A
- ADR (average daily rate)
- Total room revenue divided by nights sold - what an average booked night actually earned.
B
- Base / min / max price
- The three guardrails a host sets so a pricing engine can move freely without ever selling the villa too cheap.
- Booking window (lead time)
- How far ahead guests reserve. Long windows reward early premium pricing; short ones reward last-minute discounting.
C
- Channel manager
- Software that pushes rates and availability to every OTA and pulls bookings back, preventing double bookings.
- Cleaning fee
- A separate per-stay charge for turnover. Now shown inside total price on most channels, so an inflated one suppresses conversion.
- Co-hosting
- Managing someone else's listing for a share of revenue without holding a lease or title - the lowest-capital way to add units.
- Comp set
- The nearby, genuinely substitutable listings whose rates and occupancy define what your villa can realistically charge.
D
- Damage deposit / damage waiver
- A refundable hold, or a small non-refundable waiver fee that buys cover instead - the waiver converts better.
- Digital guidebook
- The online house manual with WiFi codes, appliance instructions and local recommendations that cuts repetitive guest messages.
- Direct booking
- A reservation taken on the host's own site or by repeat guest, with no channel commission and the guest data retained.
- Dynamic pricing
- Automated per-night rate setting from demand, comp sets, events and pace - replacing static seasonal rate cards.
E
- Event-driven compression
- The few weeks a year when city-wide demand outstrips every bed and rates multiply - and where most of an urban STR's annual profit is made or missed. Austin is the clearest case in the US, with Formula 1 at Circuit of the Americas, SXSW, ACL and University of Texas home football weekends stacked into one calendar; a pricing engine that does not know those dates will sell them at a normal Tuesday rate.
G
- Guest Favourite
- Airbnb's listing-level quality badge based on ratings and review signals - now a stronger buying cue than the host badge.
- Guest screening
- Verifying identity, intent and party size before arrival to filter out the bookings that cause damage and complaints.
- Guest WiFi capture
- Collecting guest emails at the router splash page to build a direct-marketing list from people already inside the villa.
H
- HOA / condo STR restrictions
- Private covenants that ban or cap short lets independently of city law - and can be enforced by fine faster than a city can.
I
- iCal sync
- The lightweight calendar-sharing method between sites. Cheap and universal, but polls on a delay - a real double-booking risk at volume.
- Instant Book
- Letting a guest confirm without host approval. Favoured by ranking algorithms; trades screening control for visibility.
L
- Listing quality score
- The channel's internal grade of completeness, photography, amenity data and review health that shapes search placement.
M
- Mid-term rental (30+ days)
- Letting on monthly furnished terms instead of nightly. Stays of 30 consecutive days or more commonly fall outside a city's short-term-rental definition and outside hotel occupancy tax - Austin defines a short-term rental as under 30 consecutive days - so mid-term becomes both a regulatory escape hatch and a lower-turnover, lower-revenue operating model with its own demand channels.
- Minimum length of stay (MinLOS)
- The shortest booking a date will accept. Raised in peak weeks, dropped to fill soft ones.
N
- Night cap
- An annual ceiling on lettable nights for whole-home stays, enforced by the platform's own counter in strict cities.
- Noise monitoring
- Decibel sensors that flag a developing party without recording audio - increasingly required by permit conditions.
O
- Occupancy limit & life-safety inspection
- Two conditions that ride along with almost every STR licence: a hard cap on adults and total guests (often derived from bedroom count), and a life-safety check - smoke and CO alarms, egress, extinguishers, pool fencing. Both are enforceable against the licence itself, which makes them a delisting risk rather than a fine.
- Occupancy rate
- Nights booked divided by nights available. High occupancy at a low rate is not automatically a good year.
- Orphan / gap night
- A one- or two-night hole left between bookings that no minimum-stay rule can sell unless you relax it for those dates.
- OTA commission
- The channel's cut of the booking - the largest single line item between gross booking value and what the owner keeps.
- Owner statement
- The monthly per-property accounting of gross bookings, channel fees, commission, expenses and net owner payout.
