What Is Short-Term Rental Data? Metrics and Sources

Short-term rental data is the set of numbers a lodging operator uses to decide what to charge, where to buy or sign, and whether a unit is even legal to rent. At its core it answers four operator questions: how full will this listing be, what will it earn per night, how far ahead do bookings land, and what do the local rules allow. If you run 5 to 50 doors as a business, this data is the line between pricing on instinct and pricing on evidence.

This is a definitional page. It explains the metrics, the source categories, and the reading errors that cost operators money. It does not publish benchmark numbers: for live figures by city, use Nightlydata’s regulatory tracker and quarterly reports.

TL;DR: Short-term rental (STR) data breaks into three families: performance metrics (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, booking pace, minimum stay), supply-and-demand signals (listing counts, seasonality), and regulatory status (caps, licenses, primary-residence rules). RevPAR = ADR x occupancy, so those metrics move together. Sources fall into four buckets: OTA and platform data (your own bookings), open data such as Inside Airbnb, paid market-data tools, and official regulatory sources. Two rules keep you out of trouble: know whether a number is measured or estimated, and never treat one market’s benchmark as another’s.

The core performance metrics, defined

These come from hotel benchmarking and translate cleanly to STR if you swap “rooms” for “available listing-nights.”

Occupancy rate. The percentage of available nights that were booked over a period. CoStar/STR defines occupancy as the percentage of rooms occupied in a property, segment, or area for a given period, one of the industry’s foundational metrics alongside ADR and RevPAR (source: CoStar/STR, retrieved July 2026). For a single listing it is booked nights divided by available nights.

ADR (average daily rate). Average revenue per occupied night: room revenue divided by nights sold. It reflects the price charged per booked night, not per available night (source: CoStar/STR, retrieved July 2026). A high ADR paired with low occupancy can earn less than a moderate ADR that stays full.

RevPAR (revenue per available room, or per available night for STR). Total guest revenue divided by total available nights. CoStar/STR defines RevPAR as a function of occupancy rate and ADR (source: CoStar/STR, retrieved July 2026). The identity follows directly: revenue equals ADR times nights sold, and dividing by available nights gives RevPAR = ADR x occupancy. RevPAR is the one number that catches the tradeoff ADR and occupancy hide on their own.

Booking pace and lead time. Booking pace is how fast reservations accumulate for a future date; lead time is the gap between when a guest books and when they check in. These are standard revenue-management concepts rather than a single externally standardized statistic, so treat them as directional. They tell you whether to hold rate or discount as a date approaches.

Minimum stay. The shortest reservation a listing accepts. It is a pricing lever and a compliance lever at once: minimum-night settings shape yield, and in several cities the regulatory cap is itself expressed in continuous nights (see below).

Regulatory status is a data field, not a footnote

For an STR operator the legal status of an address is as much a number as its occupancy. It sets the ceiling on nights you can sell and whether a platform will even process the booking. Treat it as structured data with a source and a date. It reads very differently by market. All figures current as of July 2026:

• New York City: Local Law 18 requires hosts to register with the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement and bars platforms from processing transactions for unregistered short-term rentals. Stays of 30 consecutive days or more are exempt (source: NYC OSE, retrieved July 2026).
• Paris: a primary residence can be let as a furnished tourist rental for up to 90 days per year, a registration number must appear on every listing, and failure to register carries a fine of up to 5,000 euros (source: Ville de Paris, retrieved July 2026).
• London: under the Deregulation Act 2015, a property can be used as short-term accommodation for a maximum of 90 nights per calendar year without planning permission (source: Greater London Authority, retrieved July 2026).
• Seattle: operators need a business license tax certificate plus a short-term rental regulatory license (75 dollars per unit, valid one year) and may run up to two units they own, and if they run two, one must be their primary residence (source: City of Seattle, retrieved July 2026). Detail in the Seattle regulations guide.
• Washington, DC: a vacation rental (entire home, host absent) is capped at 90 nights per calendar year, while a host-present short-term rental has no annual cap but limits each stay to 30 or fewer continuous nights, and both require the property to be the owner’s primary residence (source: DC DLCP, retrieved July 2026). Detail in the furnished DC rentals guide.

