How to price your Airbnb against comps

A comp is a listing that's genuinely similar to yours: same bedroom/bathroom/guest count, close enough to be competing for the same trip. "Airbnbs in my city" is not a comp set — a downtown loft and a suburban 4-bedroom house aren't competing for the same guest, even if they're 3 miles apart.

Pricing tools that show you a citywide or neighborhood-wide average are answering a different, less useful question than "what do listings like mine, near me, actually charge and actually get booked at."

A comp charging $50/night more than you isn't automatically the target — check whether it's actually getting booked. A high rate with low occupancy can mean fewer total nights sold, not more revenue. RevPAR (revenue per available night — roughly rate × occupancy) is the number that actually reflects what a listing earns, and it's easy to eyeball wrong from rate alone.

The goal isn't the highest nightly rate in your comp set. It's the best combination of rate and occupancy for your specific place.

Here's what that actually looks like with real numbers. We pulled every 2-bedroom, 2-bath, 4-guest short-term rental in Austin's South Congress / Bouldin Creek area — 25 real, currently active listings, via AirROI's comp data (the same data source HostScore's own reports use).

Market average nightly rate across that set: $314. But the top 5 earners in that exact same neighborhood, same size property, average $487/night — while the bottom 5 average $171. Same market. Same configuration. A 185% gap between the top and bottom of the same comp set.

That spread isn't random. Some of it correlates with real, checkable signals — in this same Austin pull, listings with a pool averaged 52% more than listings without one; listings with real clothing storage (not just "a closet") averaged 59% more. Those are correlations across real listings, not guarantees that adding a pool gets you 52% more overnight — but they're a real, current answer to "where does my market's money actually come from," which beats guessing.

The honest version of Step 3 is asking, in plain terms: where do I actually sit in that spread, and why? A spreadsheet of comps can show you the numbers. It can't tell you whether your listing looks and reads like the top 5 or the bottom 5 — that's the harder, more useful question, and it's the one HostScore is built to answer for your specific address.