Case Study · Southeast urban / coastal market
+30% same-store Adj. RevPAR across a 128-unit urban coastal portfolio
A Southeast coastal operator running a multi-building urban portfolio grew same-store revenue from $2.16M to $2.67M, with occupancy climbing from 52% to 70% while nightly rate held. Source: KeyData reservations, same-store view.
RevPAR lift
+30%
Units
128
Same-store revenue
$2.16M → $2.67M
Engagement
17 months
Client snapshot
Market
Southeast urban / coastal market (year-round demand, heavy last-minute booking behavior)
Units
128
Pms
Hostaway
Pricing Tool
PriceLabs
Engagement
17 months and ongoing
Scope
Full revenue management: rate strategy, stay-length pricing, distribution expansion, seasonal demand strategy, owner-ready reporting
The starting point
What we walked into
- 01A dense urban portfolio in a market where the calendar is won or lost inside ten days: the average booking arrives barely a week before check-in. Without daily pacing discipline, soft weeks are unrecoverable by the time they are visible.
- 02Occupancy sat at 52% while rate held up, the classic profile of a book priced adequately but distributed and paced passively.
- 03Summer was the weak flank: July through September was running at roughly half the guest nights of the winter peak.
- 04Distribution leaned almost entirely on Airbnb and Vrbo. Hotel-adjacent channels were not in the mix at all despite hotel-like urban inventory.
The work
What Pacer did
Occupancy at a held rate
Guest nights grew 29% on the same cohort while average nightly rate stayed within a few dollars. The lift was engineered through pacing, stay-length, and distribution rather than markdowns, which is the difference between growing revenue and buying it.
Summer demand rebuild
July-September guest nights nearly doubled (+93%) year over year on identical inventory. Structured rate ladders and stay-length flexibility opened the shoulder months the portfolio used to concede.
Hotel-channel distribution
Urban condo-hotel inventory belongs where hotel shoppers search. Activated Hotels.com and Expedia from a standing start (roughly $190K of first-year booked rent between them) and grew Booking.com by ~50%, diversifying away from a two-channel dependence.
Last-minute capture as a system
With a ~8-day average booking window, the final week is the whole game. Daily rate movement and minimum-stay releases inside 14 days turned late-breaking demand into filled nights instead of dark ones.
Owner-ready reporting
Monthly same-store narratives gave the operator a defensible story for owners while the occupancy climb was in progress, protecting the strategy from mid-flight reversals.
Results
Same-store, year over year
Only units active in both the trailing 12 months and the prior 12 months. Pure revenue management impact, no mix-shift effects.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adj. RevPAR | $46 | $60 | +30% |
| Same-store revenue | $2.16M | $2.67M | +$507K |
| Occupancy | 52% | 70% | +18 pts |
| Summer guest nights (Jul-Sep) | 5,086 | 9,829 | +93% |
| Avg. nightly rate | $89 | $85 | Held within 4% |
| Same-store units | 128 | 128 | Same cohort |
Takeaways
What this means for operators
- An 18-point occupancy gain at a held rate is a distribution and pacing outcome, not a pricing trick. The revenue was already latent in the calendar.
- Urban STR inventory competes with hotels, so it should be sold where hotel shoppers search. The hotel channels were the largest untapped source of demand.
- In sub-10-day booking-window markets, revenue management is a daily discipline. Weekly check-ins structurally cannot catch the demand that decides the month.
- The engagement is ongoing, and the portfolio has since grown beyond the same-store cohort measured here.
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