Memphis real estate statistics.
Short-term rentals, long-term rentals, crime trends, demographics, and growth. Numbers refresh on every page load. Sources cited in each section. Built and maintained by Longstep Property Solutions.
Memphis at a glance, loading the latest from across the data layer…
The questions Memphis investors and renters actually ask.
How much do Memphis short-term rentals earn?
The trailing twelve months across the full active listing base on Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com. Nightly rate is the median, not the average. Averages get pulled up by a handful of premium properties.
Source: Airbtics Memphis market data, cross-validated against AirDNA.
Which Memphis regions actually earn the most?
Memphis breaks into roughly 18 regions. Downtown, Midtown, and Cooper-Young carry the highest nightly rates. Outlying regions show lower rates but higher occupancy. Ranked by median annual revenue per listing.
Nightly rate tracks home size, not earning power. Whitehaven and Cordova rates look high because they are whole three-bedroom houses (many near Graceland), while Downtown and Midtown are mostly one-bedroom condos. Those bigger homes also book seasonally, so median annual revenue, the column that matters, lands mid-pack. Read the revenue column, not the nightly rate, to compare what a property actually earns.
| Region | Typical home | Active listings | Nightly rate | Occupancy | Median annual revenue |
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Source: Airbtics + LPS internal aggregation. Typical home is the median listing size in each region. The main table shows regions with at least 30 active listings; smaller submarkets sit under "show smaller submarkets" because their medians are based on fewer listings.
When is a Memphis property worth more on Airbnb than as a long-term rental?
For regions with enough data to compare, this shows the gross annual revenue an owner can expect from the two operating models, side by side. STR premium is the revenue lift before any cost differences.
Source: Airbtics for STR, LPS comp_scan for LTR. STR figure is median annual gross before management fee and operating costs; LTR is asking rent times twelve.
What does the Memphis short-term rental permit landscape look like?
Memphis Ordinance 5631 (effective 2022) requires a permit to operate a short-term rental. Most listings predate the ordinance and run under grandfathered status, which is why permit counts are far below the active listing base. The figures below track legally issued permits from the Shelby County register.
A low permit count is not a red flag here. It reflects how many Memphis short-term rentals are grandfathered in under Ordinance 5631, which is useful to understand before you buy or convert a property.
Source: Shelby County Accela permit register, snapshot updated weekly.
Which amenities actually move Memphis revenue?
The amenities below are the ones that set a listing apart, ranked by how much extra annual revenue they correlate with versus listings without them. The biggest movers are the features most listings do not have.
Source: Airbtics amenity impact data, Memphis-specific. Universal features (air conditioning, Wi-Fi, kitchen) are shown as table stakes without a lift figure, since nearly every listing has them and there is no meaningful group to compare against.
What drives Memphis short-term rental demand?
Memphis short-term rental demand sits on a deep visitor base: roughly 11.9 million annual visitors, multiple anchor events (Memphis in May, Beale Street Music Festival, Elvis Week, Grizzlies and Tigers basketball, the FedEx St. Jude Championship), plus steady business, medical, and FedEx hub travel.
Sources: Memphis Tourism (visitor count), LPS portfolio (length of stay), Airbtics (market size + grade). Total market size estimates median annual revenue per listing times active supply.
Thinking about renting your Memphis property short-term?
Longstep Property Solutions runs full-service short-term rental management across Memphis: pricing, listings, cleaning, and guest support. See what your property could earn.
How much does it cost to rent a house in Memphis?
The headline numbers below come from active, on-the-market listings across the Memphis-area property managers. Asking rents, not advertised aspirational rents.
Source: LPS comp engine, aggregated from property-manager portals citywide. Refreshed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
What does Memphis rent by bedroom count?
Memphis rent scales with bedroom count, with the steepest jump between two- and three-bedroom homes. The number after each value is how many active listings informed the median.
Source: LPS comp engine. Aggregated from current actives, asking rent only.
Which Memphis areas rent for the most?
These are the neighborhoods and suburb cities with the most data points in our active comp set. Ranked by median monthly rent.
| Area | Median rent | Typical range | Active listings |
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Source: LPS comp engine.
How does Memphis market rent compare to the HUD Section 8 ceiling?
HUD publishes Fair Market Rent (FMR) for the Memphis MSA each fiscal year. FMR serves as the rent ceiling for Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) tenants and is a useful baseline for affordability discussions.
| Bedrooms | HUD FY2026 FMR | Memphis market median | Market vs FMR |
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Source: HUD User Fair Market Rent dataset (FY2026, Shelby County, TN). Market median from LPS comp engine. Refreshed annually after HUD publishes the new fiscal year values each October.
