From Data to Decision. The STR Investors Who Run the Numbers Before They Ever List a Property

On a Tuesday morning in late January, Claudia Reyes sat at her kitchen table in San Antonio with a cup of cafe de olla going cold beside her laptop. She had been scrolling through STR market data for three hours. Not listings. Not Zillow photos. Data.

“Todos me decian que comprara en la playa,” she told me when we spoke in March. Everyone was telling her to buy at the beach. Florida. Gulf Coast. Somewhere with a postcard view. But the numbers were telling her something different.

Claudia is one of a growing number of STR investors who refuse to buy a property until the data tells them it makes sense. Not a gut feeling. Not a friend’s recommendation. Not a viral TikTok about passive income. The spreadsheet. The occupancy curves. The revenue per available night. The seasonal patterns that separate a good market from a great one.

I spent several weeks talking with investors like Claudia, people who approach short-term rental investment analysis the way a scientist approaches an experiment. Their stories are worth telling because they challenge the popular narrative that STR investing is about finding a cute cabin and listing it on Airbnb. These investors did their homework. And the homework changed what they bought and where.

Claudia’s Discovery: The October Market Nobody Was Talking About

Let’s call her Claudia, though that is close to her real name. She is 34, works in healthcare administration, and had saved enough for a down payment on an investment property by early 2025. Her original plan was simple: buy a two-bedroom condo near the Gulf Coast and rent it out during summer.

Then she started looking at the data.

“I kept hearing about summer markets,” she said. “But when I looked at the actual occupancy numbers, I noticed something. Some markets peak in October, not July. That felt like information people were ignoring.”

She was looking at Asheville, North Carolina. StaySTRA data shows Asheville’s peak occupancy lands in October at 65.6%, with an ADR of $227 and average monthly revenue of $4,668. July is close behind at 63.6% occupancy. But the real insight was in the off-peak numbers: January occupancy drops to 38.8%, yet the ADR holds relatively steady at $209. That is only an $18 difference between peak and trough ADR.

Compare that to a typical beach market where ADR can swing $100 or more between summer and winter. Asheville’s pricing consistency meant something to Claudia.

“La estabilidad me importaba mas que el pico,” she explained. The stability mattered more to her than the peak. She was not chasing the highest possible summer revenue. She was looking for a market where the floor was high enough to cover her mortgage year-round.

Asheville’s 1,853 active listings and declining occupancy trend (from 71.6% in 2021 to 43.8% in 2025) could have scared her off. Instead, she read it as a correction that created a buying opportunity. Home values around $454,000 were below what comparable mountain markets like Park City or Lake Tahoe demand, and the fall foliage season gave her a demand driver that most coastal investors never think about.

She ran the numbers through StaySTRA’s revenue analyzer, compared them against her mortgage projections, and made an offer in March 2025. By October, her three-bedroom cabin near the Blue Ridge Parkway was generating $4,200 a month.

Marcus and the ADR Spread Theory

Marcus is a different kind of investor. Mid-40s, based in Northern Virginia, already owns two long-term rentals. He approached his first STR purchase the way he approaches his day job in government contracting: methodically, with a spreadsheet that would make most people’s eyes glaze over.

His method starts with what he calls the “ADR spread.” He pulls average daily rate data from every market he is considering, then compares the difference between peak-season ADR and off-season ADR. A large spread, he argues, signals opportunity if you know how to price dynamically.

“Most new investors look at the peak number and get excited,” Marcus told me. “They see $380 a night in Virginia Beach in June and they start shopping for condos. But the real question is what happens in January.”

StaySTRA data confirmed what Marcus suspected about Virginia Beach. The market shows a dramatic seasonal pattern: July peaks at $345 ADR with 90.3% occupancy and $7,005 in monthly revenue. January drops to $220 ADR with 38.7% occupancy and $1,758 in monthly revenue. That is a revenue swing of more than $5,200 between the best and worst months.

For most investors, that swing looks like risk. Marcus saw it as information.

“When I see a big ADR spread, I ask two questions,” he explained. “First, is the trough survivable? Can I cover my costs at $1,758 a month? Second, is the peak reliable? Virginia Beach draws 13.6 million visitors a year. The summer demand is not going anywhere.”

He compared Virginia Beach against Park City, Utah, which sits at the top of StaySTRA’s ADR variation charts. Park City’s peak ADR reaches $985 with trough ADR at $322. That is a $663 spread. Monthly revenue ranges from $15,147 at peak to $2,385 at trough. The numbers are bigger, but so is the entry price and the risk of a dead January.

Virginia Beach, with 2,705 active listings and a median entry cost well below mountain resort markets, fit Marcus’s risk profile better. He liked that the booking window data showed 61.5% of guests booking one to three months ahead, a sign of reliable, repeat demand rather than speculative last-minute bookings.

He closed on a three-bedroom townhouse in the Oceanfront district in the spring of 2025. His first full summer exceeded his projections by 11%.

