Underwrite Bardstown DSCR on This Year's Numbers Honestly

Sep 4

12 min read

Willett Distillery stone and timber buildings in Bardstown Kentucky, no people

This piece is written for a host preparing to talk to a DSCR or portfolio lender about a Bardstown property, not as financial or lending advice. Crest & Cove Creative does not underwrite, originate, or evaluate loans. What follows is host-read guidance on the revenue data itself, and on how the Conditional Use Permit process factors into what a lender needs to know before financing closes.

The core problem a Bardstown financing file has to solve honestly: AirDNA shows $44,300 average annual revenue on 181 listings; AirROI shows $36,045 mean on 135 listings; Rabbu shows $35,304 average on 76 listings. That's roughly a quarter of the market's own scale in disagreement, and a lender or a borrower who leans on the single highest number without disclosing the other two is building a file that may not hold up to scrutiny.

None of what follows is about how to get a loan approved. It's about assembling the honest set of facts, revenue range, occupancy range, and permit status, that a host should have in hand before that conversation starts, whether the lender is a bank, a portfolio lender, or a private note holder. This is not legal advice.

Which Number Actually Belongs in the File

The most defensible approach is exporting your own trailing-twelve-month payout history as the cleanest underwriting input, rather than handing a lender a single aggregator figure that may not survive a closer look. If you don't yet have trailing performance because you're buying, not refinancing, disclose all three market figures explicitly, AirDNA's $44,300, AirROI's $36,045, and Rabbu's $35,304, rather than presenting only the most favorable one as if it were the only estimate available.

Do not round AirDNA's $44,300 up to $45,000 anywhere in a lender-facing document. It's a specific, sourced number, and rounding it, even slightly, is the kind of small inflation that erodes trust in the rest of a file once a careful reader notices it. The same discipline applies to averaging the three figures into a blended number none of the three sources actually produced; that's not a more accurate estimate, it's a number nobody stands behind.

If your property's configuration supports it, the bedroom-level breakout is worth including as supporting context, not a substitute for the market-wide figures. Rabbu's own data shows 3-bedroom properties averaging $46,365 and 5-bedroom properties averaging $76,802, both above that source's blended average, which is a legitimate, sourced data point for a larger unit, presented alongside the market-wide range rather than in place of it.

Occupancy Disagreement Matters Too

The occupancy figures behind these revenue estimates don't agree either: AirDNA shows 49 percent occupancy, while AirROI shows 40.3 percent, nearly nine points apart on ostensibly the same market. That gap matters for a DSCR calculation specifically, since occupancy assumptions drive the revenue projection a lender is ultimately evaluating. Citing occupancy without naming which source and window it comes from leaves a meaningful assumption unstated in a file where every assumption should be traceable.

A conservative host-read approach uses the lower end of both the revenue and occupancy ranges as a stress-test scenario, alongside the higher AirDNA figures as an upside case, rather than presenting only one point estimate as if the underlying data were more settled than it actually is.

It's worth walking through what that stress-test scenario actually looks like in practice: running the coverage math against AirROI's or Rabbu's lower revenue and occupancy figures first, then checking whether the deal still makes sense before layering in AirDNA's more favorable numbers as an upside case. A deal that only works under the most optimistic scenario is a fragile deal, and it's better to know that before closing than after.

Permit Status Belongs in the File, Not as an Afterthought

This is not legal advice. The Conditional Use Permit structure matters directly to a financing conversation: a lender benefits from knowing upfront whether the property operates, or would operate, under an owner-occupied Type 1 or Type 2 permit, which constrains use and occupancy requirements, or under the more restricted Type 3 non-owner-occupied tier, if that tier is confirmed at draft to actually apply to the property's specific zoning. Disclosing permit status upfront avoids a surprise mid-underwrite that could stall or complicate the financing timeline.

Confirm your specific permit tier directly with the JCCPC before finalizing a lender conversation, and note in your own file whether that confirmation happened and when. A file that shows the permit question was actively checked, rather than assumed, reads as more credible to anyone reviewing it closely.

This matters even more for a refinance than a purchase-money loan, since a property already operating under a specific permit tier has real, established facts to disclose rather than a projected plan. If your current operation doesn't cleanly fit the tier you originally filed under, that's worth resolving with the JCCPC before it becomes a lender's question rather than yours to answer first.

Assembling a Host-Read File

A complete host-read file for a Bardstown financing conversation should lead with all three revenue figures, named and sourced, plus the occupancy disagreement between AirDNA and AirROI stated explicitly rather than picking one silently. It should include your own trailing-twelve payout history if you have it, and it should state your confirmed CUP tier and the date you confirmed it with the JCCPC. This is host-read hygiene, not a lending pitch, and it's meant to help you walk into a lender conversation with a defensible, honestly labeled set of numbers rather than a single flattering figure that might not hold up.