Where does Memphis cash-flow best for a buy-and-hold rental?
A simple yardstick for investors: median sale price divided by annual rent. Lower ratios mean more attractive cash-on-cash math for a buy-and-hold rental. Shown for every neighborhood with enough active rental listings to compute a reliable rent median.
A lower sale-to-rent ratio means stronger cash flow. The cheaper a home is relative to the rent it commands, the faster it pays for itself.
| Neighborhood | Median sale price | Median annual rent | Sale-to-rent ratio |
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Source: LPS comp engine for rents, Shelby County aggregates for sale prices.
Own a Memphis rental, or thinking about buying one?
Longstep manages long-term rentals across Memphis and the suburbs: leasing, maintenance, rent collection, and owner reporting. Or drill into any neighborhood on our interactive map.
Is crime going down in Memphis?
Headline numbers from the Memphis Police Department incident dataset, year-to-date versus the same period last year, with the full 41-month trend underneath. Memphis overall crime peaked in mid-2023 and has trended down since, reaching a 25-year low in 2025 alongside a larger sworn-officer count.
Violent = FBI Part 1 violent offenses (homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, rape). Property = burglary, larceny, vehicle theft, arson. Source: Memphis Police Department incident reporting, updated daily. Most recent month is in-progress; final values post on the first of the following month.
Which crimes are falling fastest in Memphis?
FBI Part 1 categories. Every major category is down materially versus the same period last year. The single biggest mover is motor vehicle theft.
| Category | YTD 2026 | Same period 2025 | Change |
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Source: MPD via MCM ingest pipeline, year-to-date through latest closed month.
Which Memphis ZIP codes see the most crime?
Memphis crime is not evenly distributed. The 10 ZIPs with the highest incident totals over the past 12 months account for a disproportionate share of the city's reported crime. The "Trend" column shows the year-over-year direction.
| ZIP | Area | Incidents (past 12 mo) | YoY trend | Top category |
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Source: MPD incident reporting, aggregated by ZIP.
What time of day does Memphis crime happen?
Aggregated across every incident category, the hour-of-day distribution shows when reported crime actually occurs. We build this from the occurrence timestamp on each of the 328,000 ingested incidents, so it reflects when events happen, not when they were reported.
Source: Memphis Police Department incident reporting, occurrence timestamp.
Is Memphis crime falling faster than the rest of the country?
Yes. Memphis overall crime is down about a third year over year and off 43 percent from its 2023 peak, with every violent category falling by double digits. For national context, large U.S. cities saw homicides decline roughly 16 percent in the most recent year. Memphis homicides are down far more than that.
Memphis figures from Memphis Police Department incident reporting, year-to-date versus the same period last year. National comparison from the Council on Criminal Justice year-end crime report.
Why is Memphis crime falling so fast?
The drop did not happen on its own. A 2025 federal public-safety task force added federal law-enforcement resources alongside an expanded Memphis Police Department. Together they pushed overall reported crime to a multi-decade low, and the double-digit category declines on this page reflect that combined effort.
Sources: Memphis Police Department public reporting; 2025 federal public-safety task force; WeAreMemphis 2025 "25-year low" reporting.
Safety is one input. Local management is the other.
Crime data tells you where to look. Longstep's on-the-ground Memphis team tells you how a property actually performs, block by block. The full interactive crime map shows it incident by incident.
Who lives in Memphis?
Memphis MSA demographics from the most recent American Community Survey. Numbers aggregated across all neighborhoods and ZIPs we track.
Source: U.S. Census American Community Survey 1-year + 5-year, FRED MPHPOP population series. Memphis city HHI is the ACS 1-year benchmark; neighborhood breakdowns come from 5-year estimates.
What are Memphis homes selling for?
These numbers come straight from recorded Shelby County deed transactions, filtered to qualified arms-length sales (the same sales used for valuation). They cover the trailing twelve months and refresh as new records post.
These are actual recorded sale prices from the Shelby County Register of Deeds, not estimates and not asking prices. It is the same transaction record used to assess property taxes, which makes it our source of truth for what Memphis homes really sell for.
Source: Shelby County recorded sales (qualified arms-length transactions), trailing 12 months. Qualified arms-length sales exclude foreclosures, family transfers, and other non-market deeds, so this count is smaller than all-deed totals.
Is Memphis a good market for rental investors?
Memphis leads major metros for institutional and small-investor purchases. That share matters: it tells you how competitive the market is for owner-occupant buyers and how much rental supply gets absorbed by professional operators.
