What August STR Data Reveals About the Rest of 2026

Bram Gallagher (0:05)

Welcome to The STR Data Lab.

Jamie Lane (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to The STR Data Lab. I'm Jamie Lane, Chief Economist at AirDNA, and I'm joined today by my good friend and colleague, Bram Gallagher. Bram, good to chat again.

Bram Gallagher (0:22)

Always a fun time on The Data Lab. Jamie, thanks for having me.

Jamie Lane (0:25)

Yeah, so we're sitting here at the end of summer, and we're getting close to the end of September. We're going to talk a little bit about August performance and what we've been seeing so far. But how's the end of your summer been?

Bram Gallagher (0:39)

Well, it's been exciting. You know, we went to Orlando, and once again, every time it seems like I go to Orlando, something crazy happens in the economy. We've had a lot of stuff going on in the last month, economically speaking. But also in the short-term rental market, some interesting trends that are coming out, that I saw observed over this last August. And, Tiffany, actually, you know, it's a nice contrast because the news seemed very, very glum and dour.

But we turned to the short-term rental market, and things looked okay. They were still holding up. So, you know, it's been a source of strength and comfort these last few weeks.

Jamie Lane (1:24)

I'm glad that you see a source of strength because I look at the headline numbers and I see RevPAR declines, demand declines, occupancy declines. Everything looks pretty negative. So maybe you can help unpack that a little bit.

It did.

Bram Gallagher (1:41)

So if you're just looking at the top line numbers, you probably won't get the same sort of fuzzy feeling that I did. So if you recall the beginning of the year, we started out with pretty weak demand compared to the year previous because we had snow drought. Since then, we've been recovering. Our occupancy had been falling 2025 really, really closely, which I was really chuffed about because 2025 H1 performance was really good. So we were falling along there. And yet now all of a sudden we get to August and our demand has gone down. Occupancy had been holding almost exactly to 2025 for the last five months or so. And it shot down 3.3 percent. So you might think, oh my gosh, World Cup is over, the sky is falling, no one is going to short term rentals anymore. Well, no, it's in fact entirely due to a calendar artifact. So Labor Day, the Labor Day weekend, which is a huge source of end of season demand, fell on August in last year, but this year was entirely in September.

So that really shifted things. So when I looked at the demand, I saw that in August leading up to it, every single day in August had significantly higher demand than the same day back in 2025, until you get to that Labor Day weekend, and then they diverged very sharply. You see 2026's performance just like any other weekend, but of course 2025 it jumps up to a pretty high level.

So if we took out the Labor Day effect, let's shift it back just a couple of days. We'll even let some of the Labor Day build up stay in there, but let's say July 29th to August 28th. So most of the month, we're just missing the 29th, 30th and 31st, and replacing it with some of July. Well, then now our demand change has gone up 2.3%, which is the strongest increase in demand that we have seen since, wow, I think July of 2025, so more than a year.

So I don't want to say that that is the August demand, but I'm just saying that if we shift the calendar just a little bit, it's extremely sensitive to that inclusion of that weekend. Occupancy also, it goes from negative 3.2% year over year, not percentage points, but that's occupancy itself fell by 3.2%.

If we just shift it those three days, occupancy goes up plus 2.2%. And again, that is the highest occupancy growth that we have seen in this entire year. We started out at about minus 1.5, 1.4, something like that. We've sort of, we clawed our way back up to, around exactly where we were in 2025 We even saw a little bit of an increase in our occupancy in July, but it was minuscule, right? A few tenths of a percent.

So it was really exciting to see that, going from that disappointment of that huge decline in occupancy, we shifted a couple of days. Actually, we see this huge boost in it, the largest that we've seen this year. And it really tells that story that we had been anticipating, which is that half one of 2025 was very strong, half two is very weak. So if we held close to that 2025 level for the first half of 2026, that's great. And then if we continue with that sort of level of performance, then we're going to be doing really, really well in the second half. And it looks like that's what we're anticipating. Now, August numbers, they don't look so great because of that calendar shift, but when September rolls around, we're going to see probably higher numbers than we were expecting. But again, it won't necessarily because September is really outperforming, but because of the calendar shift again. So it'll be really interesting to see what that two months sort of combined perspective looks like.