Short-Term Rental Market Data via API (2026)
If you're building a tool, an underwriting model, or a pricing engine, you don't want a dashboard — you want the raw numbers in your code. Here are the three real ways to get Airbnb / STR market data programmatically, compared honestly.
The three ways to get STR market data
| Approach | What you get | Effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Scrape it yourself | Whatever you can parse from Airbnb/Vrbo listings and calendars | High — anti-bot walls, proxies, constant maintenance | Teams with scraping infra who need bespoke fields |
| 2. Dashboard + CSV export (e.g. AirDNA) | Rich market analytics, manual or limited-API export | Low to use, but not built for programmatic pipelines | Analysts and investors doing research by hand |
| 3. A dedicated data API (e.g. STRmetrics) | Clean JSON: occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, revenue per market | Lowest — one HTTP call, no scraping | Developers & PMs wiring data into their own product |
When you want an API, not a dashboard
Analytics platforms like AirDNA are excellent for research — but they're built for humans clicking a dashboard, not for a script that needs occupancy for 40 markets every morning. If your use case is programmatic — a pricing model, an investor tool, a market-monitoring feature inside your own app — a purpose-built market-data API is the shorter path.
Featured API — STRmetrics
- Self-serve: subscribe, get an API key, start calling — no sales call
- Simple REST + JSON; drop it straight into your pipeline
- Free sample endpoint to test the shape before you pay
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
"https://strmetrics-api-production.up.railway.app/v1/market?city=austin-tx"
# example response shape (illustrative values):
# → { "occupancy": 0.63, "adr": 214.0, "revpar": 134.8, "revenue": 2984200 }
See STRmetrics pricing →
Try the free sample endpoint →
How to choose
- Doing research by hand? Use a dashboard — start with the best analytics tools.
- Setting nightly prices? That's a pricing engine's job — see the best dynamic-pricing tools.
- Building software that needs the raw numbers? Use a data API like STRmetrics and skip the scraping.
How we pick
We weigh real-world value for STR operators and builders: data quality, how easily it fits a real workflow, transparent pricing, and time saved. We link to tools we'd use ourselves and label affiliate links in our disclosure. STRmetrics is a sister project of ours (a data API, not one of the affiliate tools above), so that link is a plain editorial one.