The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week on Airbnb hosts who poured years and tens of thousands of dollars into prepping their homes for the 2026 World Cup. One Atlanta host spent roughly $60,000 on renovations—new floors, new countertops, new vanities—and is charging about three times her normal rate for a single week in mid-July. With less than two months until kickoff, most hosts in most host cities are still waiting on bookings.
The numbers from AirDNA, cited in the same piece: Philadelphia is 42% booked for the group stage. Boston is hovering around 55%. Every other U.S. host city is sitting on inventory.
If you’re considering buying an STR around an event—any event—read this before you wire earnest money. Because we’ve seen this exact movie before, and it didn’t end well for the people in the front row.
What actually happened in Phoenix
Phoenix is the case study every STR investor should have memorized.
Going into Super Bowl 2023, Phoenix-area hosts expected the same payoff that previous Super Bowl cities like Miami and Los Angeles had seen: roughly 80% of available rooms booked through game weekend at premium rates. By the Thursday before kickoff, only 52% of Phoenix rooms were claimed. Hosts who’d planned on $1,500–$2,000 nightly rates ended up cutting prices around 40% just to fill the calendar.
Here’s the part that matters for anyone underwriting a deal today.
Demand for Phoenix STRs going into that Super Bowl wasn’t soft. It was up roughly 60% year over year. That’s a strong demand market by any standard.
But supply was up 85%.
Arizona’s 2016 law that prevented cities from capping STR permits, combined with pandemic-era easy money and a flood of new operators, took Phoenix’s listing count from about 5,000 in 2017 to over 20,000 by early 2023. By the time the Super Bowl arrived, Phoenix metro occupancy was down 13.6% year over year—despite a sold-out, nationally televised championship game with 60% more demand than the prior year.
Read that one more time. More demand. Lower occupancy. Lower rates. Worse year.
The event delivered exactly what it was supposed to deliver. The market math overwhelmed it anyway.
What’s actually happening in World Cup host cities right now
Same story, different uniform. A few patterns worth pulling out of the WSJ reporting and current AirDNA data:
The rentals still on the market are priced higher than the ones that already booked. AirDNA’s chief economist made this explicit—and pointed out that some hosts are pricing as if they’ll get $2,000–$5,000 a night, with no actual evidence the market will pay it. Some will eventually drop rates to clear inventory. Others will sit empty.
In multiple host cities, booking pace is currently below the same period last year—meaning some markets aren’t even producing event-lift over a normal calendar. Hotels in those cities are softening rates and easing minimum-stay requirements. STR hosts are following the same path or holding firm and praying.
Airbnb is running a $750 cash incentive for first-time bookers and an aggressive marketing campaign across all 16 host cities. Note what that is: demand stimulation. Companies don’t run that kind of incentive when the demand picture is strong.
Hosts are also doing the math on prep costs, storage costs, and damage risk against uncertain returns—and walking away. One Seattle host quoted in the WSJ calculated $1,000 in storage costs alone to clear his family’s belongings out, before he priced in any risk to a brand-new set of bunk beds. He’s not renting.
The Atlanta host who put $60,000 into renovations is charging around $4,500 a week. With bookings soft and the calendar tightening, that math only gets uglier the longer the calendar sits open.
The math nobody runs before they buy
Here’s the framework I’ve used since 2004—across 2008, COVID, and the 2024–25 STR consolidation that flushed out a lot of overleveraged operators:
Underwrite the property on what it produces in a normal week. Not Super Bowl week. Not World Cup week. Not the highest-revenue week of the year. The week the property has to perform 50 times a year, every year.
If the math doesn’t work without the event, the deal doesn’t work. Full stop.
The event is upside. The event is the bonus on top of an asset that already cash flows on baseline tourism. If you have to count on the event to hit your numbers, you don’t own an investment. You own a high-leverage bet on a single weekend.
That’s exactly where the Phoenix hosts got caught. They underwrote on event-driven peaks. The peaks didn’t materialize because supply outran demand by 25 percentage points. The mortgage came due anyway.
Why year-round demand is the whole game
There are two kinds of STR markets, and the difference is the entire investment thesis.
Event markets and highly seasonal markets depend on a small number of high-revenue weeks to make the year work. Miss those weeks—because supply ballooned, because the team lost in the group stage, because a hurricane hit the wrong week, because the marquee event simply underperformed expectations—and the year is broken.
Year-round destination markets spread demand across 12 months. One soft week is one soft week. Not the whole year.
Savannah is the second kind, and the data is unambiguous.
