561 annually, or roughly $380 per month. Combined with $893 in estimated annual insurance ($74 per month), you are looking at $455 per month in tax and insurance together, which is already embedded in the $715 expense figure in the model. The 0.97% rate carries a "normal" flag, meaning it is not a meaningful tailwind or headwind relative to national norms, but remember this is a state-average estimate and actual Lincoln County or township rates may differ, so pull the county assessor data before closing. Coastal Oregon properties can also carry elevated insurance costs due to wind and proximity to water, and the 0.19% insurance estimate may be optimistic depending on the specific asset's location relative to the coast.

The concentration and demographic risks in a 50,334-person coastal county are real. Small coastal markets tend to skew older, with seasonal population swings that can make annual rent stability harder to forecast. If the local economy has significant exposure to tourism, fishing, or timber, any cyclical downturn in those sectors will flow through to your tenant pool faster than in a diversified market. Regulatory risk in Oregon is also a standing underwriting consideration given the state's history of tenant protection legislation, which can affect your ability to reposition a property or move rents to market quickly.

Compared to its neighbors, Lincoln is the most expensive county in this dataset at $470,173 median, sitting above Jackson County ($425,440), Wallowa County ($433,289), Linn County ($403,075), and well above Douglas County ($338,442) and Wheeler County ($305,217). Lincoln's rent-to-price ratio of 0.52% beats Jackson (0.48%), Linn (0.49%), and Douglas (0.48%), which means you are getting slightly better rent relative to price here than in those three alternatives, but none of these counties are strong cash-flow markets. Linn and Douglas both carry lower absolute prices with comparable or matching overall scores of 48, which means a dollar-constrained investor gets more units or more equity cushion in either of those markets than in Lincoln. Choose Lincoln over its neighbors only if you have a specific thesis around coastal Oregon appreciation, a value-add deal priced well below the $470,173 median, or a use case that benefits from the coastal location in a way the straight rental numbers do not capture.