Source: United States Real Estate Investor, Housing Wire (2024 investor share data), Cotality (institutional investor share). Memphis is consistently among the top large metros for investor-buyer share.
Where does Memphis income sit, and where are homes actually selling?
Two reads for an investor: median household income (where higher-income rental demand sits) and the most active sale markets (where homes are actually trading, by volume, with the typical price you would pay to get in).
| Neighborhood | Median HHI | Population | Owner-occupied |
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Source: U.S. Census ACS.
Ranked by how many homes actually sold, not by price. This surfaces where Memphis is really transacting: the affordable, high-turnover neighborhoods investors target, not the handful of luxury enclaves.
| Neighborhood | Median sale price | Homes sold (past 24 mo) |
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Source: Shelby County recorded sales, aggregated to neighborhood medians.
Where are the largest Memphis-area schools?
Memphis-area schools ranked by enrollment, with their type and neighborhood. Useful for positioning a family rental and understanding where school-age demand sits.
| School | Type | Neighborhood | Enrollment |
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Source: public school district enrollment records.
Run the numbers on a Memphis property.
Demographics and prices set the table. Our investment calculator and local team turn them into a real return. Model a deal or have Longstep underwrite it for you.
Where is Memphis building, investing, and turning over?
Three public records together show where capital is moving in Memphis: the city's own growth plan, building permits filed in the past year, and the rental supply actively on the market. The figures below are citywide and update from the live data layer.
Sources: City and County building permits (Accela), Memphis 311 code enforcement, and the LPS Memphis rental data layer.
What is the Memphis 3.0 plan, and how does it read each neighborhood?
Memphis 3.0 is the city's adopted land-use plan. Every part of the city is assigned a posture that signals how the city wants it to change. Accelerate areas are steered toward growth and new investment, Nurture areas toward stabilizing and reinvesting, and Sustain areas toward preserving what is already established.
Source: City of Memphis 3.0 Future Land Use plan, mapped to neighborhood boundaries.
Which Memphis neighborhoods are seeing the most construction?
Building permits are the earliest public signal of where money is going to work. The neighborhoods below filed the most permits in the past 12 months, with the share that are ground-up new homes and the city's growth posture for each.
| Neighborhood | Permits (12 mo) | New homes | New commercial | Memphis 3.0 |
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Source: City and County building permits (Accela), past 12 months, mapped to neighborhood boundaries.
Where is code-enforcement activity concentrated?
Code-enforcement cases (derelict structures, junky yards, and vacant-lot violations) are a clean public read on neighborhood condition and, for investors, where there is distressed inventory to work with. The rate per 1,000 parcels normalizes for size so a large neighborhood does not just look worse for being big.
| Neighborhood | Cases (24 mo) | Derelict structures | Per 1,000 parcels |
|---|---|---|---|
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Source: Memphis 311 code-enforcement cases, past 24 months, mapped to neighborhood boundaries.
Find your next Memphis investment.
Growth posture, permits, and distress show you where the city is heading. Longstep helps you act on it: sourcing, underwriting, and full-service management once you own.
Memphis real estate, frequently asked.
How much does it cost to rent a house in Memphis?
A typical Memphis house, three to four bedrooms, asks roughly $1,375 to $1,800 a month. Smaller one and two bedroom rentals run about $840 to $995. Across all sizes the citywide median sits near $1,300. Rents vary by neighborhood and bedroom count. The Long-Term Rentals tab shows live figures, refreshed weekly.
How much can a short-term rental earn in Memphis?
A typical active Memphis short-term rental grosses around $32,000 a year, at roughly a $158 median nightly rate and about 54% occupancy over the trailing twelve months. Revenue varies widely by neighborhood, amenities, and management quality. See the Short-Term Rentals tab, or how Longstep manages STRs.
Is crime going down in Memphis?
Overall reported crime in Memphis is down from its 2023 peak, with violent and property categories both off their highs. The Crime and Safety tab tracks monthly trends from Memphis Police Department data, and our Memphis crime map shows it block by block.
What is the Memphis 3.0 plan?
Memphis 3.0 is the city's adopted comprehensive land-use plan. It assigns every part of the city a growth posture: Accelerate areas are steered toward new investment and growth, Nurture areas toward stabilizing and reinvesting, and Sustain areas toward preserving what is already established. See it by neighborhood in the Growth and Development tab.
Is Memphis a good market for rental property investors?
Memphis is one of the highest-investor-share housing markets in the country, with strong rental demand, affordable entry prices, and favorable rent-to-price ratios in many neighborhoods. Longstep Property Solutions provides full-service short-term and long-term management for Memphis investors. Talk to our team.