Priya’s RevPAR Filter

Priya (not her real name) spent eight years as a data analyst at a logistics company before buying her first STR in 2024. She brought a particular discipline to her STR investor market research that most casual investors skip entirely: she ignored ADR and occupancy as standalone metrics.

“ADR sin contexto no significa nada,” she told me, borrowing a phrase she picked up from an investor forum. ADR without context means nothing. A market can have a stunning $500 ADR, but if occupancy sits at 30%, the revenue per available night tells a very different story.

Her filter metric was RevPAR, revenue per available night. It combines pricing power and demand into a single number. And when she started sorting StaySTRA’s market data by RevPAR instead of ADR, the rankings reshuffled in ways that surprised her.

Key West, for example, commands an average ADR above $900 during peak months. Impressive on paper. But Key West’s RevPAR tells a more complete story because it accounts for the nights those properties sit empty. Meanwhile, markets like Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with a more modest peak ADR of $478, show occupancy rates climbing to 77% during peak season. The RevPAR comparison narrowed the gap between the glamorous market and the working-class one.

Priya built a spreadsheet comparing RevPAR across a dozen markets in StaySTRA’s dataset. She weighted consistency heavily. Markets with a smaller gap between peak RevPAR and trough RevPAR ranked higher on her list, because she was financing with a DSCR loan and needed to show the lender that the property could service the debt year-round, not just during leaf season or spring break.

She ended up buying in the Blue Ridge, Georgia area. Peak revenue there reaches $7,957 a month, with a trough around $2,771. Not the highest ceiling in the dataset. But the floor was higher than many flashier markets, and the entry price relative to revenue made the cash-on-cash return compelling.

“I could have bought in Scottsdale,” Priya said. “The peak numbers are beautiful. But the off-season occupancy drops to 40%, and the median home price is above $800,000. Blue Ridge let me get in for less and cash flow from month one.”

What the Data Actually Told Them

Walking through these conversations, I kept coming back to a common thread. None of these investors started with a destination in mind. They started with a question. Claudia asked about stability. Marcus asked about seasonal spreads. Priya asked about risk-adjusted returns. The data answered, and the answer often pointed somewhere unexpected.

That process, starting with a question, pulling market data, comparing across multiple markets, and letting the numbers lead, is what separates the investors who build sustainable portfolios from the ones who buy on impulse and end up underwater in year two.

StaySTRA’s dataset now covers 48 of the top 50 U.S. STR markets, and the variation within that dataset is enormous. Park City’s peak-to-trough ADR spread exceeds $660. Virginia Beach’s monthly revenue swings by more than $5,200 across the year. Asheville’s occupancy has corrected by nearly 28 percentage points since 2021 while ADR has held relatively firm. Each of those patterns tells a story, and the investors who read those stories before writing a check tend to make better decisions.

This is not about being the smartest person in the room. Claudia will be the first to tell you she is not a finance expert. Marcus learned to read occupancy charts by watching YouTube videos. Priya just applied skills she already had from a completely different industry. What they share is a commitment to looking at the numbers before they look at the property photos.

“Los numeros no mienten, pero hay que saber preguntarles,” Claudia said during our last conversation. The numbers do not lie, but you have to know how to ask them the right questions.

How Top-Performing Markets Get Discovered

One pattern I noticed across all three investors: none of them found their market by Googling “best Airbnb markets 2026.” They found their markets by analyzing data and discovering something the listicles missed.

Claudia found Asheville’s October peak because she sorted by monthly occupancy instead of annual averages. Marcus found Virginia Beach’s risk-reward profile because he calculated ADR spreads across 20 markets. Priya found Blue Ridge because she filtered by RevPAR-to-purchase-price ratio instead of gross revenue.

The STR market data tools available today make this kind of analysis accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours with a spreadsheet. StaySTRA’s analyzer provides occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, and revenue percentile breakdowns for thousands of U.S. markets. The data is there. The question is whether you are willing to sit with it long enough to hear what it is telling you.

National trends suggest 2026 will reward that patience. ADR is forecast to grow 1.5% nationally, and the STR investment premium (the gap between STR earnings and investment costs) has reached its highest level since 2022. Coastal, mountain, and suburban markets are all showing favorable conditions. But “favorable conditions” is a national average. The investors profiled here would tell you that national averages are where analysis begins, not where it ends.

The real work happens at the market level. Monthly occupancy curves. ADR variance. Revenue percentiles. Booking lead times. The investors who run those numbers before they ever list a property tend to sleep better at night.

And in this business, sleeping well matters.

Run Your Own Numbers

Every investor in this article started with the same step: pulling real data on real markets before making a real decision. If you are considering your first STR purchase or evaluating your next market, StaySTRA’s free revenue analyzer gives you occupancy rates, ADR, RevPAR, and revenue breakdowns for thousands of U.S. markets. Run the numbers on the markets you are watching and see what the data tells you.