Keep this file updated, not static. A financing conversation that happens a year after you first assembled the file should be checked against current figures, since aggregator data, tax rates, and permit fee schedules can all shift in that window. A file that's a year stale is a file that risks presenting numbers a lender's own research will contradict.

What a Lender Might Ask That This Piece Doesn't Cover

This piece focuses on the revenue and permit data specific to Bardstown, but a lender's own underwriting process will likely ask about factors well outside this research's scope: your personal credit history, existing debt obligations, the specific loan-to-value ratio for the property, and the lender's own coverage-ratio thresholds. None of that is something Bardstown-specific research can answer, and a host should expect a real financing conversation to cover considerably more ground than the market-specific facts this series provides.

What this series can do is make sure the Bardstown-specific portion of that conversation, the revenue assumptions and the permit status, is as defensible as possible before you walk in. The rest of the underwriting process is between you and your lender, and this piece deliberately doesn't speculate about loan terms, rates, or approval odds, since none of that is something host-read market research is positioned to predict.

Revisiting This File as Your Situation Changes

A file built for a purchase-money loan looks different from one built for a refinance a few years into ownership, since a refinance conversation has real trailing performance to draw on instead of projected market figures. If you're refinancing, lead with your own actual trailing-twelve payout history first, and use the market-wide figures from this piece only as secondary context for how your property's performance compares to the town's broader range.

If your circumstances change significantly, a change in permit tier, a renovation that adds a bedroom, a shift from owner-occupied to non-owner-occupied use, rebuild the file rather than patching the old one. Each of those changes affects which figures in this piece are actually relevant to your specific property, and a file built around outdated assumptions about your own situation is arguably a bigger risk than one built on slightly dated market data.

Why Host-Read Guidance Looks Different From a Sales Pitch

It's worth being explicit about what this piece is deliberately not doing: it isn't building toward a recommendation to take out a loan, and it isn't structured to make Bardstown's numbers look more attractive than the underlying data supports. A financing-adjacent piece that only ever presents the flattering side of a market's data is doing marketing, not host-read guidance, and this piece has tried throughout to name the disagreeing lower figures alongside the higher ones for exactly that reason.

That same discipline should carry into how you present your own file to a lender. A file that only shows AirDNA's $44,300 figure, without disclosing that AirROI and Rabbu both report meaningfully lower numbers, is presenting a best case as though it were a base case, and a lender's own research is likely to surface the discrepancy anyway, at a worse time than if you'd disclosed it yourself upfront.

What Happens If Your Own Numbers Don't Match This Range

If your own trailing-twelve payout history comes in below even Rabbu's more conservative $35,304 figure, that's real information worth taking seriously, not dismissing as an anomaly. A property that's genuinely underperforming this market's own range may have a fixable marketing or pricing issue, covered in more depth elsewhere in this series, or it may simply reflect a smaller unit competing against a market where configuration meaningfully predicts revenue. Either way, your own actual numbers should carry more weight in a real financing conversation than any of the three market-wide figures cited throughout this piece.

A Closing Note on Realistic Expectations

None of the figures in this piece are meant to talk a host into or out of pursuing financing for a Bardstown property. They're meant to make sure that whichever direction you go, the numbers you're carrying into that conversation are honestly sourced, clearly labeled, and defensible under real scrutiny. A modest, honestly presented file tends to build more lasting trust with a lender than an inflated one that only survives a first, surface-level look before falling apart entirely under closer, more careful, more genuinely skeptical examination later on down the road.

If you take nothing else from this piece, take this: know which of the three revenue figures you're citing, know its source and its window, and be ready to explain why you chose it over the other two. That single habit, more than any specific dollar figure in this piece, is what separates a defensible Bardstown financing file from one that falls apart under a careful second read.

Apply that same habit to every other figure in your file, not just revenue. Know which tax rate you cited and when you confirmed it, which permit tier you're claiming and how you verified it, and which occupancy figure you used and from which source. A file where every number traces back to a named source and a confirmation date reads as fundamentally more trustworthy than one where even a single figure is asserted without a clear origin.

A Final Reminder on Scope

This piece is host-read guidance about Bardstown's specific revenue and permit data, not a substitute for speaking with a qualified lender, accountant, or attorney about your own financing decision. Crest & Cove Creative helps hosts market their short-term rentals; it does not evaluate loans, and nothing in this piece should be read as a recommendation for or against any specific financing product, lender, or loan structure of any kind whatsoever, now or in the future. Any Bardstown-specific figure named here is meant to be checked, dated, and re-confirmed before it appears in an actual financing file.