P
- Pace and pickup
- How fast a future date is filling versus the same point last year - the early-warning signal to cut or hold rate.
- Platform accountability / listing-number display
- The enforcement shift that actually works: instead of chasing individual hosts, a city requires the licence number to appear in the listing and obliges the platform to remove listings without one. Austin's own STR page states the city will begin requesting removal of unlicensed properties from STR platforms - the same mechanism that emptied New York and cleared tens of thousands of Spanish listings.
- Platform host guarantee
- A channel's own damage protection - a claims backstop of limited scope, not a substitute for a real policy.
- PMS for STR
- The property-management system of record: reservations, guest messaging, payments, owner accounting and task assignment.
- Primary-residence rule
- Rules limiting letting to a host's own home, sometimes with a night cap, designed to exclude dedicated investment units.
R
- Rate parity
- Contractual or algorithmic pressure to not undercut a channel's price elsewhere - the central tension in any direct-booking push.
- Rental arbitrage
- Leasing a property long-term and subletting it nightly with the landlord's consent - operator margin without ownership.
- Revenue share / management fee
- The manager's percentage of rental revenue, typically 15-30% for full service, more for hands-off luxury villa programmes.
- RevPAR for STR
- Revenue per available rental night - ADR multiplied by occupancy. The single number that catches rate and fill together.
S
- Seasonality
- The predictable annual demand shape of a destination - the skeleton every rate strategy hangs on.
- State preemption of local STR rules
- A state law that overrides a city's power to ban or cap short-term rentals - the single largest swing factor in any US STR market, because it can void a local ordinance outright. Texas has seen preemption attempted rather than settled: SB 451 in the 85th Regular Session, captioned for the regulation of short-term rentals by municipalities and counties, was last recorded as referred to House Urban Affairs in May 2017. Always check the current session record before claiming a market is preempted.
- STR licence type (Type 1 vs Type 2)
- The owner-occupied / non-owner-occupied split most US permit regimes turn on - Type 1 being the host's own home, Type 2 a dedicated rental - usually with the tighter caps, density limits by census tract and waiting lists all falling on Type 2. Austin issues separate Type 1, Type 2 Residential, Type 2 Commercial and Type 3 licences; the definitions live in city code, not on the licensing page, so read the code before advising an owner which type they qualify for.
- STR permit / registration number
- The licence a city issues per property, often required in the listing itself and enforced by delisting non-compliant units.
- STR-specific insurance
- Commercial-grade cover for nightly letting. Standard homeowner and landlord policies commonly exclude it outright.
- Superhost / Premier Host
- Airbnb's and Vrbo's host-performance badges, earned on rating, response rate, cancellations and completed stays.
T
- Total price display
- Showing nightly rate plus cleaning and fees up front. It reshuffles search results toward listings with honest, low fee loads.
- Transient occupancy tax (TOT)
- The local lodging/tourist tax on short stays. Often collected by the marketplace, but the legal liability stays with the host.
- Turnover (turn)
- The full changeover between guests: clean, linen, restock, inspect. A same-day turn is the hardest operation in STR.
U
- Upsells / ancillary revenue
- Paid extras - early check-in, mid-stay clean, chef, transfers, gear - that raise trip value without adding a night.
W
- Whole-home vs private-room
- The core inventory split. Whole-home carries the villa economics and most of the regulatory scrutiny.
What people actually ask us
These are not answered here, deliberately. A short answer to any of them would be wrong more often than it was right, because the honest answer depends on your situation.
- What is a short-term rental, legally speaking?
- What is ADR, occupancy and RevPAR for a short-term rental?
- What is a channel manager and do I need one?
- What does dynamic pricing actually do?
- What is a minimum length of stay and what is an orphan night?
- What is pace and pickup, and how do I read them?
- What is the difference between Superhost and Guest Favourite?
- How does the host-only fee structure work?
- What is total price display and why did it change my search ranking?
- What is rate parity and does it apply to short-term rentals?