Quick Answer — How to Project Short-Term Rental Revenue
Annual gross revenue = Average Daily Rate (ADR) × Occupancy % × 365, plus cleaning fee revenue collected per booking, minus the host platform fee. That's the whole model, and it's the same one professional STR data platforms use as their baseline before layering in market-specific comp data.
Quick reference (at a 3% host fee, $75 cleaning fee, 3-night average stay): a $200 ADR at 60% occupancy nets roughly $47,800/year ($3,983/month). A $150 ADR at 50% occupancy nets roughly $30,800/year ($2,567/month) — a meaningfully smaller property or market, but still a real number worth underwriting properly rather than guessing.
The two biggest levers here are ADR and occupancy, and they trade off against each other constantly — a lower nightly rate typically pulls higher occupancy, and a premium rate typically pulls lower occupancy. This calculator doesn't optimize that trade-off for you (that requires real market comp data), but it makes the arithmetic of any specific ADR/occupancy combination transparent so you can stress-test your own assumptions.