Yamhill County

Yamhill County scores a 2.98% cap rate against a $501,668 median home price, with a gross rent-to-price ratio of 0.0458. That ratio sits in the low-to-mid range, and the levered math confirms it: at 6.85% financing with 20% down, the model produces a monthly cash flow of negative $1,385 and a cash-on-cash return of negative 14.4%. These are not rounding errors, they are structural. The county's appreciation score of 46 edges out its cash-flow score of 39, but even the appreciation case is complicated by a year-over-year home price decline of 0.85%. The affordability index of 28 out of 100 tells you that the local buyer pool is stretched, which limits both your exit options and rent growth runway. Yamhill sits at the 5th national percentile overall among the 1,000 counties in this dataset, ranking 25th out of 36 Oregon counties, and those rankings reflect what the numbers already show: this market is not generating returns at current prices and rates.

That positioning defines who belongs here. A cash-flow buyer should look elsewhere, full stop. The negative $1,385 monthly cash flow is not a market you fix with better property selection at the median, it is a market where the entry price-to-rent relationship is misaligned for leveraged income investing. An appreciation buyer has a case only in the speculative sense: you would be betting on price recovery in a county where prices are already down 0.85% year over year and affordability is at 28. A value-add operator could find opportunity if purchase prices can be negotiated sufficiently below median, or if a specific asset type generates above-median rents, but the baseline numbers do not give that operator much margin. The $670 in estimated monthly expenses layered on top of a $2,630 mortgage payment leaves almost no room for error even before vacancy or capital expenditure hits your ledger.

Yamhill County sits in Oregon's Willamette Valley, adjacent to the Portland metro, and is anchored by the wine and agricultural economy concentrated around McMinnville. That economic profile creates a specific tenant base, people who work in hospitality, agriculture, food and beverage production, and service industries that support wine tourism. Those are not the highest-wage sectors, which partially explains the affordability constraint: median rent at $1,914.70 per month in a county where a significant portion of employment is tied to tourism-adjacent and agricultural work creates real collection risk if the local economy softens. Proximity to Portland gives the county some spillover demand from workers priced out of Multnomah or Washington County, and that dynamic is worth monitoring, but it is not a substitute for a diversified local employment base with wage growth.

The combined monthly tax and insurance burden runs approximately $485, using a state-average effective property tax rate of 0.97% (per Tax Foundation 2024 data), with the honest caveat that actual county and township rates in Oregon can differ from that state-level figure. At 0.97% the rate is flagged as normal, so it is not a headline risk the way a 1.5% or higher rate would be, but at $405 per month in property tax alone on a $501,668 asset, it is still a real line on the underwrite. Add $79 per month in insurance and you have $485 in fixed carry before you touch debt service, maintenance, or management. That number is not punishing by national standards, but it matters when your operating margin is already negative.

The main risks here are concentration and demographic. A county of 107,674 people with meaningful economic exposure to wine tourism and agriculture has less diversification than a larger metro-adjacent county. If wine tourism contracts, whether from economic cycle, consumer spending shifts, or a bad harvest sequence, rental demand in the sub-markets most dependent on that employment base would feel it. Oregon also maintains a landlord-tenant regulatory environment that tilts toward tenants, including statewide rent control provisions under SB 608 that cap annual rent increases for older buildings. That is not unique to Yamhill, but any investor buying a pre-2004 structure here needs to underwrite with those caps in mind and should not assume rent-to-market resets between tenancies are unlimited.

Against the neighbors, Yamhill's rent-to-price ratio of 0.0458 is the best in the comparison set, beating Multnomah at 0.0410, Washington at 0.0408, Clackamas at 0.0387, and Crook at 0.0419. Josephine County at 0.0472 is the only neighbor with a better ratio. Yamhill also comes in below Washington County's $556,184 and Clackamas County's $603,032 on entry price, while delivering rents close to those markets, Clackamas at $1,944 and Washington at $1,893 versus Yamhill's $1,915. That relative efficiency makes Yamhill marginally more attractive than Clackamas or Washington for income-focused investors who insist on staying in the Oregon metro orbit. But if the goal is a better rent-to-price dynamic without the agricultural concentration risk, Josephine County's 0.0472 ratio and $384,522 median price lower the entry point enough to warrant a direct comparison. Choose Yamhill over a neighbor when your thesis is specifically about long-term proximity to Portland growth spilling west into the valley, and when you can buy meaningfully below the $501,668 median to correct for the structural cash-flow deficit the data shows.