An Oregon hospitality property in a popular beach vacation town has traded in one of the area’s highest-dollar sales on record, another positive sign amid a recovery in hospitality prices on the Northern Oregon coast.
Vesta Hospitality bought the Surfsand Resort & Spa at 148 W. Gower Ave. in Cannon Beach, Oregon, for $58 million from Martin Hospitality, of Cannon Beach, equivalent to about $598,000 per room for the 97-room property, according to a statement from Sonnenblick-Eichner, the Beverly Hills, California-based investment firm that brokered the sale.
The per-room price was more than three times the average for the surrounding market, and CoStar data showed the overall price was the highest in at least five years for Cannon Beach, which census data shows has a year-round population of fewer than 2,000. It far exceeded the next highest, a four-property, 37-key portfolio sale that garnered $7 million.
Asked about the pricing on the property, Elliot Eichner, a co-principal at Sonnenblick-Eichner, pointed to the property’s size and proximity to the sand as distinguishing factors on the state’s notoriously rocky coast.
“It’s the only full-service hotel of its kind directly on the beach,” Eichner said, noting that many of the rooms have steps directly onto the beach, and adding that he believed the buyer intended to put about $100,000 per key into upgrades on the property.
The sale marked another positive sign for Oregon’s northern coast as a whole, where prices on a per-key basis have been rising steadily since hitting a low in the throes of the pandemic in early 2021.
Average per-key prices for coastal hospitality properties north of Coos Bay stood at about $177,000 in July, according to CoStar research.
That figure had hit a high of $167,000 in March 2020, before dropping steadily as the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the hospitality industry nationwide, dragging the per-key sales average on the north coast to a nadir of $158,000 in March 2021.
Cannon Beach is one of the closest beach resort towns to Portland and Seattle, with 9 miles of coastline and a large, picturesque rock monolith offshore dubbed Haystack Rock, one of the largest such monoliths in the world.
Founded in 1996, Vancouver, Washington-based Vesta has a portfolio of hotel properties concentrated in the South, Southwest, West Coast and Pacific Northwest, according to its website.