The terms that show up in comp data and pricing tools, defined plainly — including the ones commonly used loosely, and where a figure means less than it appears to.
- ADR (Average Daily Rate)
- The average nightly price a listing actually charged over some period. It's a per-night figure and ignores fees, taxes, and length of stay.Worth distinguishing achieved ADR from asking price. A listing displaying $400/night that rarely books is not a $400 ADR listing. Rate data worth using reflects what was booked, not what was advertised.
- Aesthetic signal
- A visual or styling characteristic detectable in a listing's photos — natural light, wood flooring, open shelving, statement art, clutter, dated fixtures — as distinct from a countable amenity.These are the signals conventional pricing data can't see, which is why two listings with identical size, location, and amenity lists routinely earn differently.
- Amenity premium
- The difference in average nightly rate between comparable listings that have a given amenity and those that don't.A correlation, not a causal lift. Listings with a hot tub frequently also have better furniture, better photos, and a better location — so a "+18%" premium describes a group of listings, not the effect of installing a hot tub. Always read it alongside the number of listings it was computed from.
- Booking pace
- How quickly upcoming nights are filling, usually expressed as the share of a future window already booked, or the rate at which bookings are arriving compared to a prior period.Reliable only over short forward windows. Several months out, almost nothing is booked yet, so any average computed across that window reflects a handful of unusual early bookings rather than the market.
- Booking window (lead time)
- How far in advance guests book, and separately, how far ahead a host opens their calendar for booking.A host-side constraint that quietly caps demand: a calendar only open 30 days out is invisible to guests planning two or three months ahead.
- Cleaning fee
- A one-time charge added to a booking, separate from the nightly rate.Sits outside ADR entirely, which makes rate-to-rate comparisons misleading on their own. A $200/night listing with a $150 cleaning fee costs a guest very differently than a $200/night listing with none — especially on short stays, where the fee is spread across fewer nights.
- Comp (comparable listing)
- A listing genuinely competing for the same booking as yours: similar bedroom, bathroom, and guest-capacity configuration, close enough that a guest planning a specific trip would consider both.Proximity is not the same as a radius. A mile in one direction can be the same walkable neighborhood; a mile in another can cross a highway into somewhere with a different reason to visit.
- Comp set
- The full group of comparable listings a property is measured against. Every market average, premium, and benchmark derived from it inherits whatever bias the set itself has.Getting the set right matters more than the analysis run on it. A precise calculation over the wrong listings is just precisely wrong.
- Fill rate
- The proportion of listings or nights in a given window that have been booked. Often used as a confidence measure on forward-looking data rather than as a headline metric.Useful as a floor: when fill rate for a future window is very low, any rate averaged across it is computed from too few bookings to mean anything.
- Guest capacity
- The maximum number of guests a listing accommodates.Acts as a hard filter in guest search, which makes it a firmer comp boundary than it looks. A guest searching for six will never see a four-sleeper, so the two aren't competing regardless of how similar they otherwise are.
- Guest Favorite
- An Airbnb badge applied to listings with consistently strong ratings and reviews.A reputation signal rather than something you can change directly — informational when comparing why some comps out-earn others.
- Long-stay rental
- A listing with a long minimum stay — commonly two weeks or thirty days — priced for extended stays such as relocations or seasonal residents.The most common silent corruption in a comp set. Its nightly rate is effectively a bulk discount, so averaging it into nightly comps drags your market rate down for reasons unrelated to your market. Nothing flags it except the minimum-stay field, which is why HostScore excludes two-week-plus minimums from rate math and reports how many were set aside.
- Market average
- An average computed across a defined set of listings. Its usefulness depends entirely on how that set was defined.A citywide average smooths over enormous neighborhood-level spread and typically describes no real property. "Average for listings like mine, near me" is a different and far more actionable number than "average for my city."
- Minimum stay (minimum nights)
- The fewest nights a guest may book.Both a demand filter and a comp-set filter. A three-night minimum excludes most weekend travel outright; a two-week minimum signals a different business model entirely.
- Occupancy rate
- The share of available nights that were booked over a period.Must be read together with ADR. A high rate with weak occupancy can mean fewer total nights sold and less revenue than a lower rate that stays full. Note also that occupancy measured over a short recent window can read artificially low simply because a listing had limited availability then, not because demand fell.
- RevPAR
- Revenue per available night — roughly ADR multiplied by occupancy. Blends price and demand into a single figure, so it reflects earnings rather than headline rate.Borrowed from hotels, where it stands for revenue per available room. In short-term rentals the unit is a night. It's the number that exposes the trap in optimizing for rate alone: raising your nightly price can lower RevPAR if it costs you enough occupancy.
- Seasonality
- Predictable variation in rates and demand across the year, driven by weather, holidays, school calendars, and local events.The reason a single night's price tells you almost nothing, and the reason trailing averages are the standard baseline.
- Superhost
- An Airbnb status awarded for meeting thresholds on ratings, response rate, cancellation rate, and completed stays.Another reputation signal you can't toggle, but one that helps explain rate differences within a comp set.
- TTM (Trailing Twelve Months)
- A rolling average across the most recent twelve months, used to produce a stable baseline that isn't distorted by one unusual month or season.The tradeoff is lag: a twelve-month average describes the past year, so it can trail a market that's moving right now. Pairing it with a shorter recent window — checking whether the last 90 days run above or below the annual baseline — is a common way to catch that.