Nashville STR revenue rose 18.7% last year. Hotels went the other way.
The Metro Tourism and Convention Commission met on February 12 and put real numbers on something owners have been arguing about for two years.
Nashville short-term rental revenue over the trailing twelve months was up 18.7% year over year. There are roughly 9,500 active listings in the market and they account for about 23% of all lodging revenue in Nashville. Over the same period, hotel demand was down 0.3% and hotel average daily rate was down 2%, on 2.7% supply growth. And New Year's Eve set a record: about 220,000 people downtown and roughly $41 million in economic impact (Metro Tourism and Convention Commission minutes, February 12, 2025).
Short-term rental revenue up almost 19%. Hotel revenue per room down. That is a real shift and it is worth understanding before you get excited about it — the hotel half of it has been building for a while, with downtown adding rooms faster than it has been filling them.
The number that matters is the second one
Eighteen-point-seven percent growth is a market number, not your number. It is the whole pie, and the pie got bigger partly because more listings joined it — although with the 30-year back at 7% and expensive money slowing the buy side, that pipeline is not what it was in 2021.
Here is the sentence to sit with: 9,500 active listings share 23% of the city's lodging revenue. Whatever your home earns, it earns it in a race with roughly nine thousand other homes, several dozen of which a guest is actually comparing against yours on any given search. That count has been climbing steadily for as long as the residential permit door has been shut.
Market growth does not distribute evenly. In a growing market with growing supply, the top of the listing quality curve captures more than its share and the bottom captures less. Some owners had a 30% year. Some had a flat one. Both of them live inside that 18.7%.
Where the sorting happens
A guest searching for a Nashville home in April sees a grid of photos and prices. They will look at maybe fifteen listings closely and shortlist three. Every bit of that sorting happens before anyone reads your description.
Which means the highest-leverage work on most Nashville listings right now is not the nightly rate. It is the listing itself.
The Boost part: what we do to a listing
When we take over a home, listing content is the first thing rebuilt, and it gets revisited when the house changes. Here is the actual work.
The first photo. It is the entire ad. It should be the single best room in the house, shot wide, in daylight, straight-on, with nothing on the counters. Not the exterior, unless the exterior is genuinely the selling point. Not a detail shot of a coffee station.
Photo order after that. Living space, kitchen, primary bedroom, second bedroom, bathroom, outdoor space, then the rest. Guests swipe in order and stop when they lose interest, so the order is a ranking of your arguments.
Photo count and captions. Enough to answer the questions that stop a booking — every bedroom, every bathroom, the parking, the stairs. Caption anything that could surprise someone.
The title. Specific and useful. Bedroom count, neighborhood, and the one thing that makes the house different. Not adjectives.
Amenities, exhaustively. Every single one that exists in the house should be checked, because amenities are search filters. Free parking on premises, dedicated workspace, air conditioning, dryer, crib, EV charger, whatever is actually there. Unchecked boxes remove you from searches before a guest can rule you out on merit.
The description's practical half. How check-in works, where to park, how many stairs, what the street is like on a game night. Managing expectations up front is the lowest-cost review insurance in this business, and it costs one paragraph.
We refresh this any time a home changes — new sofa, new paint, new hot tub, new anything. A listing that shows a house as it was two years ago is quietly advertising a different home than the one the guest walks into.
What to do with the NYE number
That $41 million New Year's Eve figure is not trivia. It is a demand signal for a date you can price right now, eleven months out. The single most profitable habit I know is putting real rates and real minimum stays on next year's peak dates while everyone else is thinking about next month.
Same goes for CMA Fest, big football weekends, and the marathon. Those dates are known. Price them early, hold them, and let the rest of the calendar fill around them.
What to do this week
Open your listing on your phone, the way a guest sees it. Look at the first five photos and ask whether you would tap it. Then go into the amenities list and check every box that is true. That second one takes fifteen minutes and it is the highest hourly-rate work available to most owners today.
If you want somebody to go through your listing line by line and tell you where you are losing bookings before anyone reads a word, get a revenue estimate from Boost Rentals. I will show you your comp set and what separates the homes above you from you. No obligation.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals