Ask ten short-term rental investors what they want to buy next and you will hear beachfront, cabin, or "something unique." Almost nobody says "a three-bedroom house with a pool in a suburb nobody has heard of." That is exactly the property that came out on top when someone finally scored the archetypes side by side.
Garrett Brown has been investing in short-term rentals for seven-plus years and now creates content for BiggerPockets. He ran five property archetypes through the same four filters, cash flow, appreciation, bonus depreciation, and 10-year market durability, and published the results in a free BiggerPockets STR Investment Guide. The rankings are useful. The number buried underneath them is more useful still, and we will get to it.
The Scoreboard
Here is how the five landed, and what each one is actually good at.
1. Suburban house with a pool. Highest overall score. Entry prices run $350k to $700k, well under beachfront or lakefront comps in most markets. Gross yields land in the 8% to 14% range, and it carries the lowest regulatory exposure of the five. Add Sunbelt population growth and you get the most consistent performer in the study, on the least interesting property in the study.
2. Lakefront. The appreciation play. Some lake markets are running 8% to 12% a year. At today's rates, though, day-one cash flow is rare. You are buying the curve, not the monthly.
3. Treehouses and unique rural stays. The highest ceiling of anything measured. Top listings clear $200k a year at ADRs north of $1,000 a night. See the next section before you get excited.
4. Beachfront. The archetype everybody pictures first, and a real business, but the entry price and the carrying costs put it behind the pool house on the combined score.
5. Downtown urban townhouse. Strongest ADRs in the study, in markets like Nashville, Austin and Denver, and the lowest overall score. Regulation is why. Dense urban markets have tightened hard, and that risk drags the durability score down even when this month's revenue looks great. A property type can print excellent nightly rates and still be the riskiest 10-year hold you own.
Read the Median, Not the Headline
The treehouse category deserves its own paragraph, because it is where investors get hurt.
Yes, the best unique stays clear $200k a year. The median property in that same category barely clears $20k. That is a 10x spread inside one archetype. The listings you see on Instagram are the top of a very long tail, and the tail is where most owners end up.
That does not make unique stays a bad bet. It makes them a high-variance bet, which is a different thing entirely. If you have the location, the design budget, and a genuine talent for marketing a property nobody is searching for by name, the upside is real. If any of those three are missing, underwrite to the $20k median and see whether the deal still works. Most do not.
The same discipline applies everywhere: pull comps at the 50th percentile, not the 90th. The 90th percentile listing is somebody's fifth property with a five-year review history and a photographer on retainer. It is not your baseline.
The $18,208 That Nobody Argues About
Now the number that should reframe the whole exercise.
On a $550k suburban pool house generating $82k a year, the guide found an $18,208 difference in annual cash flow between two management approaches on the same property. Self-managing with direct bookings on one side, using a property manager through Airbnb alone on the other. Same house, same market, same purchase price. The only variable was how it got managed and where the bookings came from.
Sit with that. Investors spend six months agonizing over beachfront versus lakefront, weighing appreciation against cash flow, building spreadsheets for archetypes they will never buy. Then they hand the finished property to whatever operating model is easiest, and give back more than the gap between the archetypes they were comparing.
Two things drive most of that $18,208, and neither is exotic:
- Channel mix. Every booking that comes through your own site instead of an OTA keeps the 15%-plus you were handing over. On $82k of revenue, moving even a quarter of your bookings direct is real money. We have written about the case for a direct booking site and five strategies that boost direct bookings if you want the mechanics.
- Operating discipline. Pacing reviewed weekly, cleaners who photograph every turnover, pricing that responds to the booking window instead of sitting where you set it in March.
Across the 300+ properties our team manages, that is the pattern. The property type sets the range of outcomes available to you. The operating model decides where inside that range you actually land.
How to Use This Before Your Next Offer
The honest read on Garrett's data is not "buy suburban pool houses." It is that each archetype is a different bet, and you should know which bet you are making before you wire earnest money.
- Want cash flow with the least regulatory risk? The suburban pool house scored highest for a reason. Boring is a feature.
- Playing a 10-year appreciation game? Lakefront, with your eyes open about weak day-one cash flow.
- Chasing the outlier? Unique rural stays, underwritten to the median, funded so you survive two slow seasons.
- Set on a downtown location? Read the ordinance, the pending council agenda and the permit cap before you read the pro forma. Not after.
And whichever you pick, decide the management and distribution model at the same time you decide the property, not eighteen months later when the numbers disappoint. That decision was worth more than the property type in the only apples-to-apples comparison anyone has run on it.
If you want a second set of eyes on a deal you are underwriting, or on whether your current operating model is leaving that $18,208 on the table, book a strategy call and we will walk through the numbers with you.