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Peak summer season is wrapping up across the Texas Hill Country, making July a useful point to evaluate what actually happened—not just how busy the calendar felt.
For short-term rental owners, however, determining whether a property performed well isn’t as simple as looking at occupancy or asking what neighboring homes were charging.
A property can achieve strong occupancy while leaving revenue on the table. Another can command an impressive nightly rate but leave too many nights unbooked. And increasingly, a significant portion of Hill Country demand isn’t materializing until relatively close to arrival.
To better understand these dynamics, we reviewed July 2026 performance across three of our primary markets—Wimberley, Canyon Lake, and Dripping Springs—using broader market data from AirDNA alongside July performance data from properties professionally managed by Hearth & Haven Vacation Rentals.
The results reinforce something we see regularly in revenue management:
There is no single number that tells you whether a short-term rental is performing well.
Occupancy, average daily rate (ADR), revenue per available rental night (RevPAR), and booking pace all tell different parts of the story.
And those stories can look very different even between Hill Country communities located relatively close to one another.
Before getting into the numbers, some context is important.
Our July Hearth & Haven portfolio included:
| Market | H&H Properties | Market Dataset* |
|---|---|---|
| Wimberley | 3 | 861 |
| Canyon Lake | 6 | 1,385 |
| Dripping Springs | 4 | 485 |
*Market counts shown are from the AirDNA datasets used for this analysis.
Our portfolio therefore represents only a very small sample of each broader market.
Property composition matters tremendously. A two-bedroom cottage shouldn’t necessarily be compared with a five-bedroom luxury home with a pool. Waterfront access, views, location, guest capacity, property quality, amenities, and availability can all influence performance.
For that reason, this report should not be interpreted as a direct apples-to-apples ranking of Hearth & Haven properties against every property in a market.
Instead, we’re using our portfolio as a real-world case study alongside broader market data to understand what July tells us about pricing, occupancy, booking behavior, and the changing Hill Country STR market.
AirDNA itself cautions that market-level averages can hide significant variation and recommends narrowing comparisons by factors such as location, bedrooms, amenities, and price tier when evaluating an individual property.
Before comparing markets, it’s helpful to understand what each metric actually tells an owner.
Occupancy measures the percentage of available nights that were booked.
Higher occupancy sounds great—and generally is—but occupancy alone doesn’t tell us whether those nights were sold at profitable rates.
ADR measures the average nightly rate guests actually paid for booked nights.
A high ADR can look impressive, but it doesn’t tell us how many nights remained vacant.
RevPAR brings occupancy and ADR together.
In simplified terms:
RevPAR = ADR × Occupancy
This makes RevPAR particularly useful because it measures how effectively a property monetized the nights it actually had available.
AirDNA similarly describes RevPAR as a measure that captures both how often a property books and what it earns when it does.
And July provides an excellent example of why all three metrics need to be considered together.
Wimberley remains one of the Hill Country’s best-known leisure destinations, but July’s numbers illustrate the tradeoff that can occur between occupancy and nightly rate.
| Metric | Hearth & Haven | Wimberley Market |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy | 63.74% | 56.40% |
| ADR | $296.69 | $397.90 |
| RevPAR | $189.10 | $224.00 |
| H&H Avg. Booking Window | 11 days | — |
At first glance, occupancy looks very strong.
Our Wimberley properties achieved 63.74% occupancy compared with 56.4% across the broader market—a 7.34 percentage-point difference.
If occupancy were the only measure of success, that would be the end of the analysis.
But it isn’t.
Our average daily rate was $296.69 compared with $397.90 for the broader market.
That difference ultimately resulted in RevPAR of $189.10 compared with $224 for the market.
Our Wimberley portfolio was effective at filling available nights, but July suggests there may have been opportunities to capture more rate.
That doesn’t necessarily mean rates simply should have been higher. Raising prices can reduce occupancy, and the mix of properties within the broader market differs substantially from our three-property Wimberley sample.
Instead, it demonstrates why an owner shouldn’t judge performance by occupancy alone.
A full calendar is not necessarily an optimized calendar.
The broader Wimberley market’s July reservations broke down as follows:
| Booking Lead Time | Share of Bookings |
|---|---|
| 0–6 days | 25% |
| 7–14 days | 12% |
| 15–30 days | 18% |
| 31–60 days | 17% |
| 61–90 days | 9% |
| 91+ days | 19% |
That means:
37% of bookings occurred within 14 days of arrival.
And:
55% occurred within 30 days.
Our Wimberley portfolio had an average booking window of just 11 days.
An average booking window isn’t directly comparable with AirDNA’s distribution of bookings across ranges, but directionally it tells us our properties were especially reliant on shorter-window reservations during July.
That relationship between booking pace, rate, and occupancy is something we’ll continue watching closely.
Canyon Lake was our largest dataset, with six Hearth & Haven properties compared with 1,385 properties in the broader dataset used for this analysis.
| Metric | Hearth & Haven | Canyon Lake Market |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy | 54.02% | 58.20% |
| ADR | $402.79 | $423.20 |
| RevPAR | $217.60 | $246.30 |
| H&H Avg. Booking Window | 13 days | — |
Unlike Wimberley, there isn’t one metric creating most of the difference.
