For any short-term rental alliance or group, a best practice is to get and maintain a lay of the land when it comes to STR data, especially before and during an STR ordinance process. Examining certain data can help shed light on how these rental properties play into the overall housing, tourism, and economic situations in your community. That information can help your community take a fact-based approach to decisions and balance out different interests.
Whether or not your local government has gathered the data and analyzed it as part of due diligence in ordinance-making, anyone can access the relevant figures by going to the right online sources.
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Data on short-term rentals
As a baseline, you’ll want to find out how many total short-term rentals are in your community and how they break down by type (hosted room rentals or whole-home rentals.)
Other key data points:
- Average daily rate
- Occupancy rate
- How much revenue the properties generate
Your local government may have some of this information and be able to provide it to you. However, you can also generate basic and detailed statistics from analytics providers Key Data and AirDNA.
Tourism data
Short-term rentals and vacation homes are a part of the larger tourism industry. In fact, they have gained popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic as people have sought safe places to self-isolate, quarantine, or gather with family members in a secluded place.
But hosts are not the only beneficiaries. Their guests also eat at or order from local restaurants, fill up their gas tanks in town, participate in indoor and outdoor recreation, and shop, among other things. All of this economic activity benefits the community at large.
What is the value of these guests to the community? To help assess that value, you’ll need data on:
- Average spending by each guest
- Guest profiles (average number of nights stayed, number of guests in a group)
- Amount of transient occupancy, or lodging, tax revenue from each stay
- Overall estimated economic impact
Where can you find this information? Typically, this type of tourism data comes from the local tourism board, convention and visitors’ bureau, or a city department of economic development. Most of these entities produce an annual report on these tourist data points. The annual reports are typically posted somewhere on the agency’s website. If you can’t find it, your local tourism board can probably help track it down.
Housing data
How do short-term rentals impact overall housing in the community?
The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey offers the most comprehensive data on housing in different towns, cities, and metropolitan statistical areas.
You can find:
- Total housing units
- Rental and homeowner vacancy rates
- Demographic information
Once you have the total number of housing units in your city, you can compare that with the total number of short-term rentals to see what percentage of units are used as STRs part-time or full-time.
You may also want to get a sense of how housing prices have changed over time.
- You can track average rents on websites such as Apartment List, which produces an annual report for specific cities, counties, states, and the nation.
- The National Association of REALTORS provides average home prices for metropolitan statistical areas around the country.
For more local data for a specific town, contact your local chapter of the National Association of REALTORS.
Nuisance data
Are short-term rentals generating more nuisance incidents than other homes? It’s impossible to know until you look at the data, including complaints about parties, noise, trash, and parking violations.
Many cities have a non-emergency call center line, such as 311, to file these types of complaints or service requests and often publish that data online. If the information is not available online, you can probably obtain it through a public records request.
Each jurisdiction produces 311 complaint and service request data differently, but generally, you should be able to get a spreadsheet of overall complaints/requests. To sift out meaningful information, you’ll need to check with your local government to find out the specific terminology used for service requests or complaints related to short-term rentals or vacation homes.
From there, you can extract those complaints by doing a search within the CSV file.
Whether or not your local government has looked at this data, taking the lead in gathering these statistics will help your community make a more informed decision when crafting short-term rental regulations.
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Photo courtesy Franki Chamaki
