Most US Property Managers Expect Revenue Growth in 2027

Three in four US vacation rental property managers expect their revenue to grow in 2027, according to a survey from Key Data. The vacation rental analytics firm found 76.8% of professional managers surveyed are optimistic about next year's top line, even though nearly two-thirds, 64.2%, expect competition for guests to intensify over the same period. For an industry that spent much of 2024 and 2025 absorbing rate compression and oversupply warnings, that combination of confidence and caution is itself the headline.

Confidence and competition are not a contradiction

Those two figures sound like they should cancel each other out. They don't. A manager can reasonably expect more bookings and higher average daily rates next year while also expecting a crowded field of rivals chasing the same travelers. Growth and rivalry have coexisted through most of the post-pandemic stretch: total nights booked in the US short-term rental market has kept climbing even as the number of active listings has grown faster, squeezing occupancy for individual properties in oversupplied metros. What the Key Data survey captures is sentiment among operators who run this as a business day to day, not a market-wide forecast. It tells you what managers believe will happen to their own portfolios, which is a different thing from what will happen to the market as a whole.

Why the optimism, and why the hedge

Property managers have reasons to feel steadier heading into 2027 than they did a year or two ago. Demand has proven resilient through repeated rounds of economic uncertainty, and many operators have spent the past two seasons tightening pricing discipline, trimming underperforming units and leaning harder on dynamic pricing tools rather than blanket discounting. That operational discipline is a plausible driver of revenue confidence even in a market where supply keeps expanding. The flip side, the expectation of fiercer competition, reflects a market that has not stopped adding inventory. New entrants keep listing on Airbnb and Vrbo, institutional capital keeps buying single-family homes for short-term letting in growth markets, and established managers keep adding doors through acquisition. More operators chasing a finite pool of travelers in any given destination means lower occupancy or softer rates unless demand grows to match, which is exactly the tension the survey numbers describe without resolving.

What this means for a manager's 2027 planning

The practical takeaway is that revenue growth next year, if it materializes, is more likely to come from rate management and ancillary income than from occupancy alone. Markets where supply has grown fastest, destinations across Florida, Arizona and parts of the Mountain West have seen some of the steepest listing growth over the past two years, are the ones where a manager's own forecast should be the most conservative, regardless of how the national number looks. Operators should treat the 76.8% figure as a sentiment reading from peers, not a guarantee, and stress-test their own 2027 budgets against a scenario where guest volume flattens even if headline bookings industry-wide tick up. Fee structure matters too: managers who have shifted toward transparent, all-in pricing have generally held onto conversion better as OTAs and regulators push harder on hidden fees, and that is a lever available regardless of what competitors do.

What to watch through the rest of this year

The real test of this sentiment comes in how occupancy and rate data behave through the next two booking seasons, not in the survey responses themselves. Key Data has not published the full breakdown of markets or portfolio sizes behind these topline percentages, so it is worth watching for the detailed report to see whether optimism is concentrated among larger, more diversified management companies or spread evenly across smaller independent operators, since those groups tend to have very different exposure to new supply. Operators should also watch how channel mix shifts: managers expecting tougher competition for guests are the ones most likely to diversify beyond Airbnb and Vrbo into direct bookings and corporate housing to protect margin. Whether that optimism survives contact with another year of listing growth will show up first in the occupancy numbers for spring and summer 2027, not in a survey taken now.