Our occupancy was approximately four percentage points below market, while ADR was about 4.8% below market.
Together, those differences resulted in RevPAR of $217.60 compared with $246.30 across the broader market.
Again, this isn’t necessarily an apples-to-apples property comparison. But it gives us a useful benchmark against which to evaluate our portfolio and make future revenue-management decisions.
The booking data is perhaps even more interesting.
| Booking Lead Time | Share of Bookings |
|---|---|
| 0–6 days | 21% |
| 7–14 days | 14% |
| 15–30 days | 19% |
| 31–60 days | 19% |
| 61–90 days | 9% |
| 91+ days | 18% |
More than one-third—35%—of market bookings occurred within two weeks of arrival.
And 54% occurred within 30 days.
Our Canyon Lake portfolio averaged a 13-day booking window.
For owners, that matters.
An open weekend 30 or 45 days away can be uncomfortable to look at. The natural reaction may be to immediately lower the price.
But if a substantial portion of the market hasn’t booked yet, aggressive discounting too early can potentially sacrifice rate unnecessarily.
The challenge is determining when to hold and when to react.
Of our three markets, Dripping Springs produced the most striking July comparison.
Our portfolio consisted of four active properties during the period. The July portfolio generated 26 bookings and approximately $30,150 in revenue. Its average booking window was 57 days.
| Metric | Hearth & Haven | Dripping Springs Market |
|---|---|---|
| Occupancy | 66.67% | 50.00% |
| ADR | $430.67 | $476.40 |
| RevPAR | $287.12 | $238.00 |
| H&H Avg. Booking Window | 57 days | — |
Our ADR was approximately 9.6% below the broader market.
If we looked only at nightly rate, we might conclude that the portfolio underperformed.
But occupancy tells a different story.
Hearth & Haven properties achieved 66.67% occupancy compared with 50% for the broader market.
That additional occupancy more than compensated for the lower ADR.
The result was:
Hearth & Haven RevPAR: $287.12
Dripping Springs market RevPAR: $238.00
Our portfolio therefore generated approximately 20.6% more revenue per available night than the broader July benchmark.
That’s an excellent illustration of why ADR cannot be viewed in isolation.
This is one of the most common traps in short-term rental pricing.
An owner sees comparable properties listed at $475 per night while their own property is priced at $425 and naturally asks:
“Why aren’t we charging $475?”
It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
But an advertised rate isn’t necessarily a booked rate.
And even a booked ADR doesn’t tell the entire story.
Suppose one strategy produces a $475 ADR but only 45% occupancy while another produces a $425 ADR and substantially greater occupancy.
Which performed better?
You can’t answer that question from ADR alone.
That’s where RevPAR becomes particularly useful.
Dripping Springs illustrates this perfectly: our ADR was lower than the broader market, yet the combination of rate and occupancy resulted in substantially higher revenue generated per available night.
When we put the three markets next to one another, another trend becomes difficult to ignore.
| Booking Lead Time | Wimberley | Canyon Lake | Dripping Springs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–6 days | 25% | 21% | 28% |
| 7–14 days | 12% | 14% | 13% |
| 15–30 days | 18% | 19% | 16% |
| 31–60 days | 17% | 19% | 18% |
| 61–90 days | 9% | 9% | 9% |
| 91+ days | 19% | 18% | 16% |
| Within 14 days | 37% | 35% | 41% |
| Within 30 days | 55% | 54% | 57% |
Despite the differences between these destinations, all three had one thing in common:
Wimberley: 55%
Canyon Lake: 54%
Dripping Springs: 57%
And between 35% and 41% of reservations were made within just two weeks.
That’s an important piece of information for Hill Country STR owners.
Booking behavior has consequences for revenue management.
If more than half of the market’s reservations haven’t been made 30 days before arrival, looking at occupancy 45 or 60 days ahead without understanding booking pace can create a misleading picture.
Owners may see open dates and assume:
Sometimes one of those things may indeed be true.
But sometimes the demand simply hasn’t arrived yet.
The key is knowing the difference.
That’s why we pay close attention not only to occupancy but to pace—how today’s booked occupancy compares with where we would normally expect the calendar to be at that point before arrival.
The lesson isn’t to simply hold prices indefinitely.
Unsold inventory in a vacation rental is perishable.
Once Friday night passes, there is no opportunity to sell it again.
So revenue management becomes a balancing act.
Hold rates too aggressively, and you risk vacancy.
Discount too early, and you may fill the property with guests who would have paid considerably more.
The objective is to evaluate incoming demand and make adjustments as the booking window closes.
That can mean holding rates when booking pace is strong, making targeted adjustments when pace falls behind, protecting premium weekends, responding differently to weekdays, and using last-minute discounts strategically rather than automatically.
Our own booking windows add another dimension.
| Market | H&H Average Booking Window | Market Bookings Within 30 Days |
|---|---|---|
| Wimberley | 11 days | 55% |
| Canyon Lake | 13 days | 54% |
| Dripping Springs | 57 days | 57% |
Wimberley and Canyon Lake were heavily reliant on short-window reservations.
