Underwrite Prescott, AZ DSCR on This Year Only

Aug 29

11 min read

Updated: Aug 30

Prescott courthouse, butte, or civic landmark, no people in foreground. Wikimedia: Granite Dells overview.jpg

If you are pulling together numbers for a Prescott short-term rental, the first mistake is easy to make and hard to walk back: reaching for Phoenix figures because they are bigger, more familiar, or easier to find online. Phoenix is a five-figure-listing city with its own guest pattern, its own seasonality, and its own revenue line. Prescott is a smaller, highland market with a different visitor, a different peak, and a materially lower typical revenue number. Mixing the two in a financing packet does not make the house look stronger. It makes the packet look like it was assembled by someone who never checked which town they were actually writing about.

This piece walks through what a recent Air ROI extract for Prescott actually shows, how it compares to Phoenix on the same dataset window, and what a host or a buyer should be reading before numbers go anywhere near a lender or a partner. It also covers what the extract cannot tell you, which is just as important as what it can, because a packet that leans on a listing scrape for facts a scrape was never built to confirm is a packet with a gap in it. This is not legal advice, and it is not underwriting advice either. It is a plain read of one town's data so that whatever packet gets built next starts from the right line.

The goal here is narrow on purpose. This is not a pitch for or against buying in Prescott, and it is not a projection of what any specific property will earn going forward. It is a record of what one extract, covering one twelve-month window, actually says about typical performance across 801 active listings, so that anyone building a case for financing has a real baseline to start from instead of a borrowed one.

Start With the Prescott Line, Not the Phoenix Line

On the current extract, covering August 2025 through July 2026, typical listings in Prescott earned about $25,061 over the trailing year, drawn from 801 active rentals. That is the number that belongs on a Prescott property. Phoenix, on the same extract window, shows typical listings earning about $35,247 from 5,820 active rentals. Those are two different files, two different guest bases, and two different supply counts. A Phoenix number dropped into a Prescott packet is not a rounding error. It is a different market wearing the wrong label, and anyone who has spent time comparing the two towns side by side would catch the substitution immediately.

The gap is not just about the metro-versus-mountain-town size difference. Phoenix draws a year-round urban and business traveler pool across nearly six thousand listings. Prescott draws a smaller, more seasonal highland visitor across roughly eight hundred listings, many of them coming specifically for the town's character, its courthouse square, and its cooler elevation rather than passing through on a business trip. A lender or partner comparing the two numbers side by side should see two labeled columns, not one blended guess dressed up as a single market average.

Keeping the two towns on separate lines also protects the host later, not just the lender now. If a packet quotes Phoenix's higher number and the property underperforms that figure in its first year of operation, the gap between projection and reality becomes a problem the host has to explain. If the packet quotes Prescott's actual figure from the start, the property has a fair chance of tracking close to what was promised, because the number it was promised against was the right one to begin with.

What the Prescott Extract Actually Shows

Beyond the headline revenue figure, the extract carries a handful of numbers that matter for anyone trying to model a specific property. Average daily rate sits at about $220. Occupancy comes in at 40.1 percent. Revenue per available room, or RevPAR, lands at about $86. Those three figures together explain how the $25,061 typical revenue number gets built: a moderate rate, a moderate occupancy rate, and a RevPAR that reflects both working together across a full year rather than a single busy season.

None of those figures are exceptional in either direction, which is itself useful information for a financing conversation. A market with a 40.1 percent occupancy rate is not a market that fills every week of the year, and a rate of $220 is not a market that commands premium urban pricing. This is a seasonal highland town with a real but bounded demand curve, and the numbers should be read that way rather than stretched to fit a more aggressive story about year-round demand that the data itself does not support.

It is worth sitting with the RevPAR figure specifically, because it is the number that most directly reflects what a specific listing is likely to generate per available night across the calendar year. An ADR of $220 sounds appealing in isolation, but RevPAR of $86 is the figure that accounts for the nights that do not book at all. Any projection built only from the ADR, without weighting it against the occupancy rate that produces the actual RevPAR, is going to run high.

Read the Trend Line, Not Just the Snapshot

A single year of revenue and occupancy numbers tells you where a market sits today. The year-over-year trend tells you which direction it is moving, and that direction matters more to anyone financing a purchase than the snapshot alone. in this sample, Prescott's revenue is down about 4.5 percent year over year, while supply is up about 16.1 percent over the same period. Put plainly: more listings are competing for a smaller pool of trailing revenue, and that pressure shows up in the average before it shows up anywhere else.