Visit Savannah reported 12.9 million visitors in 2024, a 2.3% increase over 2023, generating
$4.1 billion in visitor spending. The mix is 89% leisure and 11% business and business-leisure. April, May, and June are the busiest months—but the city’s own tourism data describes activity as spread fairly evenly across the calendar.
That last phrase is the investment thesis in a single line.
A few things make Savannah’s calendar look the way it does:
St. Patrick’s Day brings one of the largest celebrations in the country every March—top-five in the U.S. by attendance.
Spring shoulder season runs hard from February through early June, with peak demand in April.
Summer beach demand at Tybee Island stays steady through August.
Fall picks up with conventions, weddings, SCAD parents weekends, and the Savannah Bridge Run.
Holiday season drives a strong November and December—Savannah does Christmas as a destination event.
Convention business anchors year-round group and weeknight demand. The $276 million Savannah Convention Center expansion came online in 2024 and is already pulling in major statewide events, including the Georgia Governor’s Tourism Conference.
Corporate travel from Hyundai’s $12.6 billion Bryan County plant is adding a baseline of business stays that didn’t exist five years ago.
And here’s the number that matters more than any of those individually: 68% of Savannah’s overnight visitors are repeat visitors. Repeat visitation is the bedrock of any durable tourism economy. Repeat visitors aren’t chasing one event. They come back because the city itself is the product.
How to put this into practice when you’re shopping for an STR
A few ways to apply this when you’re underwriting deals—in Savannah or anywhere else.
Underwrite the bottom 25% of weeks, not the top 5%. If your property breaks even or cash flows in low season—January and early February in Savannah—the rest of the year is upside. If it only works in peak weeks, you’ve inherited someone else’s optimism, and you’re paying for it.
Look at supply growth, not just demand growth. Phoenix’s lesson is that demand can grow 60% and you can still lose money if supply grows 85%. Pull the local supply trajectory and any
pending regulatory changes that might move the supply lever in either direction.
Avoid markets where a single event drives the underwriting. If a listing agent or seller is selling on “but the World Cup,” “but the Super Bowl,” “but the Masters”—the property’s fundamentals don’t justify the price. The event is doing the talking.
Favor markets with diversified demand drivers. Leisure plus business plus convention plus event-overflow is a more durable revenue mix than any single one of those alone. Cities with that mix don’t have to win the lottery to have a good year.
Be honest about operating costs in soft weeks. Cleaning, utilities, software, channel fees, taxes, insurance, and management don’t pause when occupancy drops. The math has to absorb that without the marquee event riding to the rescue.
Pull comps on actual operating data, not projections. AirDNA projections are useful directional inputs. They are not P&L statements. Pull the real performance of comparable units in your target neighborhood at the property level, then build the deal from there.
The legitimate version of optimism
I’m not anti-event. We host through every Savannah event from St. Patrick’s Day to the Savannah Bridge Run, and those weeks are excellent margin compounders on top of properties that already cash flow.
I’m anti-event-as-thesis.
The host who put $60,000 into renovations to chase one month of World Cup bookings made an emotional decision dressed up as a math decision. The Phoenix hosts who watched supply outpace demand by 25 percentage points didn’t lose because they were unlucky. They lost because they were betting an entire year on a weekend.
If you’re underwriting a property right now, the question is not “what could this make in the best week of the year.” The question is “what does this make on a Tuesday in February?”
If the answer is a number you can live with, you have an investment. If the answer requires a World Cup, you have a problem.
If you’re looking at STR properties in Savannah and want the actual baseline numbers—what comparable units in your target neighborhood are doing in low season, peak season, and on average, with full NOI build, DSCR, and cash-on-cash at multiple offer tiers—that’s exactly what we run for buyer clients before they write an offer. Reach out at sid@sidwashere.com or schedule a call at team912.com.
Run the numbers in real time with the Team 912 ROI Calculator, or pull a deal-by-deal underwrite using the STR Deal Analyzer.
Sources
– Wall Street Journal, “Airbnb Hosts Prepped Their Homes for a World Cup Windfall. They’re Still Waiting.” (April 30, 2026)
– AirDNA U.S. Market Reports, 2023 Phoenix Super Bowl analysis and 2026 World Cup host-city booking data
– Visit Savannah Annual Tourism Report, 2024
– Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Economic Impact Report – Hotel Dive, “Hospitality Market Spotlight: Savannah” (August 2025)
Own a home here and thinking about renting it out? Take a look at our property management in Savannah.
