Airbnb comps have become a hot topic in the short-term rental world, but do you really know how to use them to your advantage? For investors and hosts, understanding the power of short-term rental comps is a game-changer—unlocking smarter pricing, better management strategies, and ultimately, higher profits.
In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know about Airbnb comps, from what they are and why they matter to the best ways to find and use them. Plus, we'll introduce you to the top tools for identifying and analyzing STR comparable listings, so you can make smarter investment and management decisions.
Ready to level up your vacation rental game? Dive in—and don’t miss how Summer Forecast can help you create advanced, customizable comp sets to build a winning short-term rental portfolio.
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What are Airbnb comps?
Airbnb comps is short for Airbnb comparables, also referred to as short-term rental comps. This is an important term in the vacation rental industry that signifies listings that are very similar to your property and located in the same area. These comps are typically the same property type and size, have a similar number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and boast comparable features and amenities. Moreover, they are usually positioned within a few miles from your property.
The purpose of using Airbnb comps is to establish profile, pricing, and performance benchmarks for purchasing and managing a new property. Before you buy an investment property, you can use comparables to find out the most popular listings in the area, figure out the most in-demand amenities, and estimate the expected revenue and ROI. Once you own a short-term rental, you can analyze comps to set competitive prices, strengthen marketing, and get more bookings on Airbnb.
Why are Airbnb comps important?
In the highly-competitive Airbnb industry, the performance of your home is driven by how it compares to competitors in the local market. The most efficient way to compare your property to the competition and to make it stand out is to use Airbnb comps.
Researching your Airbnb comparable properties provides the following benefits to investors, hosts, and property managers:
- Accurately forecast performance: When buying a property for Airbnb, analyzing the financial performance of your comps provides investors with realistic expectations of the average daily rate (ADR), occupancy rate, income, and profit that they can earn in their selected location.
- Choose the optimal investment property: Checking which properties do well and which don't do so well in the local market helps guide your choice of the best property type with the right features for more profitable investment decisions.
- Compare Airbnb amenities: Whether you are still buying a property or already own one, short-term rental comp analysis can help you identify the most popular amenities in the market, what guests are demanding, and what is missing from listings.
- Understand market standards: Comps are indispensable in learning more about the area where you're thinking about investing. Understanding and complying with market standards boosts overall performance.
- Furnish and design accordingly: By studying competitor listings, hosts can gain knowledge of interior design and furnishing standards in the area in order to prepare their property for guests in the most efficient manner.
- Identify changing trends in the market: Analyzing comps should be an ongoing process, rather than a one-off exercise, as it can help you keep track of emerging trends and changing Airbnb metrics in the area. This allows you to take preemptive steps to optimize your property for new realities instead of simply reacting.
- Optimize Airbnb pricing: By knowing what nightly rates comps apply, you can optimize your own Airbnb pricing strategy. Daily rates that are just below your closest competitors' can help you snatch bookings from them and send your occupancy through the roof.
- Enhance marketing: Analyzing comparable listings can help you draw conclusions about the most successful listing titles, descriptions, and amenities in the area. In this way, you can boost your Airbnb SEO efforts for a higher ranking in guest searches.
- Boost occupancy: Working on both pricing and ranking can lead to better Airbnb occupancy rate, which is one of the most important metrics for the performance of your STR business.
- Make more money: All in all, using Airbnb comps in your investing and management decisions and processes is expected to lead to better revenue and higher profit by outperforming competition and staying ahead of developing trends.
In other words, accurate Airbnb comps can lead to a better vacation rental pricing strategy, improved occupancy rate, and increased ROI.
How to see Airbnb comps
When it comes to maximizing your vacation rental success, finding and using the right Airbnb comps is a must. The good news? Airbnb makes it easy to access comparable listings right on its platform! As a host, you can tap into key competitor metrics and compare your listing's performance with nearby comps—all in just a few clicks.
Access data related to comps' pricing, booking calendars, occupancy, guest reviews, and others. You can also review comparable listings to check out their title, description, features, amenities, ratings, reviews, strengths, and weaknesses.
The main benefit of using Airbnb to access and analyze comps is data accuracy. After all, anything you see is coming right from the source, so it's as accurate and reliable as it gets.
But on the flip side, the short-term rental platform doesn't provide all necessary numbers and details to analyze performance, such as average daily rate, average occupancy, net revenue, RevPAR, operating expenses, cash flow, and return on investment. In addition, you cannot get a quick snapshot of the overall performance of competitors via Airbnb due to the lack of data aggregation and summary features.
To fill these gaps, savvy Airbnb hosts resort to third-party STR analytics tools. Using dedicated Airbnb management software makes it easier and faster to locate relevant comps, organize them in custom sets, analyze their performance, and base decisions on them. Third-party Airbnb data and analytics tools offer more granular data at the property level as well as market-wide insights for better and more efficient decisions.
How to find and analyze Airbnb comps
Mastering the art of finding and analyzing Airbnb comps is a crucial skill for any host or investor. Whether you're fine-tuning pricing, assessing a new market, or optimizing a property's performance, the process involves a few key steps that lay the foundation for smarter decision-making.
Here's a step-by-step breakdown to help you uncover the most relevant comps, analyze their performance, and apply those insights to boost your short-term rental success.
1. Analyze your own property
The first step in Airbnb competitor analysis is actually performing a detailed analysis of your own rental to identify the main features that characterize it. You need to note down the most important characteristics of your own house to be able to build a set of comparable properties that closely resembles it for your analysis purposes.
2. Define your criteria for comps
Once you've taken a careful look at your property, you should be able to write down a list of the main features that define it. In this way, you will set up the criteria based on which to look for comps in the next step.
Focus on these characteristics when defining the criteria for your Airbnb comps search:
- Property type: For example, single family homes yield different results from apartments or condos when rented out on a short-term basis even if they are of similar size.
- Property size: Generally speaking, larger rentals produce higher income as they are able to host more guests at the same time.
- Number of floors: Multi-story vacation rentals tend to generate better daily rates and income as they have more rooms, offer more space, and can be occupied by more hosts. (But this may not be the case in your niche market, so double-check!)
- Number of rooms: The larger the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the higher the number of potential hosts. Moreover, it matters whether a STR offers extra rooms such as a home office, a kids bedrooms, a fully furnished kitchen, and a laundry room.
- Balconies or verandas: The availability of balconies, verandas, and similar features affects the performance of short-term rentals.
- Outdoor spaces: Patios, decks, porches, gardens, and other outdoor spaces add value to properties, but they also elevate operating expenses, leading to alterations in overall cash flow and profit.
- Amenities: Amenities are at the core of Airbnb rentals, so you should consider whether your property has a fireplace, swimming pool, hot tub, free parking, stocked up kitchen, gaming room, and other big and small amenities when looking for comparable listings.
- Level of finishing and furnishings: Finally, take into account whether you'll be looking for more luxury or more basic properties and the interior design style in which they are furnished.
Once you have a list of the main criteria for your comps, you're ready to start looking for them.
3. Research listings in your market
Use the list of characteristics that you prepared under the previous step. While some fluctuations will happen, especially in small markets with a relatively limited number of short-term rentals, try to look for properties that are as similar to yours as possible. This will increase the level of accuracy of your analysis. Aim to include at least ten or more listings in each of your comp sets.
The first obvious place to look for vacation rental comps is the Airbnb website itself. You can use the available filters to build your own Airbnb comp set, which is basically a list of comparable listings. Shortly, we'll discuss how tech-based tools can help you in this regard.
4. Identify the KPIs of comps
Once you have a list of similar listings, you have to conduct Airbnb rental property analysis on each of them to find out the most important performance metrics. Your analysis should incorporate both quantitative data and qualitative information.
