Data Firms Answer the Airbnb Collapse Tweet With Far Smaller Declines (July 2023)

From the record. This is a look back at July 2023. The desk wrote it on 11 October 2026 from sources published at the time; Stay Gazette opened in July 2026 and did not report this as it happened.

On 15 July 2023, eighteen days after a tweet of 27 June about an “Airbnb Revenue Collapse”, the travel trade outlet Skift reported that the tweet had been viewed more than 35 million times on Twitter and that the company named as the source of its figures, AllTheRooms, had still said nothing in public. By then three other data firms had produced numbers of their own. None came close to the drops of more than 46% in the tweet's chart.

The tweet was posted by the chief executive of a real-estate consultancy. Its chart showed the change in revenue per available listing, or RevPAL, in May against a year earlier: Sevierville, Tennessee, down 47.6%, Phoenix down 47.2% and Austin, Texas, down 46.1%. The text said revenue was down nearly 50% in cities such as Phoenix and Austin and warned that Airbnb owners in the hardest-hit areas could be forced to sell in a wave later in 2023.

What the other firms published

Key Data's review of the first half of 2023, dated 10 July, did not mention the tweet. It put US revenue per available rental, or RevPAR, down 3.3% at $89, average daily rate down 2.3% at $260 and occupancy one percentage point lower at 34%. As possible causes the firm named the cost of living, a sharp rise in the number of vacation homes on offer over the previous two years, or both.

Melanie Brown, Key Data's executive director of data insights, said the firm's own numbers were down in many of the markets the tweet listed, Skift reported. “However, the declines are not nearly as dramatic as what was shown,” she said. She had presented to three investor groups the week before, and all three asked about the AllTheRooms data.

AirDNA had answered within days of the tweet. Its chief economist, Jamie Lane, ran the same analysis on AirDNA's data and tweeted the result: “There is not a collapse in RevPAL happening. Is it down in 2023? YES. Is it down 40%? NO.” The average market on the list, he wrote, showed a decrease of 3.6%, against 40.3% in the original. In an episode of the company's STR Data Lab podcast published on 6 July, he took up the tweet with chief executive Demi Horvat as his guest.

On 14 July AirDNA published its review of June. In its earliest archived copy, captured on 4 August 2023, the review put US RevPAR up 0.3% from a year earlier at $214.82. Demand was up 14.3%, available listings were up 15.2% at 1.53 million, and average daily rate was up 1.5% at $333.19. Occupancy stood at 64.5%, which was 1.1% lower than in June 2022 and 7.1% above June 2019.

A third firm, STR Insights, put May RevPAL in the Phoenix metro area down 2.5%, where the chart had 47.2%, and in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, down 4.8%, where the chart had 45.1%, according to Skift. BiggerPockets reported AirDNA's figure for Sevierville on 12 July: three-month-average revenue down 9.4% from a year earlier, against 47.6% in the chart.

The silence at the source

What the reporting of mid-July could not do was check the chart against the firm it named. Skift reported on 15 July that AllTheRooms had made no public statement about the figures and had not dealt with reporters and others who were trying to verify them, and that its chief executive did not answer Skift's email. ABC15 in Phoenix reported on 17 July that the firm did not respond to its questions either.

The consultant filled in part of the gap himself. In an email to Skift that Saturday, he said AllTheRooms had sent him a spreadsheet covering revenue, listings and RevPAL for every US county back to 2015, and that he had combined the counties into metro areas and made the table himself. He said he had made no error and had checked the work three times, and he had not retracted the tweet. AllTheRooms, he said, had not answered his questions about the gap with AirDNA, and Airbnb had not answered his requests for its own data. KXAN had reported on 30 June that an Airbnb spokesperson said the company could not provide that data.

Skift's judgment was that the drop had been shown in error and that AllTheRooms' reputation had suffered, partly through its silence. It added a caution that covered every firm in the argument: the vendors had few common standards for how they gathered listings or worked out their measures.

What Airbnb, managers and a professor said

Airbnb's statement, as Skift carried it, said the figures did not match its own data and that nights and experiences booked had grown 19% in the first quarter of 2023 from a year earlier. The founder of the trade site Rental Scale-Up, writing on 17 July, called that an answer about the company's totals that left out individual hosts. On PriceLabs' Market Dashboard he found average revenue per listing in Austin down approximately 21% in May. That was well short of 46%, he wrote, and it was no slight correction either.

AirDNA's statement on Austin, issued on 28 June and carried by the television station KXAN, gave two numbers: between May 2022 and May 2023, available listings in the metro area rose 16% and demand rose 7%.

