How often do Airbnb comps change? We tracked 60 for 10 weeks

Every Monday from July 20 to October 12, 2026, we asked a short-term rental data provider (AirROI) for the 25 most comparable listings to each of 60 Austin rentals. The 60 were taken from real, active listings spread across six neighborhoods: East Austin, South Congress/Bouldin, Downtown/Rainey, Zilker, Mueller and Hyde Park, ten in each, with one to three bedrooms.

The question was simple. If you pulled your comp set today and again a month from now, how much of it would be different? That number decides how often a host actually needs to re-check their competition. It also decides whether a tool that watches your comp set for you has anything to report.

Across the cleanest ten weeks of data (August 3 to October 12), 9.5% of the average comp set was replaced. That works out to roughly 4% a month, or about one listing out of 25.

Most properties saw even less. The median property had two of its 25 comps replaced in ten weeks. Thirty-three of the sixty saw two or fewer change. The most any single property saw was seven.

It wasn't one quiet corner of town dragging the average down. The busiest neighborhood, Downtown/Rainey, changed about 7% a month and the calmest, South Congress/Bouldin, about 2%. Bedroom count made almost no difference: one-, two- and three-bedroom properties all landed at roughly 4% to 5% a month.

Comp data tools usually report trailing-twelve-month figures: average nightly rate and occupancy over the past year. A trailing average takes in each new month at about one-twelfth weight, so it's built to move slowly. In our data it often didn't move at all. For two to three weeks at a time, the provider returned identical figures, down to the last digit, for every one of the 60 properties.

So a weekly "your market changed" update is, most weeks, reporting that nothing changed.

This measures who your competitors are, not what they charge tonight. Nightly prices swing with seasons, weekends and events, and dynamic pricing tools exist for good reason. Nothing here argues against adjusting your price. It argues against re-auditing your list of competitors every week.

It's also one city, one data provider, and one stretch of the year, summer into fall. Austin in the spring, around South by Southwest in particular, could look very different, and a market with lots of new supply coming online would see more turnover. Treat 4% a month as a reasonable baseline for an established city market, not a universal law.

One week in early August, more than half of the average comp set changed at once. It wasn't the market. The provider had changed how it picks comparables. Overnight, the average comp moved from 0.75 to 0.46 miles away, and the share matching the subject's bedroom count jumped from 82% to essentially 100%. Arguably those are better comps. But a host watching their comp set that week would have seen a dramatic shake-up that had nothing to do with their competition.

We left that week out of the numbers above. The lesson for anyone using a comp tool: if your comp set changes a lot overnight, check whether the tool changed before you conclude your market did. Real shifts in competition show up gradually.

Check your comp set when something changes on your end, like new photos, a renovation, new amenities or a new pricing strategy, and otherwise every few months. Checking weekly is wasted effort, because your competition is almost the same list it was last month.

Spend that time on your own listing instead. If the other 24 listings you're up against are the same ones you were up against in the summer, the thing most within your control is the one listing that's yours.

And when you do look, look carefully. A comp set that barely changes is worth understanding properly once: which listings outperform you, at what rates, and what they offer or show that you don't.