Some of the Airbnb metrics to measure are:
- Average daily rates
- Occupancy rates
- Revenue
- Expenses
- Cash flow
- ROI in terms of profit margin, cap rate, and cash on cash return
- Number of guest reviews
- Average rating
- Available and missing amenities
- Listing title and description
- Seasonality trends in performance
While some of these data points will be available on Airbnb, you'll need third-party tools to get the rest of the information on your comps.
5. Analyze seasonal and pricing trends
As soon as you've collected data on all the Airbnb statistics that you need, it's time to get to some deeper level analysis. Go through the data and look for trends related to seasonality and how your competitors deal with them. The focus here should be on nightly prices, occupancy rates, and income.
Some questions to try to answer during your analysis include:
- When are daily rates the highest?
- When are nightly prices the lowest?
- What impact do weekends have on Airbnb demand?
- How does occupancy change throughout the year?
- When is the high season and when is the low season in the local market?
The answers to these questions will help you inform your own dynamic pricing strategy in order to boost results based on supply and demand in the area.
6. Adjust for unique selling points and amenities
Since no two real estate properties are exactly the same, another important step of the process is to identify the most significant differences between your property and the properties in your Airbnb comp set. It might be that your listing offers a fireplace, while others don't, or that your swimming pool is heated, while others are not.
Once you know how your rental exceeds comps or falls behind them, you should adjust your pricing strategy as well as listing information and marketing plan to account for the differences and emphasize the unique selling points of your listing.
7. Apply what you learned
Next, it's time to apply the information that you've gathered during your Airbnb comp analysis.
You can create your listing and calculate your pricing based on the strategies applied by your competitors. You may consider investing in must-have amenities in your market. The ultimate goal of this entire process is to launch and manage your vacation rental in a way that will maximize its performance in line with local trends and competition.
8. Monitor progress and repeat analysis
Finally, you should keep in mind that comp analysis is not a one-time thing; it's a continuous process. Keep track of the performance of your own property as well as the performance of your Airbnb comp set continuously. Moreover, you should work on adding new comparable listings that show up in the market and remove those that are no longer active.
The top short-term rental markets are highly dynamic, and you should follow trends and even predict them to stay ahead of the curve and boost revenue. So, in the long term, continue monitoring your property and its comps and adjusting your strategies as needed.
The best tools for finding Airbnb comps
Using Airbnb data software can make the process of locating and analyzing comps significantly faster, more efficient, and more precise. Automation platforms can give you access to data and analytics on hundreds of thousands of listings nationwide to build your own comp sets for both high-level Airbnb market research and detailed property analysis.
These are the top tools for Airbnb comp analysis.
1. Summer Forecast
Summer Forecast is the #1 platform for finding and analyzing short-term rental comps in the U.S. The advanced competitive set building tool gives you the option to build custom Airbnb comp sets with the properties that you consider to be your closest competitors in each area and that matter the most for your business. Forecast also generates default comp sets for you to make this step easier.
For each comp set, you can view aggregate information that summarizes the average performance of included listings focusing on the most important metrics, like:
- Distance from your property
- Occupancy
- Average daily rate
- Gross revenue
- RevPAR
- Amenities compared to market
For each of these data points, you see the range, average, historical performance of the set, and future projections. Moreover, you can access detailed analysis of each comp in the set for a more in-depth understanding of its performance and comparison with your own listing.
All in all, with Summer Forecast, you can create accurate comp sets quickly and tailor analysis to your specific needs and priorities for deeper and more relevant insights. This tool is of indispensable help both when you are looking for new investment opportunities and want to reveal top-performing options and when you are managing a portfolio of vacation rentals and want to benchmark their performance to competitors.
Full-access annual subscriptions to Summer Forecast start at $4,000, with startup plans available at even more affordable rates based on your needs.
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2. Summer Airbnb Estimator
The Summer Airbnb Estimator is another tool that helps investors and hosts locate comparable listings and access data on them. This Airbnb analyzer lets you enter any address in the U.S. to analyze the short-term rental market there.