Same metric, “nights you may legally sell,” five different rules. That is why regulatory status belongs in the dataset, dated and sourced, not in a blog post you read once. Rules change; verify each figure with the cited authority before acting.

The four source categories

1. OTA and platform data (your own). Your booking records from the major platforms are the most accurate data you own: real, measured, first-party. Occupancy, ADR, lead time, cancellation rate, and channel mix all come out of your own reservations. The limit is scope: you see your own listings, not the market around them. Spreading those bookings across channels is its own lever, covered in OTA distribution beyond Airbnb.

2. Open data (Inside Airbnb and similar). Inside Airbnb is an independent, non-commercial project that compiles public information from the Airbnb site (each listing’s 365-day availability calendar and its reviews), then cleanses and aggregates it. Its site states it “is not associated with or endorsed by Airbnb” (source: Inside Airbnb, retrieved July 2026). It is released under a CC BY 4.0 license, so you can reuse it with attribution (source: Inside Airbnb, retrieved July 2026). The caveat that matters: its occupancy figures are estimates, not measured bookings. The San Francisco Model converts reviews to bookings at a 50% review rate, applies an average length of stay, and caps estimated occupancy at 70% (source: Inside Airbnb, retrieved July 2026). Useful for market shape, wrong tool for your own precise occupancy.

3. Paid market-data tools. A category of subscription platforms estimates neighborhood-level occupancy, ADR, and seasonality from scraped and modeled listing data. They fill the blind spot your own bookings cannot: what the market around you is doing. Depth, freshness, and geographic coverage vary, and the outputs are modeled estimates, not measured bookings. How to weigh these tools against free alternatives is covered in STR market-research tools compared.

4. Official regulatory data. Municipal and national government pages are the primary source for legal status: caps, license requirements, primary-residence tests, tax rules. Always cite the official page with a retrieval date, because these move (the Paris guidance page was last updated in April 2026). Secondary summaries go stale fast.

How to read the numbers without fooling yourself

Measured versus estimated. The most expensive mistake is treating an estimate as a measurement. Your platform bookings are measured. Inside Airbnb occupancy and market-tool figures are modeled. Use estimates to size a market, use your own data to run it.

RevPAR over ADR alone. ADR flatters a listing that sits empty behind a high headline price. Because RevPAR = ADR x occupancy, RevPAR is the honest scoreboard when you compare units, dates, or a price change.

Match the window and the geography. A metric is only comparable within the same period and the same market. Peak-season occupancy in one city says nothing about shoulder-season demand in another. Do not carry a benchmark across a border, a season, or a property type.

Anchor to the source and the date. Every number worth acting on has a source and an as-of date. A 90-night cap that was 120 nights last year is a different business. This is why Nightlydata dates every figure and links the official source.

Where Nightlydata fits

Nightlydata does not sell a data feed to replace your own bookings. It maintains the reference layer around them: a per-city tracker of regulatory status with official sources and dates (for example Paris, London, and New York), quarterly market reports with disclosed methodology, and a directory of the tools and services that produce or consume this data. Use your platform data for what you operate, and these assets for the market and rules around it.

Key facts

• STR data covers three families: performance metrics, supply-and-demand signals, and regulatory status.
• The three core metrics are occupancy (booked nights divided by available nights), ADR (revenue divided by booked nights), and RevPAR (revenue divided by available nights).
• RevPAR = ADR x occupancy, so it is the single metric that captures the price-versus-fill tradeoff (source: CoStar/STR, retrieved July 2026).
• Booking pace and lead time are standard revenue-management concepts, directional rather than externally standardized.
• Inside Airbnb occupancy is an estimate (reviews-to-bookings model, capped at 70%), not measured bookings, and is CC BY 4.0 licensed (source: Inside Airbnb, retrieved July 2026).
• Regulatory caps differ sharply by market: NYC exempts stays of 30-plus consecutive days, Paris and London cap primary residences at 90 days per year, DC caps host-absent rentals at 90 nights, Seattle requires a per-unit license (source: official municipal pages, retrieved July 2026).
• Two reading rules: know whether a number is measured or estimated, and never carry a benchmark across market, season, or property type.

Information current as of July 2026; verify regulatory details against the official source before acting.