The Memphis short-term rental shakeout, live
Failed means the listing no longer appears in our nightly calendar observation of the Memphis market. Earnings are each listing's last full trailing-12-month revenue while it was operating.
Withdrawn: we cannot date a listing's birth without biasing it
This section used to group listings by the year of their first guest review. That is the only birth date we hold, and it comes from the review corpus, which reaches 72% of listings still running and 9% of the ones that quit. A cohort curve built on it counts survivors and misses the dead, which is why it used to report the 2019 class at 100% still hosting after six years. We would rather show you nothing here than a curve we know leans one way.
Cohort membership needs at least 3 reviews. The newest cohort is still young; its number will fall.
Two factors separate the dead from the living
It is not the market. Failed and surviving listings sit in the same neighborhoods, and launch timing barely matters. The separation shows up in how the listing was run.
Ratings separate the two groups. Pricing does not, and we published the opposite until 2026-08-16, when we recomputed this study on every listing whose status we observe directly rather than only on the ones our review scraper had reached. Failure in Memphis is operational, which also means it is avoidable.
What the survivors have that the dead did not
Death rate by amenity, against a market baseline of 9%. The pattern is one story told three ways: listings equipped for families and groups, with real outdoor investment and in-unit laundry, almost never die. The under-equipped, apartment-style profile does. The worst marker on the board is a lock on a bedroom door: that is the signature of a home rented out room by room, and rent-by-the-room listings almost always go dark. Amenities travel with investment and property type, so read these as markers, not magic. The full breakdown, amenity by amenity, is in the amenity survival study.
Lowest death rates
Highest death rates
Amenities as declared on each listing. Rows need 80 or more studied listings and a clear gap from the market baseline; the laundromat-nearby and shared-building-machine rows are consolidated into a single no-in-unit-laundry marker. A travel crib does not save a bad operation; it marks a host who built for the guest they actually get.
How not to become the statistic
- Know your real number before you launch. The failed half of this market earned about a third of what survivors earn on comparable homes. Run your address and see what your exact property supports in its current condition, long-term and short-term, before the furniture is bought.
- Guard the rating like revenue. Slipping under 4.6 is the single strongest failure marker we measure. That is cleaning, response time, and honest listing photos, week after week.
- Price to the comps, not the dream. Homes priced 25% over their neighbors fail at more than three times the rate of everyone else.
- Check the permit before anything else. A new Memphis permit markets 3 bedrooms and 6 guests under Memphis City Code Chapter 5-44. If the numbers only work at 4 bedrooms, they do not work.
How this report is built
- The corpus. Full guest review histories, over 180,000+ Memphis reviews and growing nightly, for every Memphis short-term rental we track, going back to 2011. Review dates bound each listing's operating life.
- Alive or dark. A listing counts as operating if it appears in our nightly calendar observation of the Memphis market. A listing counts as dark when it no longer does. A small share of dark listings are conversions to long-term rentals or sales rather than failures; we flag those as our parcel matching improves.
- Earnings. Each listing's trailing-12-month revenue while it operated, from our daily market data. Failed listings show their last full year, which is the year that made the owner quit.
- Freshness. The numbers re-fetch from the live data layer on every page load and the underlying study re-runs every night. Nothing on this page is typed in by hand.
- Corrections. Spot something off? Email support@staywithlps.com and we will re-verify against the raw observations.
Memphis Airbnb failure, frequently asked.
What share of Memphis Airbnbs fail?
About one in five of the listings we track has gone dark: 614 of 3,273 whose status we confirm by direct observation. We no longer publish a typical lifespan, because the only birth date we hold is the first guest review and that source reaches 9% of the listings that quit.
Do Memphis Airbnbs fail because the market is bad?
No, but the gap is narrower than we used to report. Listings that quit earned a median of roughly $14,700 a year against roughly $20,000 for listings still running. We previously published $8,500 against $27,800, which came from the small share of failed listings our review scraper had reached.
What predicts failure best?
Guest ratings and pricing. A listing that slips below 4.6 stars carries more than three times the failure rate, and so does pricing 25% above comparable homes nearby. Launch season barely matters, and occupancy alone separates the groups far less than people assume.
Which amenities do surviving Memphis Airbnbs have?
Family and group readiness leads everything we measure. One caution first: how many amenities a host bothers to list moves the failure rate 6.4x on its own, so raw rates mostly measure how thoroughly someone filled in the form. Adjusted for that, and compared against listings of similar detail, a theme room runs 0.19x the failure rate, a pool 0.23x, a travel crib 0.32x. The cleanest line in the data is laundry: a free dryer you own runs 0.43x, a paid dryer in the building 2.08x. Same appliance. The difference is whether you own the building. Rent-by-the-room signals sit at the other end: a lock on the bedroom door 2.45x, paid parking 2.27x, breakfast 2.00x.
How often does this page update?
Nightly. The study re-runs against the previous night's market observation and the numbers re-fetch from the live data layer on every page load.
Email me when the shakeout moves.
One email a month with what changed: who is entering, who is going dark, and what the survivors are doing differently. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.