A One-Page Checklist Version of This File

If you're assembling the actual file to hand a lender rather than reading this for background, here's the condensed version of everything above in the order a DSCR underwriter is likely to want it. This isn't a substitute for the fuller sections above, just a compressed checklist for the moment you're ready to build the packet.

First, your own trailing-twelve-month export, gross revenue and nights booked, labeled clearly as your property's actual performance rather than a market estimate. Second, the two third-party figures side by side with their sources named: AirDNA's roughly $44,300 and AirROI's roughly $36,045, both presented as a range rather than averaged into a single number. Third, the two occupancy readings, 49 percent and 40.3 percent, again labeled by source rather than blended.

Fourth, your current permit and licensing status, stated plainly rather than implied. Fifth, a brief note on how your own numbers compare to the aggregator range, whether you're tracking toward the higher end, the lower end, or somewhere between, and why, if you have a reason. A lender who sees a host who understands the gap between their own data and the market estimates, rather than one who's simply forwarded a screenshot, is looking at a more credible file.

None of this checklist replaces a conversation with your own lender about what their specific DSCR program actually requires. It's a starting point for organizing what this research has already confirmed, not a guarantee that any given lender will accept it in this exact form.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which revenue figure should I use when talking to a lender about a Bardstown property?

Your own trailing-twelve-month payout history if you have it, since that's the cleanest input available. If you're buying rather than refinancing, disclose all three market figures, AirDNA's $44,300, AirROI's $36,045, and Rabbu's $35,304, rather than presenting only the highest one. This is host-read guidance, not lending advice; Crest & Cove does not underwrite loans of any kind.

Should I round AirDNA's $44,300 figure up to $45,000 for a lender file?

No. Round numbers, even small ones, are the kind of detail that erodes credibility once a careful reviewer notices the rounding wasn't neutral. Cite the specific, sourced figure exactly as reported, and don't average it with the other two disagreeing sources into a blended number none of them actually produced or would ever stand behind.

Why do AirDNA and AirROI show different occupancy rates for Bardstown?

AirDNA shows 49 percent occupancy against AirROI's 40.3 percent, nearly a nine-point gap on ostensibly the same market. This kind of disagreement is common in a market this size, and any occupancy figure cited in a financing file should be attributed to its specific source and window rather than presented as a single settled fact.

Does my Conditional Use Permit tier matter to a lender?

It can, since it affects how the property can legally be used and occupied. A Type 1 or Type 2 permit requires owner-occupancy, while a Type 3 tier, if it applies, covers non-owner-occupied use under more restricted conditions. Disclosing your confirmed tier upfront avoids a surprise mid-underwrite that could delay closing.

Does Crest & Cove Creative underwrite or originate DSCR loans?

No. Crest & Cove does not underwrite, originate, or evaluate loans of any kind, for any property, in any market, at any time, full stop. This piece is host-read guidance on how to think about and present Bardstown's revenue and permit data in a financing conversation, not a lending service or any form of financial advice.

Should I use a stress-test scenario in my own financing planning?

It's a reasonable approach given the range in this data. Using the lower end of both the revenue and occupancy figures as a conservative scenario, alongside the higher AirDNA numbers as an upside case, gives a more honest picture than relying on a single point estimate as if the underlying data were more settled than it actually is.

What should I do if I don't have trailing-twelve payout history yet?

Disclose all three current market revenue figures explicitly rather than presenting just one. A buyer without operating history doesn't have a cleaner alternative available, so transparency about the range itself, named and sourced with their windows and sample sizes, is the more defensible approach than picking the single most flattering number and hoping nobody checks.

Is the occupational tax relevant to a DSCR calculation?

It can factor into net income projections, since it's calculated as 1 percent of net profits, separate from the roughly 10 percent combined transient-tax stack. Confirm current rates directly with the city's finance office when building out a full net-revenue picture for any financing file you personally assemble yourself, start to finish.

How should I document that I confirmed my permit tier?

Keep a written record, ideally a follow-up email summarizing what the JCCPC confirmed and when, rather than relying on a verbal answer alone. If permit status ever comes into question during the life of a loan, that record is far more useful than a memory of a single phone call made months earlier, or longer.

What's the biggest mistake a host makes preparing a Bardstown financing file?

Presenting a single, flattering revenue figure without disclosing that two other legitimate sources report meaningfully lower numbers. A file built that way is more likely to raise questions once a lender or underwriter looks closely, compared to one that names the full range upfront and explains clearly how each figure is actually being used throughout.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

Bardstown's revenue data disagrees by roughly a quarter across three sources, and a lender needs to know that before financing closes. This is host-read guidance, not underwriting or lending advice.

Once your financing file reflects Bardstown's real numbers, let's make sure your listing's marketing matches what you're underwriting toward. We'll help you build positioning that supports the revenue picture your file actually documents. Send the live listing draft and the facts you can actually cite.

Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.