In Cannon Beach the beach is public and the land is finished.

Oregon is unusual among American coastal states in that the beach is not for sale. The Beach Bill, passed in 1967, established public access along the entire shoreline, which means no one in Cannon Beach owns a private strip of sand and no development can ever be permitted between the town and the water. The most valuable thing in the market is held in common and cannot be built on.

What that does to a hotel market is structural rather than sentimental. The beach is the demand driver, the beach is permanently accessible to every property in town, and the quantity of land from which you can reach it in a short walk is fixed. Cannon Beach itself is small, low, and has stayed that way; there is no version of the next decade in which someone drops two hundred keys behind the dune.

Haystack Rock, and why the town's landmark is protected

Haystack Rock stands just offshore at roughly 235 feet and is probably the most photographed object on the Oregon coast. It sits within the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, and the tide pools at its base are a designated marine garden, so it's protected habitat rather than an attraction anyone manages for visitation. Puffins nest there in spring. That combination, an unmissable landmark that nobody can commercialise, is the kind of asset a destination market is built on.

The four hotels

Avenir bought four hotels here in July 2021, in a single transaction rather than one at a time, thirty-seven keys in total and all within the town itself. They were deliberately left as four different things rather than folded into one product.

• Cannon Beach Hotel: the historic one, a classic New England–style building in the middle of town.
• The Courtyard: extended-stay suites, aimed at the traveller who wants privacy and a longer booking.
• McBee Cottages: cottages, family-shaped, a short walk from the beach.
• Hearthstone Inn: rustic and artisan-built, closer to a cabin than to a hotel room.

Four small properties in one square mile is a useful structure rather than an accident. One team can cover all of them, a guest who cannot get the room they wanted can be moved to a sister property, and buying costs are spread across four assets instead of one. Each keeps its own name; the collection site exists to make that easy rather than to sell a brand.

What outsiders keep noticing

We own hotels here, so we're hardly disinterested. Better to point at people who are. Travel + Leisure named Cannon Beach the happiest beach in the United States. U.S. News keeps the town on its list of the best small towns to visit in America, in company with Nantucket, Stowe and Camden. TripAdvisor gave the Cannon Beach Hotel Collection a Travelers' Choice award for 2024, which is a guest-review award rather than an editorial one and matters to us for precisely that reason.

Awards don't show up on a P&L. But in a town this small, recognition keeps the top of the funnel full without anybody paying for it, and one national list can move real traffic in a market of a few thousand keys. It is also the clearest evidence we have that the demand here predates us and doesn't depend on us.

What is genuinely hard here

Seasonality on the north Oregon coast is severe and honest operators say so. Summer sells itself. The shoulders and the winter are where the year is actually won or lost, and they are won with midweek programming, length-of-stay offers and a direct channel that can reach a past guest without paying a commission to do it. Weather is a demand input here in a way it never is in Palm Springs.

The second constraint is the same one that makes the market attractive. If you can't build, you can only buy, and the things worth buying trade rarely and quietly. We took that trade knowingly, and it's part of why the portfolio has grown by adding inside markets we already knew as often as by entering new ones. The wider version of that argument is in the note on why hotels behave differently from other real estate.