Port Aransas STR Revenue Estimator

Short-term rentals are one of the most consequential — and most argued-about — parts of the Port Aransas economy, so it is worth being precise about what this tool does and does not do. It produces an estimate of the gross annual revenue a vacation rental of a given size, in a given part of the island, might generate. It is a transparent modeling exercise, not a forecast, an appraisal, or a promise. Two properties with the same bedroom count on the same street can perform very differently depending on their condition, their views, their reviews, their pricing strategy, and the skill of whoever manages the calendar. No public dataset can see those differences, and this tool does not pretend to.

The most important constraint shaping the model is a legal one. Under Texas Senate Bill 1086, the state no longer publishes per-taxpayer Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT) receipts. That means there is no lawful, public figure for what any individual short-term rental collects, and there never will be one from the tax record. Lodging tax is levied on all short-term lodging together — hotels, motels, and vacation rentals alike — and is only reported at the city aggregate. Everything in this estimator is therefore built from aggregate or market-wide inputs and is designed to stay that way. We will not fabricate a property-level number the public record cannot support.

The first input is the average daily rate (ADR): the median advertised nightly price for listings of a given size in a given area. These rates come from a dated, point-in-time snapshot of active Port Aransas vacation-rental listings, captured through a scraping service and then aggregated. We group listings by bedroom count and by neighborhood, and for each combination we compute the median advertised nightly rate along with the number of listings behind it. We publish the median rather than the mean because a handful of ultra-premium beachfront homes would otherwise distort the typical figure. Crucially, we track the sample size for every cell, and where a size-and-neighborhood combination has too few listings to be meaningful, we suppress it entirely and say "insufficient data" rather than showing a median drawn from one or two outliers. When a neighborhood is too thin, the estimator falls back to the island-wide median for the same size and tells you it has done so.

The second input is occupancy — the share of nights in a year a property is actually booked — and this is where honesty matters most, because occupancy is exactly the number that no public source reports for short-term rentals specifically. Rather than invent one, we anchor a base assumption to something real: the city's Hotel Occupancy Tax receipts. Dividing the annual HOT revenue by the tax rate recovers the total taxable lodging dollars spent in Port Aransas in a year. Comparing that to the theoretical maximum — the active listing count multiplied by the citywide median nightly rate across all 365 nights — yields an implied, market-wide utilization rate. Because HOT receipts blend hotels and motels in with vacation rentals, that implied figure leans high for rentals alone, so we treat it as a reference point and anchor a deliberately conservative base within a defensible band. The tool then shows a conservative, base, and optimistic scenario around it, and — most importantly — lets you drag the occupancy assumption yourself, because your read on the market is as valid an input as ours.

The arithmetic that ties it together is intentionally simple and fully visible: estimated gross annual revenue equals the median nightly rate, multiplied by 365 nights, multiplied by the occupancy rate. We show you the exact numbers going into that multiplication so nothing is hidden in a black box. A 55% occupancy assumption, for instance, means the model expects the property booked a little more than half the nights of the year — a reasonable central case for a well-run coastal rental, but one you should adjust up or down based on what you know about seasonality, minimum-stay rules, and how aggressively the property will be marketed.

Finally, a word on what "gross revenue" leaves out, because the gap is large. The figure this tool produces is booking income before costs. It does not subtract platform service fees, credit-card processing, cleaning and turnover, professional management (often 20–30% of revenue for full-service operators), utilities, internet, landscaping, pool service, repairs and maintenance, furnishings and their replacement, property and liability insurance at coastal rates, wind and flood coverage, HOA dues, property taxes, or the Hotel Occupancy Tax itself. Real, spendable net income is a fraction of the gross shown here, and the fraction varies enormously by property. Use this estimator to understand the shape of the market and to sanity-check the numbers you see elsewhere — not as a substitute for a full pro-forma from a qualified accountant or property manager. It is a starting point for a conversation, and it is only as good as the assumptions you feed it.