State of STR Revenue, Q2 2026: Growth Came Back on Both Levers.

By Jon Latorre, CEO and Founder, Pacer  ·  July 3, 2026  ·  6 min read

Across Pacer's managed book, same-store RevPAR grew 6.9% year over year in Q2 2026, and for the first time in several quarters both rate and occupancy climbed together. Summer is already pacing ahead of last year. Here is what drove the quarter and what it means for your book.

Every quarter someone asks whether the short-term rental market is up or down. This quarter there is a real answer, and it is a good one. Across Pacer's managed book, same-store, the second quarter of 2026 delivered honest growth: revenue per available night up 6.9% year over year, with rate and occupancy both contributing. After several quarters of rate carrying the load while occupancy softened, demand came back, and it showed up in both numbers at once.

What the market did in Q2 2026

Pulling live across 44 Pacer portfolios with at least twelve months of tenure, same-store, the book grew adjusted RevPAR 6.9% year over year. ADR rose 4.2%. Occupancy rose 2.6%. Read those together and the shape of the quarter is clear: this was not a discount-driven volume grab and it was not a rate squeeze on shrinking demand. Both levers moved in the same direction at once, which is what a genuinely healthy quarter looks like. It was broad, too. The median portfolio grew RevPAR 6.2%, and roughly two thirds of the book, 30 of 44 portfolios, grew year over year.

Rate up 4.2%. Occupancy up 2.6%. RevPAR up 6.9%. Both levers moved together, and that is what a healthy quarter looks like.

The momentum is carrying into summer. On our book, same-store, July through September is already pacing ahead of last year at the same point in the booking window: on-the-books occupancy is running about 2.5 points higher, and on-the-books revenue is up nearly 12%. Demand is not just present. It is arriving with rate intact.

What this means for property managers

First, benchmark yourself against the quarter the market actually gave you, not against a gut feeling. Same-store, the market handed comparable operators roughly 7 points of RevPAR growth in Q2. If your book was flat, that is not "the market was flat." It means the growth was there and it went somewhere else. The first honest question of a quarterly review is not "are we up," it is "did we capture what was available."

Second, when both rate and occupancy are rising, the expensive mistake flips. In a soft market the costly error is holding rate too long on dates that were never going to fill. In a firming market it is the opposite: cutting rate to buy occupancy that was already coming. With summer pacing ahead of last year, the discipline that pays right now is patience. Let demand come to your rate on strong dates, and spend your aggression only on the dates where pace, read against a current baseline, is genuinely behind.

Third, the growth that showed up this quarter was not evenly claimed, and the difference is the part you control. It is not market selection. It is rate strategy, fee design, length-of-stay pricing, promotional timing, and distribution mix, revisited weekly rather than set once. Operators who lag a rising market are rarely cursed with a bad market. More often, the pricing is on autopilot and the revenue work simply is not getting done.

What to do about it now

1. Score your own Q2 same-store before anything else. Same units both years, owner and hold nights out of the denominator. If you cannot produce that number, that is the first gap to close, because every other decision depends on it.
2. Reset your pace baseline to the last 6 to 12 months. Summer is pacing ahead of last year. If your baseline is stale, ahead reads as normal, and you will leave rate on the table on dates that are quietly outperforming.
3. Ride the firming demand with rate before volume. When occupancy is rising on its own, blanket discounting converts demand you already had into revenue you gave away. Push rate on compression dates. Hold your floors elsewhere.
4. Audit your fee-to-rent split under all-in pricing. Guests sort on the total price. A stale cleaning fee still costs you search rank and short-stay conversion, and in a growth quarter that cost is invisible until you benchmark it.
5. Know where you stand. In a quarter this strong, the difference between keeping pace and pulling ahead is decided date by date. If you cannot say whether you captured the market's growth, you are managing blind.

A concrete example

The bottom line

Q2 2026 gave operators the first both-levers quarter in a while: rate up, occupancy up, RevPAR up nearly 7% same-store across our book, and summer pacing ahead. The market did its part. The question every operator should be asking is whether their book did too. If yours grew high single digits, you kept pace. If it grew double digits, your revenue management earned it. And if it was flat, the growth was available and it went to someone else, which is a fixable problem: rate strategy, fees, length-of-stay, promotions, and distribution, managed every week.

Figures pulled live from Pacer's production database on July 3, 2026, across 44 tenured managed portfolios (12+ months on Pacer). All RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy figures are same-store: computed only on units present in both the current and prior-year period, on adjusted-available nights (owner and hold nights removed). Realized metrics cover the full second quarter, April 1 through June 30, 2026, against the same period of 2025. Headline figures are revenue-weighted across the book; per-portfolio median is shown for distribution. Booking-pace figures compare on-the-books July through September nights at the same point in the booking window year over year.