Unlike other Airbnb calculators, reports are customized for your specific property and situation. This results in an unmatched level of accuracy and personalization. The report comes with a full list of Airbnb comps in the area and their data.
The comp data provides a detailed breakdown of nearby active listings including but not limited to ADR, occupancy rate, and revenue. This helps you conduct competitive analysis without the need for complex spreadsheets and manual calculations.
The Summer Airbnb Estimator can be used to analyze the potential of new investment properties as well as to make sure that your listing is performing as expected.
3. AirDNA
AirDNA helps hosts and property managers find comparable listings and build Airbnb comp sets. As soon as you connect your Airbnb listing to the software, the platform generates a list of similar listings based on geographical proximity and number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and guests. You can customize lists to your preference by adding and removing properties using filters related to features, amenities, and average rating.
You can use the saved comp sets to quickly benchmark your property against the average performance of competitors and adjust your pricing and management accordingly. AirDNA has a free plan that includes some features related to Airbnb comps, but access to more advanced tools is paid. The pricing depends on multiple factors and is custom in most cases, especially for larger-scale STR operators.
4. Mashvisor
Mashvisor is another real estate investing tool that facilitates the process of finding and analyzing short-term rental comps. When conducting Airbnb investment property analysis, investors can access similar active listings and new listings in the area and view data on their performance.
Some of the data available for comps includes daily rates, occupancy rate, and revenue. In addition, users are able to see how similar each comp is to their property to decide whether to include it in their analysis or not. Comps data is downloadable for additional investigation outside the Mashvisor platform. Mashvisor pricing starts at $24.99/month when billed annually and goes up for more sophisticated plans.
Tips for creating better Airbnb estimates using comps
No matter how you tackle Airbnb comps—manually or with the help of powerful tools—you have a unique opportunity to learn from the wins and missteps of other hosts and property managers. Why reinvent the wheel when you can build on proven strategies?
With our team, we compiled the ultimate list of go-to tips STR pros rely on and the biggest pitfalls to avoid when using comps to shape your pricing and management strategies.
- Mix and match data from multiple reliable sources for comprehensive analysis
- Take into consideration the impact of seasonality in the local market
- Focus on truly comparable listings when building your comp sets
- Regularly update your comp sets and data to stay in line with market shifts
- Continue analyzing the strategies and performance of your comps to identify emerging trends
- Account for big and small differences between your property and Airbnb comps to finetune your strategy (the devil is in the details in the short-term rental industry)
- Benchmark against top-performers, not the average, to really boost results
- Pay attention to guest reviews and incorporate them in your analysis
- Be proactive rather than reactive
- Use Airbnb automation tools for finding and analyzing comps
In addition, make sure to avoid the following common mistakes in estimating Airbnb performance using comps:
- Using questionable data sources instead of proven Airbnb comp tools
- Relying on single performance metrics and missing the bigger picture
- Basing decisions on Airbnb comp sets that contain too few properties
- Overgeneralizing and ignoring unique features and amenities
- Not accounting for seasonality or emerging trends
- Overlooking business operating cost factors and focusing exclusively on the income side of the equation
- Attributing competitors' success to the wrong factors
- Conducting analysis just once
Being aware of the best tips to follow and the most common mistakes to avoid should prepare you to start looking for and using the most relevant comps for your short-term rental business purposes.
Bottom line
Success in the vacation rental industry is driven by data-based decisions, and the optimal way to analyze and boost the performance of your short-term rental is by benchmarking it against Airbnb comps. For comp sets to be truly helpful, they need to include a sufficient number of very similar properties and provide detailed analytics.
To maximize your Airbnb revenue, leverage the institutional-quality, yet intuitive insights offered by Summer Forecast. Our platform provides readily available access to accurate, high-quality comp data for building a top-performing short-term rental portfolio.
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