Short-term rental glossary

The terms owners run into, defined the way I would explain them on a call. Plain, no jargon for its own sake. Where a term has a guide behind it, the link takes you there.

STR (short-term rental): A furnished property rented by the night or the week, usually through platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. It is a real operating business, not a listing you post and forget.
ADR (average daily rate): Total booking revenue divided by nights sold. It tells you what your nights actually earn, not what your calendar asks for.
ALE (additional living expense) housing: Insurance-paid housing for families displaced from their homes, placed through firms like ALE Solutions and Sedgwick. A furnished rental can be packaged and submitted to these placement networks as a steadier booking source.
Booking window: How far ahead of the stay date guests in your market actually book. It sets when you hold rate and when you start moving it. See the guide.
Cap rate: Net operating income divided by purchase price, as a percentage. It is a quick way to compare deals, not a substitute for a full pro forma. See the guide.
Channel manager: The layer that syncs your calendar, pricing, and listing content across booking sites so you never double-book. In a modern stack the PMS usually does this job. See the guide.
Comps: Comparable listings that genuinely match your property on location, size, quality, and guest type. Bad comps are how rosy projections get built. See the guide.
Direct booking: A reservation made on your own site instead of through a booking platform, so no channel commission. Worth building once the base is running, not on day one. See the guide.
Dynamic pricing: Adjusting nightly rates continuously based on demand, season, and lead time instead of running one flat rate. A flat rate is wrong in both directions: too cheap on strong nights, too expensive on weak ones. See the guide.
Feasibility screen: A fast kill-or-advance check on a property before you spend real money: zoning posture, suitability, red flags, operator feasibility. Mine is $250 per property with a two business day turnaround. See the guide.
Gap night (orphan night): A stray one or two night hole between reservations that default settings will never fill. You fill gap nights with targeted rules and pricing, or you lose them every week. See the guide.
Go/no-go: The clean decision every screen and underwrite should end with: advance the deal or kill it. The point of the work is the decision, not the spreadsheet. See the guide.
Guest-ready: The state where the property can actually host a paying guest: furnished, stocked, photographed, cleaned, systems live. I treat it as a launch milestone, not a feeling.
Lead time: The days between when a reservation is made and when the guest checks in. Short lead times are normal in many markets; they feel scary but they are not a problem by themselves.
Minimum stay (min-stay): A rule setting the fewest nights a guest can book. Set it too high and you starve the calendar; set it too low and turnovers eat the margin. See the guide.
MTR (midterm rental): A furnished stay of roughly one to several months, typically for corporate, medical, relocation, or insurance guests. Different guest, different marketing, and often a steadier calendar than nightly STR.
Occupancy rate: The share of available nights that actually got booked. High occupancy at a weak rate can still be a losing month, so always read it next to ADR. See the guide.
Operator feasibility: Whether the property can actually be run as a rental: septic, water, heating, power, internet, access, seasonality. Plenty of properties pencil on paper and fail here. See the guide.
OTA (online travel agency): A booking marketplace like Airbnb, VRBO, or Booking.com. They bring the demand and take a commission for it. See the guide.
Pacing: How your future bookings are filling in compared to where they should be at this point in the season. When pacing is behind, you adjust price or stay rules now, not after the empty week arrives. See the guide.
PMS (property management system): The software that runs your reservations, guest messaging, and calendar across channels. Mine is Hospitable; the point is one system of record instead of five inboxes. See the guide.
Pro forma: The projected profit and loss for a property: revenue, operating costs, and reserves, built on conservative assumptions. If the deal only works in the rosy version, it does not work. See the guide.
Rate integrity: Holding your pricing structure steady instead of panic-dropping every time the calendar looks thin. Discounts are a tool; reflexive discounting trains the market to wait you out.
RevPAR (revenue per available night): Revenue divided by every night on the calendar, booked or not. It punishes empty nights the way ADR alone never will, which makes it the more honest number.
RMS (revenue management system): Pricing software that adjusts your nightly rates from market data. I use PriceLabs, and it still needs a human setting the strategy. See the guide.
Seasonality: The predictable rise and fall of demand across the year in your market. Your pricing, min-stays, and expectations should change with it, on purpose. See the guide.
Shoulder season: The in-between stretch on either side of peak season. It is where disciplined pricing and surgical promotions earn their keep, because peak mostly sells itself.
Turnover: Everything that happens between one guest leaving and the next arriving: cleaning, inspection, restock, reset. Turnover cost and time are why very short stays are not free money.