That combination does not mean the market is broken. It means new supply has been arriving faster than demand has grown, which is exactly the kind of pressure that shows up first in average revenue per listing before it shows up in headlines or in tourism marketing. Anyone reading Prescott numbers for a financing packet should carry both figures together, the revenue direction and the supply direction, rather than quoting last year's number as if the trend line were still climbing in the same direction it may have been two or three years ago.

This trend also matters for how conservative a revenue projection should be. A market with rising revenue and flat supply can reasonably support a projection that assumes some continued growth. A market with falling revenue and rising supply, which is what this sample shows for Prescott, calls for a projection that assumes flat or slightly declining performance unless there is a specific reason tied to the individual property to expect otherwise.

License and Tax Status Belong in the Packet, Not the Scrape

Air ROI's dataset is a revenue and occupancy scrape. It is a useful lens on how listings are performing, but it is not a substitute for a license, and it is not proof of registration. A low-regulation reading on a listing aggregator does not tell a lender or a buyer whether the specific parcel in question currently holds a valid short-term rental registration, or what fees and taxes remain due on it for 2026.

That confirmation has to come from the primary source: prescottaz.gov. Before any revenue figure goes into a financing packet, the remaining 2026 license status and remaining tax dollars for the specific property should be confirmed there, not assumed from a scrape's regulatory summary. A packet that pairs a real revenue figure with an unconfirmed registration status is only half built, and the missing half is the part a careful reviewer checks first.

It is also worth keeping the registration confirmation dated. Fees, renewal windows, and remaining balances can shift within a calendar year, so a confirmation pulled six months before financing closes is not the same as one pulled the week the packet goes out. Treat the town's own page as the source of truth, and treat the date you checked it as part of the record, not an afterthought.

Know What Kind of Property This Data Actually Describes

The Prescott sample this sample is drawn from is overwhelmingly entire-home listings, at about 95.1 percent of the total. That matters for comp selection. If the property being financed is a private room, a shared space, or an accessory unit, the $25,061 typical revenue figure is not describing a comparable product, and using it as-is would overstate what that listing type is likely to earn in this market.

Comps should start from the product type the remaining license actually allows on the parcel in question, and then narrow from the full 801-listing sample to the subset that matches. A whole-house comp set built from a mostly-whole-house market is a reasonable starting point. A private-room listing benchmarked against that same whole-house-heavy sample is not, and the gap between the two can be large enough to change whether a projection is realistic or aspirational.

Where a 30-Night Filter Fits, and Where It Does Not

Some Prescott listings run a 30-night minimum stay, and it is worth being precise about what that setting does and does not represent in a financing context. A 30-night filter changes who can book a listing; it does not, by itself, change the occupancy or revenue figures reported in this sample, which reflect actual stays and actual nightly performance across the sample regardless of minimum-stay settings on any individual listing. A projection should not treat a 30-night minimum as a guarantee of filled nights, because a filter only limits who can book, it does not create the demand to fill the calendar.

If a specific property being financed is going to run under a 30-night minimum as a strategy, that decision should be modeled separately from the general 801-listing average, since it targets a different guest and a different demand pool than the roughly 4.9-night typical stay this market otherwise sees. Folding a long-stay strategy into a short-stay average, or the reverse, produces a projection that does not match either strategy cleanly.

What a Clean Packet Actually Contains

A financing packet built on this data, without guessing anything beyond what the extract shows, should carry: the $25,061 typical annual revenue figure with its 801-listing sample size and the August 2025 through July 2026 window it covers; the $220 ADR, 40.1 percent occupancy, and $86 RevPAR that explain how that revenue figure is constructed; the year-over-year trend of minus 4.5 percent revenue against plus 16.1 percent supply; and the remaining 2026 license and tax status confirmed directly at prescottaz.gov rather than inferred from the scrape.

Phoenix's $35,247 revenue on 5,820 listings can be noted for context, but it belongs on its own line, clearly separated, not folded into a Prescott average. A reviewer who sees two markets clearly labeled trusts the packet more than one who sees a single blended number that does not match either city's actual file. Keep the tourism talking points, the postcard language, and the visitor-count marketing copy out of the column that has to carry the note. That copy has its place elsewhere; it does not belong next to the revenue figure that a lender is going to check against the town's own data.

