215,000 people downtown on New Year's Eve, then nothing
Thomas Rhett, Lainey Wilson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Elle King played Lower Broadway on New Year's Eve to a crowd Visit Music City put at roughly 215,000 people.
Four weeks later, your calendar looks like a parking lot on Sunday morning.
This is the most predictable thing about owning a short-term rental in Nashville and it still catches people. Every January I get a version of the same message: is something wrong with my listing? Usually the answer is no. January is the trough. It was the trough last year and it will be the trough next year.
Why the trough is structural
Nashville's demand is event-driven and leisure-heavy. Bachelorette parties, music, football, conventions, and a downtown that people fly in for on a Thursday. None of those happen in the third week of January. The weather is bad, the holidays drained everyone's discretionary spending, and the city's own calendar is thin.
The market compensates in the other direction later. Spring here is genuinely strong, summer is busy, and the last week of December pulls a disproportionate share of the whole year into three nights. If you annualize your January you will talk yourself into a decision you should not make.
What the rate picture is doing
The 30-year fixed has sat between roughly 6.60 and 6.69 percent through January, according to Freddie Mac's weekly survey — a full point below the October peak.
That does two things for owners here. It thaws the buy side slightly, which over the next several months means a few more investor purchases and a few more listings competing with yours. And it makes a refinance worth a phone call for anyone who bought in late 2023.
It does not change your January. Nothing changes your January.
The right way to spend a slow month
Every hour and dollar you put into the home in January is cheaper than the same hour in April, because in April it costs you a booked night too.
Deep clean beyond the turn. Not a turnover clean — grout, oven, inside the fridge seals, baseboards, under the beds, the light fixtures nobody has touched since the home went live. This is the month to run the full version of the quarterly walkthrough list — batteries, mattress condition, listing photos against the actual room — because none of it costs you a booked night right now. Guests do not consciously notice a deeply clean home. They notice the opposite, in writing.
Paint the touch-ups. Every doorway and stair corner in a short-term rental takes a beating from luggage. A quart of paint and two hours resets the whole feel of a hallway.
Replace the soft goods you have been ignoring. Pillows are the single most complained-about item in this business and the cheapest to fix. Towels go grey. Mattress protectors have a life. Do the whole set at once so the home reads consistent.
Re-shoot if the photos are more than two years old or the furniture has changed. Your first photo is most of your conversion.
Then leave the price alone. Do not panic-discount an empty January into a worse January. Dropping a $180 night to $99 does not create demand that is not in the city; it just teaches the market what your home is worth.
What we do with January
Same as above, plus we spend it on the boring infrastructure. Vendor lists refreshed — three names per trade with cell numbers, which is the list December's tornado week showed every owner they should already have — supply pars rebuilt, permit expiration dates confirmed for the year, listing content re-walked against the actual house.
On the money side, all of that work passes through at cost. There is no markup on maintenance or supplies at Boost, which matters most in the month where you are doing the most of it. If a mattress is $640, your statement says $640. If the painter is $310, your statement says $310. Our fee is 18 percent of nightly revenue and that is the whole of what we make.
I say it repeatedly because the alternative is common and quiet. A 10 or 15 percent markup on off-season maintenance is invisible on any single invoice and material over a year — and it creates an incentive for your manager to do more work on your house, which is exactly the incentive you do not want them to have.
The one thing to actually watch
Not January's revenue. February and March pace against the same date last year — the same comparison our Tuesday repricing pull puts in front of us every week. If March is pacing behind last March by more than a little, your base rate for spring is wrong and you have about four weeks to fix it before the good weekends are gone.
That is the number I would be looking at this week.
If you want someone to check your spring pace against your comps before it is too late to matter, send me the address. Get started here.