The Top Performing Airbnb Properties in the USA

Customers frequently ask, "What city is the best place to start a new Airbnb vacation rental." Every city has its pros and cons; regulation, seasonality, cost of ownership, and so on. We thought we'd let the performance of the best properties speak for themselves. 4,500 of the nearly 300,000 active Airbnb listings in the United States made the list.

The interactive map below shows where the top 1% of Airbnb properties in the USA are located. We filtered every single Airbnb listings to identify only those properties that had more than 20 reviews and achieved at least a 70% occupancy rate in the last twelve months.

Zoom into the map and hover over individual properties to view their Airbnb occupancy rates, annual revenues, and number of reservations.

Some obvious cities had the largest number of high performing listings. New York City had 831 listings make the grade and San Francisco came in at a distant 2nd place with 375 properties. Here is the list of the 25 Airbnb cities with largest number of successful listings.

While many known Airbnb hotspots were at the top of the list due to the sheer number of total listings, looking at the ratio of top properties to total properties reveals some interesting insights. Austin and Miami, which are generally considered great vacation rental markets, had less than 3% of all properties achieve 70+% occupancy throughout the year while temperate California cities outperform the rest of the country at over 10%.

One-bedroom units seemed to dominate the list with 2452 of the 4478 of the top listings. This would indicate that smaller units are able to see more consistent bookings year-round.  Here is the breakdown of the number of listings that qualified based on the number of bedrooms.

For those of you interested in what properties are making the big bucks, below are the 25 properties and that earned the most income in the group. Surprisingly, while there are over 1,000 listings on Airbnb that charge over $1,000 per night, none of them were able to achieve high enough occupancy rates to make the cut. The most that any single listing was able to charge throughout the year was $695, with an average of $520 for the Top 25.

Want to get the skinny on how the best Airbnb properties in your city are faring?

Input your city into MarketMinder and see how you too can make a killing renting out your place on Airbnb.