STR vs LTR market lens for property investors. Pulls short-term (Airbnb, Vrbo) and long-term (Apartments.com) rates side-by-side, normalizes to monthly equivalents and break-even occupancy — the spreadsheet you'd build by hand, in one run.
All notable changes to STR vs LTR Market Lens — Airbnb, Vrbo & Apartments.com will be documented in this file.
[2026-05-21]
🎉 STR vs LTR Market Lens — Launch!
Cross-Channel marketComparisonRow Headline — Every row carries a normalized monthly_equivalent_rate_usd so Airbnb, Vrbo, and Apartments.com rates sit side-by-side in one dataset. The first cross-channel STR-vs-LTR comparison actor on the Apify Store.
Break-Even Occupancy Calculator — Every STR row ships with a break_even_occupancy_pct — the minimum bookings needed to match the run's median LTR monthly rent. The single most useful number for an STR acquisition decision.
3-Platform Cross-Fusion in One Run — Airbnb (STR), Vrbo (STR), and Apartments.com (LTR) merged into a single unified schema and dataset. No more juggling three actors and three CSVs.
cross_listing_candidates[] Detection — Identifies likely cross-listed properties via 50 m coordinate proximity + bedroom + property-type match. Solves the "same property on Airbnb and Vrbo" question without needing a street-address join.
Live STR Calendar Enrichment — Optional toggle pulls forward-12-month availability from Airbnb and Vrbo per listing, replacing the static occupancy baseline with real bookings data. Premium-event billing.
Shareable HTML Market Report — Self-contained report.html with channel medians, break-even distribution, and cross-listing hit counts — auto-saved to the key-value store, ready to share with co-investors.
3 Search Modes — Location string (Miami, FL), coordinates + radius (km), or US ZIP code. Pick whichever matches your sourcing workflow.
Six-Event Pay-Per-Use Pricing — Charged only for rows received. Headline event fires only when 2+ channels return data — single-channel runs pay commodity rates only.
💎 User Benefits
STR vs LTR acquisition decisions in one run — Stop juggling Airbnb, Vrbo, and Apartments.com scrapers. One input, three channels, one normalized rate column.
Underwrite properties before you buy — Get the break-even occupancy of every STR candidate against the local LTR baseline.
Mashvisor / AirDNA alternative at pay-per-use prices — $0.012 per comparison row vs $35/month subscriptions. Cheaper for casual investors, broader than Mashvisor (we ship Vrbo, they don't).
Warehouse-ready output — Standard JSON-line dataset pipes straight into Snowflake, BigQuery, or Postgres for portfolio modelling.
Free tier for market sizing — 25 rows per channel for free. Enough to scope any US market end-to-end before committing budget.
🎯 Use Cases
Real-estate investors running acquisition due diligence on a target property — pulling Airbnb / Vrbo / LTR rates around the unit and deciding the optimal channel before purchase
STR operators evaluating market-entry feasibility across 5 candidate cities — sorting by the widest STR-over-LTR monthly delta
Property managers running mixed STR/LTR portfolios — flagging units that are mis-channelled and re-platforming them
REIT and PE acquisition analysts automating investor reports — piping the marketComparisonRow straight into Snowflake / BigQuery
