How to Use Mashvisor’s Airbnb Market Research Tools

You will need the best Airbnb market research tools in order to make profitable and efficient short term rental investment decisions.

As next year promises to be great for short term rentals, many investors are expected to flood the market, looking for the best deals. To be competitive, especially as a beginner investor, you must harness the power of Airbnb data, predictive analytics, and AI-driven technology. It is the only way to study markets—and find properties—before the competition.

Table of Contents

1. Why You Need Airbnb Market Research Tools
2. What the Mashvisor Airbnb Market Research Tools Do for Investors
3. How to Get Started with Mashvisor’s Tools

While many existing and aspiring Airbnb hosts understand the need for a data-based Airbnb market research tool, they don’t know where to find the top platform required for it.

The last decade saw a surge in the advancement of real estate technology apps claiming to help investors find the best markets and properties to start a vacation rental business. However, they are not all created equal, and they do not all provide the same capabilities or accuracy.

If you’re looking for the best tools to help you research Airbnb markets and properties for sale, you’ve come to the right place. With Mashvisor, you can turn three months of short term rental analysis into 15 minutes. In this article, we’ll show you how to use each one of the tools available on the Mashvisor app to make this year your most profitable yet.

Let’s get started!

Why You Need Airbnb Market Research Tools

Before we jump into how Mashvisor’s Airbnb market research tools work, it’s important to explain why you need such tools to begin with.

In brief, access to a technology-based platform helps you make better real estate investment decisions—faster. The same holds true for both long term and short term rental properties but is particularly important for the latter. There are so many factors that go into choosing a good Airbnb location.

Some factors to consider include:

• Tourist attractions
• The annual number of visitors
• Major local events and seasonality
• Supply of and demand for Airbnb rentals
• Daily rates
• Occupancy rates
• Monthly short term rental income
• Return on investment
• Short term rental laws and regulations

If you need to find all the required data and information on your own, it will take you weeks or even months, especially if you’re investigating a few different markets. By the time you’re confident in selecting a certain location, other investors will have already flooded the market.

That’s why, in order to be faster, more confident, and more profitable than the competition, you need to use big data and real estate technology tools to study both markets and properties.

And luckily for you, the Mashvisor real estate investing app comes with all the tools you need to research Airbnb markets and find out the best one for your specific needs and aspirations. And all of these—with just a few clicks of a button!

What the Mashvisor Airbnb Market Research Tools Do for Investors

The Mashvisor platform provides an arsenal of tools that investors can use to search for potentially good markets for short term rentals and analyze the potential of specific locations. Moreover, there are also functionalities that allow Airbnb hosts to find the top-performing vacation rentals for sale in any market of their choice.

Importantly, the Mashvisor Airbnb analytics and research website can be used equally comfortably from a desktop or a mobile.

So, let’s take a look at each of these tools and what exactly it does for investors:

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Investing Blog

The first step in Airbnb market research is finding city-level Airbnb data. Unless you want to invest locally or already with intelligence on the best markets for short term rental properties, any city or town is a valid option. It really depends on your budget and what kind of experience you’re looking to provide to guests.

How do I research a market on Airbnb?

Conducting a nationwide Airbnb rental market analysis is not feasible for an individual investor, especially since Airbnb itself does not provide the needed information directly to investors.

So, the process requires finding, obtaining, copying, organizing, cleaning, and calculating massive amounts of real estate data points in confusing Excel spreadsheets. Also, it is prone to human errors. Moreover, it doesn’t even consider the qualitative side of Airbnb market research.

However, Mashvisor provides investors with the right tool to focus their research efforts in a way that gives them immediate access to the best locations for vacation rental property investments.

You can visit the Mashvisor real estate blog, especially the Airbnb Rentals and Markets section.

There, you will find up-to-date rankings of the best cities for short term rentals according to different criteria, such as:

• Highest cash on cash return
• Highest cap rate
• Highest rental income
• Highest Airbnb occupancy rate
• Most affordable property prices
• Fewest Airbnb laws and regulations

Surfing through the most recent articles will allow you to find the top Airbnb locations at any point in time. All the provided data and analytics are based on Mashvisor’s own national Airbnb market research and analysis, using big data from reliable sources and proprietary AI algorithms.

Start reading the Mashvisor real estate blog.

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Laws and Regulations Page

Another crucially important step in the Airbnb market research is finding what regulations and restrictions apply to short term rentals in your selected location.

It is very different from investing in long term rentals. With the so-called traditional rental properties, landlords rarely face any major restrictions. While state and city laws might impose rent control, they never prohibit renting out on a long term basis. However, it is a real possibility with vacation rentals.

And even if your city of choice does not prohibit short term rentals altogether, they might impose various regulations related to:

• Owner-occupied vs non-owner-occupied short term rentals
• Residential vs commercial zoning districts
• Maximum occupancy per room and property
• Maximum number of renting out per year
• Safety requirements
• Licenses and permits
• Transient occupancy taxes

If you’re considering a few different locations, you might need weeks to find all the appropriate ordinances and make sense of them. You might even need to consult a local vacation rental property manager to ensure legality.

Alternatively, you can use the Mashvisor Airbnb market research tool dedicated to this purpose—the short term rental regulations page. Once you’ve selected a few potentially good cities with the help of the Mashvisor blog, you can easily check a summary of all applicable laws. Furthermore, you will get access to the municipal websites where you can find all details.

In this way, you can confirm that non-owner occupied short term rentals are allowed and not restricted in any major way before you make any further moves in your selected market.

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Heatmap

Another major step in Airbnb market research is getting neighborhood-level data to choose the best area for the short term rental strategy.

