How much revenue can a short-term rental make? Meet the short-term rental calculator

Perhaps you are thinking of repurposing your home as a short-let, or you’re weighing up two different properties or markets to invest in – maybe you just want to know how much your short-term rental should be making.

But the answers to ‘how much revenue can a short-term rental make?’ are scarcer.. Enter the Lighthouse Short-term rental calculator.

What you can learn from the short-term rental calculator

By searching for a specific address and filtering down by property type and size, the short-term rental calculator will return a projected report covering key performance metrics and useful information for your property. They include:

• Monthly and annual revenue

• Occupancy

• ADR (average daily rate)

• Improvement points to increase the property’s performance, based on comp set data

• Similar properties, effectively creating a competitive set for the property in question

• An ROI simulator, calculating revenue, costs and fees through a calendar year

These points help to build a comprehensive picture of the potential performance of any given address as a short-term rental, based on existing, comparable properties in the vicinity. You can even download the data to manipulate and compare as you prefer.

How much revenue can a short-term rental make? The use cases

This is a question asked by many stakeholders across the short-term rental industry, including destinations who wish to understand high-level performance and business cases in their markets, investors looking to achieve the best ROI, and property managers wanting optimal portfolio performance. Below we dive into actual applications of the short-term rental calculator for investors and property managers.

Investors

As an investor, your primary objective is to select investments that will bring the highest return. The hardest thing is finding a reliable, objective way of assessing the options – and finding properties for potential short-term rentals are no different. 

• The calculator makes it possible to assess markets for a high-level indication of investment opportunities.

• With the assistance of topline performance metrics, investors can select the most profitable investment option quickly and accurately – both by type and specific property.

• Investors looking to optimize their interests can use the data-based suggestions to improve their return through added amenities and more.

• Surveying the competition surrounding opportunities can also give valuable strategic insight.

• Assessing seasonal strategy with the ROI simulator can also help guide you towards the best approach.

Property managers

Property managers need to gain, set up and maintain inventory in the right way. Data-based approaches to identifying properties with the highest ROI, positioning listings in the right way and maintaining optimal performance can be the linchpin to an improved bottom line. In the case of the short-term rental calculator, there are several ways in which these challenges can be allayed.

• The calculator can inform as to which areas of your market or types of stock will be most profitable, and therefore which opportunities should be sought, pursued or prioritized.

• The report generated is an opportunity to proactively supply owners with an achievable expectation on return – and also justification for pricing and performance.

• It also provides managers themselves with a fact-based benchmark by which to set their new listings and monitor performance.

• Furthermore, the similar properties section hands PMs an effective competitive set to monitor performance.

• In the event of seeking to enhance performance potential, identifying listings, improvements in the suggested actions, which also estimate added return, or indeed reviewing competing listings can be a useful pointer.

• By assessing various markets PMs can also identify ripe markets for expansion.

• Finally, the seasonal ROI projections can aid with forecasting.

How does the short-term rental calculator work?

The Lighthouse short-term rental revenue calculator – along with the Lighthouse freemium dashboard – has been updated to work from global 2022 data, so you can find relevant, data-based answers to those burning questions around ‘how much revenue can a short-term rental make?’.

 And the best bit is, you can access for free: