Short-term rental markets, measured
Legality by city, honest revenue math with sample sizes, weekly movers, and the financing questions no data company answers. Every post shows its work.
STR permit fees in 40 cities: what you pay before your first guest
The permit and registration fees 40 cities publish for short-term rentals, quoted as written in each ordinance or fee schedule, with the source beside every figure.
Does a 3-night minimum cost you bookings? Not in the next 30 days
On 29,000 entire homes, a one-night minimum and a three-night minimum show the same share of the coming month already taken. Longer rules are too thin in the data to call. A null result, with the sample.
Who you are really competing with: where professional hosts own the supply
Across 483,048 active entire-home and room listings in our dataset, 54% belong to hosts running three or more, and 33% to hosts running ten or more. Here is where the professionals hold the supply, and where the single-listing host still does.
The priciest markets are not the best earners
Across 220 metros with a served revenue figure, the rank correlation between median nightly rate and median annual revenue is 0.83. Only 6 of the fifteen highest-rate markets are among the fifteen highest-earning.
How many rentals match a permit, city by city
All 41 sub-markets where we hold a usable permit registry and at least 200 entire-home listings, ranked by the share of listings that match a permit, from 11% in St. Petersburg to 94% in Nashville.
Why the number you see on AirDNA is too high
The one peer-reviewed measurement of vendor short-term rental data found occupancy overstated by 60% and revenue per available night by 179%. The cause is definitional, and here is how we define ours.
How the numbers work
The definitions and rules behind every figure on the site.
Meet DwellSignal: four free tools to size up a rental marketAn introduction to exploring markets, comparing places, and understanding the assumptions behind a property analysis.→How permit matching works, and how to check one address yourselfThe rule that links a public short-term rental registry to a listing, the numbers it produces today across 120 usable registries, and how to check a single address against its city's registry.→How we count: measured, modeled, or not shownThe definitions behind every DwellSignal number, what measured and modeled mean on a page, and where a figure is withheld rather than guessed.→