Accuracy of AIRDNA ?

[Alex Ballesteros]

I am a new investor who is on track to buying my first investment property here in Compton, CA and my initial investment strategy was to have the main house as a long term rental property and house hack by converting the dethatched garage into an ADU which is where I would live in. After my analysis, the income from renting the main house would cover a little over 2/3 of my mortgage, but now I am thinking if it would be more beneficial of having the main house as a Short Term Rental, so I used the Airdna calculator on BP and the annual revenue would cover my mortgage & then some (earn profit on top of my mortgage).

First, what are your thoughts on doing STR vs LTR given my area?

Second, how accurate is the data on AIRDNA? I know this mostly depends on how well executed I set up the Airbnb.

I'd love to hear your guys' opinions & recommendations!

[Kevin Pillow]

@Alex Ballesteros Airdna is okay because it's easy to type in an address on the rentalizer and have it spit out an approximation for revenue. May I suggest a different method I use with my own investor clients. 

Use the Pricelabs market dashboard feature (very affordable) to do a comp analysis similar to the enemy method:
1. Create a dashboard for your area of interest
2. Filter to match the number of bedrooms of the subject property
3. Filter for AirBnBs in the neighborhood of your property by using the box or laso tool
3. Then Pricelabs will generate a list of all the active airbnb listings within that box/laso that can be sorted by different categories and is downloadable 
4. The categories will show occupancy rate, listed rate, revenue and some other metrics
5. There is also a link to each property in the list so you can see the actual Airbnb listing for the property. If the property has high occupancy rates, lots of reviews and solid revenue you can go to their airbnb listing and analyze what they did to their property to get those kinds of results. Your job would be figuring out how your property compares and what you need to do to be in the same bracket as those best preforming airbnbs in your target area. You can also get a better idea of what your revenue numbers can be based on comps with other active airbnb listings in your immediate area. Here is a screen shot to see what it looks like when you filter for specific area. Hope this helps!