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.
Every class of Memphis Airbnb loses about a quarter of its members
Listings grouped by the year they earned their first review, and the share of each class still operating today. The consistency is the story: the shakeout is not a 2020 event or a rate-hike event, it is a permanent feature of this market.
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.
Occupancy separates the two groups far less than ratings and pricing do. 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 25%. 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.
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 Ordinance 5631. If the numbers only work at 4 bedrooms, they do not work.
How this report is built
- The corpus. Full guest review histories, over 150,000 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 four listings launched since 2019 has gone dark, and the rate is remarkably consistent across every entry year. The typical failed listing operated for about 21 months before quitting.
Do Memphis Airbnbs fail because the market is bad?
No. Failed listings earned a median of roughly $8,500 a year while survivors earn roughly $27,800 on comparable homes. The market pays operators well; the failures were earning a third of it on the same streets.
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: listings with a travel crib die at roughly 5%, children's dinnerware around 11%, against a 25% market baseline. Fenced backyards, fire pits, outdoor furniture, and in-unit laundry all sit well below baseline. Listings without in-unit laundry, apartment-style markers like elevators, and rent-by-the-room signals like a lock on the bedroom door sit well above it.
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.