The occupancy vs ADR vacation rental debate comes up in nearly every first conversation we have with an owner. Someone's neighbor is "booked 90% of the year." Someone else is "getting $400 a night." Both sound great. Neither tells you what the home actually earned, and one of them might be leaving a lot of money on the table. Here's how to think about the two numbers together.
Define the terms
Occupancy rate is the percentage of available nights that were booked. Thirty nights in a month, 21 booked, 70% occupancy.
ADR (average daily rate) is total nightly revenue divided by nights booked. Twenty-one nights, $4,200 in nightly revenue, $200 ADR.
RevPAR (revenue per available night) is the number that matters: ADR times occupancy, or total revenue divided by all available nights. In the example, $200 × 0.70 = $140 per available night. That's what the home earned per calendar night, whether or not someone was in it.
Why neither number works alone
High occupancy at a low rate means more turnovers, more wear, more cleaning coordination, and more guests. A home booked 90% at $150 earns $135 RevPAR and gets cleaned 25 times a month. A home booked 60% at $250 earns $150 RevPAR and gets cleaned maybe 12 times. The second home made more money with half the wear and half the risk of a bad guest.
High ADR at low occupancy has its own problems. A home priced at $400 that books 30% of the time earns $120 RevPAR, sits empty most nights, and misses the review volume that helps it rank. Empty nights aren't free either: the heat is on, the hot tub is running, the mortgage is due.
What we look at
RevPAR by month, not by year. Oregon coast and mountain homes are deeply seasonal. A Manzanita house might run 90% occupancy in July at a premium rate and 40% in February at a discount. Annual averages smear that together into a number nobody can act on. Monthly RevPAR tells you which months are pricing right and which are leaking.
We also look at lead time. If a home is fully booked three months out, it's priced too low. If it's booking only inside the last week, it's priced too high or the listing has a problem. Dynamic pricing tools handle much of this automatically, but a human should read the pattern.
Where the tradeoffs land in our markets
Mt. Hood Village: demand spikes on ski weekends and summer weekends, softens midweek. The play is often a higher weekend rate with strong midweek discounts to capture the remote-work crowd. Occupancy looks lower than a coast home; RevPAR can be just as good.
Coast (Manzanita, Neskowin): summer and holiday weeks are the money. Off-season occupancy is the lever. A home that fills February at a modest rate versus one that sits empty at a summer rate: the first one wins, and the guests who come in February tend to leave the kind of reviews that help July.
Eugene: event-driven. Ducks home games, graduation, the Bach Festival, track meets at Hayward. Those weekends command real premiums; the weeks between are steadier and lower. Missing the event pricing is the most common mistake we see.
The review connection
Occupancy feeds reviews, and reviews feed pricing power. A home with 80 five-star reviews can charge more than an identical home with 12, because guests trust it. That's an argument for accepting slightly lower rates early in a home's life to build volume, then raising them. We wrote about the math in what a 5.00 rating is worth.
Wear, and the real cost of a night
Every booked night has a cost: cleaning, supplies, utilities, and a small slice of the eventual replacement of the couch. A cheap one-night booking with a full turnover may net less than it looks. This is why minimum-stay rules exist and why a two-night minimum on weekends is common. Occupancy that comes from lots of one-nighters is expensive occupancy.
So which matters more?
Neither. RevPAR matters, and behind RevPAR, net revenue after cleaning and wear. A good manager moves rates constantly to find the point where the two numbers multiply to the most money with the least damage. That means saying no to some bookings and dropping rates on others, and it's the part of this business that looks like nothing from the outside.
If you want to see what that looks like for your home, we'll run a earnings review using comparable homes and show you the occupancy and rate assumptions behind it, not just the total. How we manage the rest is spelled out on the owners page. The numbers are the easy part. Reading them honestly is the job.