In Phoenix, the co-owner of a property management company with approximately 50 short-term rentals told ABC15 she did not believe the number when she saw it. Lane, the station reported, said AirDNA's data showed revenue down by three to 10% across the country, which he described as a moderation after the high bookings of 2020 through 2022. Mark Stapp, a real-estate professor at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, took up the forced-selling warning. Short-term rentals were about 1.2% of the overall housing market, he said, and putting all of an estimated 23,000 up for sale together would move the Valley's housing market only a little.

Eric Schueller, executive vice president of revenue at the property manager Evolve, told BiggerPockets that Evolve's own analysis sat closest to AirDNA's, and that supply was growing faster than demand, which left total revenue per property lower than a year before.

The Gazette Verdict, looking back

The other firms' figures backed the direction of the tweet and none backed its size, and the company whose name was on the chart made the confusion worse by staying silent. The other numbers on record showed less revenue per listing or per available night: 3.3% less across the US half-year at Key Data, 3.6% across the tweet's own markets at AirDNA, 2.5% in Phoenix at STR Insights, about 21% in Austin on PriceLabs' dashboard. None showed 47%. The cost fell on hosts, managers and investors, who could not tell a 3% problem from a 47% one while AllTheRooms did not say if the table matched its data. Key Data's Melanie Brown took the question from three investor groups in one week. Airbnb paid nothing: it pointed to bookings up 19%. For a host, one vendor's table is a claim. Check a number about your market against a second source and your own calendar before you act on it.

The other side

The consultant had not retracted by mid-July, and none of the reports showed where his arithmetic failed. He said he worked from county data the firm itself sent him, checked it three times and asked AllTheRooms and Airbnb for figures to settle it. By his account neither had answered. The firms that rebutted him sell their own data and, by Skift's account, share few standards; AirDNA later revised its own June numbers down. And the direction held. Supply in Austin grew 16% against 7% for demand on AirDNA's count, and AirDNA's pacing pointed to RevPAR about 8.8% lower for the rest of summer. A national average of plus 0.3% did not help a host in a market like that.

What it meant for hosts

For a host or manager in July 2023, the argument came down to which number to plan on. The reviews published that month offered some practical points.

Plan on less per listing than in 2022, and far less than half gone. AirDNA's pacing for the rest of the summer through Labor Day had demand 6.6% ahead and rates up 1.4%. If that pace held, it wrote, RevPAR would come in about 8.8% lower.
Watch supply in your own market. AirDNA counted listing growth of 33.5% in Phoenix and 23.4% in Los Angeles in June, against 15.2% nationally.
Price for late bookers. AirDNA said guests booked a June stay 44 days ahead on average in 2023, against 54 days in 2022. Key Data measured the US booking window at 41.2 days, down from 45.1, and suggested waiting longer before cutting rates.
Ask what a figure measures. The chart was revenue per available listing in May by metro area, compared with a year earlier and, by the consultant's account, built by him from county files. The national reviews measured the whole country.

Since then

AirDNA later revised its June 2023 figures: the same review, as last updated on 5 May 2026, says methodology improvements led to updates as of 20 December 2023. It now gives June 2023 RevPAR as down 2.8% at $201.18, occupancy as 62.38%, 1.8% lower than a year earlier, average daily rate down 1% at $322.51 and demand growth of 9.7%.

Sources

Skift (Wayback Machine capture of 18 July 2023), Behind the Source of the Viral ‘Airbnb Collapse’ Data (15 July 2023).
AirDNA (earliest archived copy; Wayback Machine capture of 4 August 2023), U.S. Market Review: Demand Accelerates with Big Booking Bump (14 July 2023).
Key Data (Wayback Machine capture of 29 September 2023, which shows the date), How The Short Term Rental Market Shaped Up During The First Half Of 2023 (10 July 2023).
ABC15 Arizona, How much are revenues really down for short-term rentals? (17 July 2023).
BiggerPockets, Is the Airbnb Collapse Actually Happening? Here’s What We Know (12 July 2023).
Rental Scale-Up, The Airbnb collapse is real? - a closer look (17 July 2023).
AirDNA (STR Data Lab podcast, episode 39), The Airbnb Collapse with Demi Horvat (6 July 2023).
KXAN Austin, Analyst warning of local Airbnb collapse says Austin has more rentals than homes for sale (30 June 2023).
AirDNA (the same review as later revised; page last updated 5 May 2026), U.S. Market Review: Demand Accelerates with Big Booking Bump (5 May 2026).

Data Firms Answer the Airbnb Collapse Tweet With Far Smaller Declines