Frequently Asked Questions

What revenue figure should go on a Prescott financing packet?

The current extract puts typical annual revenue for Prescott listings at about $25,061, drawn from 801 active rentals covering August 2025 through July 2026. That figure, paired with its sample size and date window, is the number to carry into a packet for a Prescott property. Phoenix's separate figure of about $35,247 on 5,820 listings should never be substituted or blended in, since it describes a different city with a different guest base entirely.

Why can't Phoenix numbers be used for a Prescott property?

Phoenix and Prescott are separate municipalities with separate short-term rental files, separate guest patterns, and separate revenue lines on the same data extract. Phoenix draws a much larger, more urban, more year-round traveler base across nearly six thousand listings, while Prescott's roughly eight hundred listings serve a smaller, more seasonal highland visitor. Using one city's revenue figure to describe the other misrepresents both markets to whoever reads the packet next.

What do the ADR, occupancy, and RevPAR numbers actually mean here?

in this sample, Prescott's average daily rate is about $220, occupancy runs at 40.1 percent, and RevPAR sits near $86. Together these three figures explain how the $25,061 typical annual revenue number gets built: a moderate nightly rate combined with a moderate fill rate. None of the three numbers are unusually high or low, which reflects a seasonal but steady highland market rather than a boom-or-bust one.

Is Prescott's short-term rental revenue growing or shrinking?

On the current extract, Prescott's revenue is down about 4.5 percent year over year while active supply is up about 16.1 percent over the same period. That means more listings are dividing a slightly smaller trailing revenue pool than the year before. It does not signal a collapsing market, but it does mean new supply is arriving faster than demand is expanding, and that trend belongs in any packet built from this data.

Does the Air ROI extract confirm my Prescott rental license status?

No. Air ROI's data is a revenue and occupancy scrape built from public listing activity, and its low-regulation reading is not proof of a valid short-term rental license or confirmation of taxes owed. Remaining 2026 license status and remaining tax dollars for a specific property need to be confirmed directly at prescottaz.gov before that property is advertised or financed on the strength of this data.

What kind of property does the $25,061 figure actually describe?

The Prescott sample behind this sample is about 95.1 percent entire-home listings, so the typical revenue figure is most representative of a whole-house short-term rental. A private room, shared space, or accessory unit is a different product with a different demand curve, and comping it directly against a whole-house-dominated sample will likely overstate what that smaller unit type can realistically earn.

Should tourism visitor numbers be included in a financing packet?

Tourism and visitor-count data can explain why demand exists in Prescott, but it is not a revenue figure and should not sit in the same column as one. A financing packet should keep the operable numbers, revenue, occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, and confirmed license status, separate from marketing or visitor-count context. Blending the two makes the packet harder to verify against the town's own data and the property's own performance history.

How current does the license and tax confirmation need to be before financing moves forward?

Because license terms, fees, and remaining balances can change within a given year, the confirmation at prescottaz.gov should be pulled as close to the financing or advertising date as practical, not carried over from an earlier check. A packet with a stale registration confirmation is not meaningfully different from one with no confirmation at all, since either can leave a lender or partner relying on out-of-date information.

Does a 30-night minimum stay change the revenue projection?

Not by itself. A 30-night minimum limits who can book a listing, but it does not change the occupancy or revenue figures this sample reports, since those reflect actual stays across the sample regardless of individual minimum-stay settings. About a quarter of Prescott listings run a 30-night minimum today, but the market's typical stay length is still roughly 4.9 nights, so a long-stay strategy needs its own separate projection rather than borrowing the short-stay average.

Can Wickenburg or other nearby towns be folded into the Prescott sample?

No. Wickenburg operates as its own separate municipal file with its own registration and tax rules, distinct from the roughly 801-listing Prescott sample this sample describes. Any property outside Prescott's own municipal boundary needs its own confirmation at the desk that actually issues its permits, and its revenue data should stay on its own line rather than being folded into a Prescott-wide average.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

A Prescott listing only earns what its photos and positioning let guests actually see. Get the visual story and the search terms right, and the booking calendar starts doing the rest of the work.

Ready to make a Prescott listing look like the stay guests are already searching for? Let's line up the photos, the description, and the channels so this property gets found by the right traveler first. Send the live listing draft and the facts you can actually cite.

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