Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR: which one to trust

A short-term rental is measured in nights, not months, and three numbers describe how it did. They are easy to compute and easy to misread, and the number hosts quote most is the one that leaves the most out.

Occupancy is the share of available nights that sold: nights booked divided by nights you offered. It tells you how full the calendar was and says nothing about price.

ADR, the average daily rate, is what a sold night earned on average: room revenue divided by nights booked. It is a price number. It says nothing about how many nights actually sold. You can lift ADR by raising rates and lose more nights than the higher rate makes back, and ADR on its own will look better while the year gets worse.

RevPAR, revenue per available night, is the one that catches that. It is room revenue divided by every available night, booked or not, which is the same as ADR multiplied by occupancy. Because it counts the empty nights too, a high nightly rate has nowhere to hide. Two units can post the same ADR and earn very different RevPAR, and RevPAR is what matches what actually landed in the account.

Underneath all three is a plainer question: whether running the unit nightly is worth it at all. A place run nightly is more work and more cost than the same place on a twelve-month lease, and the test is whether the revenue RevPAR implies clears the long-term rent by enough to pay for that extra work. Sometimes it does not, and the unit belongs on a normal lease.

That comparison, and the three numbers behind it, is what the Short-Term Rental Tracker keeps: occupancy, ADR and RevPAR for up to three units, month by month, next to the long-term rent each unit would earn instead. It records the year in nights and shows which units are earning their extra work. It runs in Excel and Google Sheets, and it does not connect to your calendar or your bank. The buy-side numbers, cap rate and break-even, are on the free calculators page.