Dripping Springs was different.
Despite 57% of the broader Dripping Springs market’s July bookings occurring within 30 days, our portfolio’s average booking window was 57 days.
We shouldn’t overstate what that means.
Our portfolio consisted of only four properties, and differences in property type, location, amenities, event demand, and guest demographics could all contribute.
But it’s something worth watching.
Capturing reservations earlier generally provides greater calendar certainty and can reduce dependence on last-minute pricing adjustments.
This may ultimately be the most important conclusion from July.
Our properties generated higher occupancy but lower ADR and RevPAR than the broader market.
The opportunity is understanding whether additional rate can be captured without sacrificing too much of that occupancy.
Performance was closer to the broader market, although both occupancy and ADR trailed somewhat.
Here, pricing and booking pace both deserve continued attention.
Our properties achieved substantially higher occupancy while maintaining an ADR relatively close to market, resulting in RevPAR approximately 20.6% above the broader benchmark.
The portfolio also booked considerably further in advance than our other markets.
Those aren’t three versions of the same STR market.
They require different decisions.
There’s another reason owners should pay attention to these numbers.
Competition remains substantial.
AirDNA’s current public market data identifies hundreds of active rentals in each of these communities and notes that the exact composition varies substantially by property size and type. Its July 2026 public data also shows active supply declining year over year in Wimberley, Canyon Lake, and Dripping Springs, even while other performance metrics have moved in different directions in each market.
That reinforces the larger point:
Supply, demand, pricing, and guest behavior are not moving uniformly.
This isn’t the environment many owners experienced during the extraordinary travel demand of 2020–2022.
Simply owning an attractive Hill Country vacation home and publishing it on Airbnb or Vrbo isn’t a complete revenue strategy.
Today’s environment requires much more active management.
If you own a vacation rental in Wimberley, Canyon Lake, Dripping Springs, or the surrounding Hill Country, we believe four metrics deserve particular attention.
Occupancy: Are you capturing an appropriate share of available demand?
ADR: What are guests actually paying for the nights that book—not simply what competing properties are advertising?
RevPAR: How effectively are occupancy and nightly rate working together to generate revenue from your available calendar?
Booking Pace: Are reservations arriving when they should, or is your property falling behind the market as arrival dates approach?
None should be evaluated alone.
It also isn’t maximum ADR.
A property that achieves 90% occupancy by dramatically underpricing every available night isn’t necessarily optimized.
Neither is a property advertising premium rates while leaving half of its calendar vacant.
The objective is finding the right balance between rate and occupancy to maximize the productive revenue potential of the property.
And that balance changes.
It changes by season.
It changes between weekends and weekdays.
It changes around holidays and local events.
It changes as the booking window shortens.
And, as our July data demonstrates, it changes considerably between Wimberley, Canyon Lake, and Dripping Springs.
We don’t view this report as a scorecard showing whether Hearth & Haven “beat the market.”
Our portfolio is far too small relative to the broader market—and the homes too varied—for that to be a particularly useful conclusion.
Instead, the comparison gives us information we can act on.
In Wimberley, we’re examining the relationship between our strong occupancy and lower realized ADR.
In Canyon Lake, we’re watching both rate and booking pace as we work to close the performance gap.
And in Dripping Springs, we’re studying what’s driving the combination of strong occupancy, earlier reservations, and higher RevPAR so we can understand what lessons may be transferable elsewhere in the portfolio.
That’s what market data should do.
It should create better questions, which lead to better decisions.
July also marks an important transition.
The core March-through-July Hill Country travel period is behind us, and we’re moving toward late summer and fall.
The strategies that worked during peak demand shouldn’t simply remain in place because they worked earlier in the year.
Booking windows may change.
Guest demographics may shift.
Weekend and weekday demand may separate further.
Events, weddings, wineries, outdoor recreation, holidays, and changing weather patterns can influence each market differently.
For owners, this is precisely when understanding the data becomes increasingly important.
The July numbers reinforce a simple reality about today’s Texas Hill Country short-term rental market:
Performance is becoming more nuanced.
A strong occupancy number doesn’t necessarily mean a property maximized revenue.
A high nightly rate doesn’t necessarily mean a property performed well.
And an open calendar several weeks before arrival doesn’t necessarily mean demand isn’t coming.
Understanding performance requires looking at the relationship between occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, booking pace, property characteristics, seasonality, and local market conditions.
More than half of July bookings in Wimberley, Canyon Lake, and Dripping Springs occurred within 30 days of arrival. At the same time, our own portfolio experienced dramatically different results across those three destinations.
For us, that’s the biggest takeaway from July:
At Hearth & Haven Vacation Rentals, we use property-level performance data alongside broader market intelligence to continually evaluate pricing, booking pace, positioning, and revenue strategy for the homes we manage.
Because in a changing market, the goal isn’t simply to get booked.
It’s to make informed decisions about when to hold, when to adjust, and how to maximize the long-term performance of each individual property.
Wondering what your home could make as a vacation rental? Whether you’re a homeowner exploring short-term rental income, an investor analyzing returns, or a real estate agent advising clients, our expert team is here to help.
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