Most investors know that location is crucial for real estate success, but they underestimate the importance of neighborhoods within a city. Just as different cities yield different results, different areas within the same city can bring totally different daily rates, occupancy rates, rental expenses, rental income, and ROI.

The said metrics are affected by things like proximity to tourist attractions, public transportation accessibility, walkability, shopping and dining options, crime rates, and others. But for a single investor, it’s not easy to gather and analyze all the short term rental data that goes into finding a good neighborhood for such a strategy.

That’s why Mashvisor developed yet another tool to help with this stage of the Airbnb rental market analysis: the real estate heatmap.

The heatmap on the Mashvisor technology platform is a color-coded representation of the best and worst areas for investing in Airbnb in any US city or town. You can use a number of different filters to locate neighborhoods with low property prices and high Airbnb return on investment.

The filters include:

• Listing price
• Short term rental income
• Short term rental cash on cash return
• Short term rental occupancy rate

For each of the above metrics, the white color signifies low values, and the dark blue color indicates high values, with various shades of blue meaning values in between.

To start researching the best neighborhoods for Airbnb rental properties in any US market, sign up for a 7-day free trial of Mashvisor.

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Neighborhood Analysis Pages

Yet another indispensable part of the Airbnb location research is analyzing the actual investment potential of a few areas that seem to offer a good balance between property prices and ROI. As we mentioned above, it requires gathering a lot of qualitative information, as well as quantitative data points.

In other words: How do I know if an Airbnb market is good?

With the help of the Mashvisor neighborhood analysis pages. The pages function as a set of Airbnb market research tools that provide direct access to all the Airbnb data analytics you might potentially need to make a decision. Importantly, they cover all neighborhoods in all US cities and towns with active real estate listings.

The data points that Mashvisor neighborhood analysis provides include:

• Mashmeter: Mashvisor-calculated score of the future potential of an area based on past and current trends
• Median property price
• Average property price per square foot
• Average Airbnb rental income
• Average Airbnb occupancy rate
• Average Airbnb cash on cash return
• Number of investment properties for sale
• Number of active Airbnb rentals
• Walk Score
• Transit Score

As you can see, these numbers are more than enough to create a full picture of a neighborhood and its potential for short term rental property investments when researching various markets.

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Investment Property Search Engine

The Airbnb market research does not end with finding a good location and confirming its potential to bring a high return on investment at reasonable prices. It continues with researching the best short term rentals for sale.

While there are many different ways to search for real estate listings, few of them focus on investment properties. And one of the few options is the Mashvisor investment property search engine.

Mashvisor allows investors to enter their specific requirements like market, budget, expected Airbnb income, expected cash on cash return, and preferred property type when searching. Once they do that, they are immediately provided with a list of available properties for sale that meet their exact expectations, including both MLS listings and off market properties.

So, for those wondering: Which is better: Mashvisor or AirDNA?

The answer is definitely Mashvisor. And one of the main reasons is that AirDNA does not allow investors to search for available properties for sale. It is a crucial tool functionality for beginners with little experience and limited access to other resources.

With Mashvisor, investors don’t need to waste months flipping through newspapers, driving for dollars, or checking out homebuyer websites to find listings with no potential as vacation rentals. On the contrary, every provided property will have the potential to turn into a top-performing Airbnb rental. What’s left is identifying the top of the top choices.

Mashvisor’s Airbnb Profit Calculator

The final Mashvisor Airbnb research tool that we will discuss here goes slightly beyond the strict limits of market research but is equally important for making profitable investment decisions. That tool is the Mashvisor Airbnb profit calculator. It is an investment property calculator, also known as a rental property calculator, that focuses explicitly on short term rentals.

So, if you’re wondering: How do I analyze Airbnb data?

With the help of the Airbnb calculator. The Mashvisor calculator provides readily available investment property analysis on all listings available on the platform. The analysis is based on the performance of close-by, similar properties, known as rental comps in real estate investing.

The necessary real estate and rental data are obtained directly from the MLS, Airbnb, and public records, making them very reliable and trustworthy. All data is updated on a regular basis, and the analysis results generated by the Mashvisor algorithms are checked against the performance of actual hosts.

The available property-level Airbnb data and analytics include:

• Listing price
• Price per square foot
• Number of bedrooms and bathrooms
• Startup costs
• Rental income
• Recurring operating expenses
• Cash flow
• Occupancy rate
• Cash on cash return
• Cap rate
• Down payment
• Monthly mortgage payments

The rental property analysis is highly interactive, which means that investors can change any number based on their own Airbnb market research. The changes will be reflected in the rest of the calculations.

What it means is that with Mashvisor’s tools, you can research not only markets but also properties for optimal investment results.

How to Get Started With Mashvisor’s Tools

Real estate investing has always been one of the best ways to make money in the short and long term. However, in the past, this strategy used to be reserved for those with lots of money and free time, as well as unlimited access to the best deals. The latter was mostly achieved through networking and personal connections.

The recent advancement of technology in the real estate business has democratized the process, giving access to just about anyone to the best deals on the market. The only requirement is to get the best Airbnb market research tools. But it doesn’t require special connections or tons of money.

For a reasonable subscription fee, Mashvisor helps you do all the research and analysis needed to find the best markets and the best properties for short term rental investing. It includes researching cities and neighborhoods and learning about their Airbnb regulations and requirements. It also includes searching for properties for sale and analyzing their potential.

So, if you want to make this year your most profitable yet, all that’s left is to get access to Mashvisor’s tools.

Still not sure? Sign up for a free demo with our experts to see what exactly Mashvisor can do for you.