Marathon STR Market Report 2026: $56,513 on 1,067 Listings

Thomas Garner
Aug 19
14 min read

Updated: 15 hours ago

Seven Mile Bridge looking west, Marathon Florida

Marathon, Florida - a City of Marathon address in Monroe County, in the Florida Keys' Middle Keys region - published a typical year of $56,513 across 1,067 active listings for the August 2025 through July 2026 vintage. Average daily rate sits at $534, occupancy at 39.3 percent, and RevPAR at $220.

This report reads that published year as one specific, complete data set - not a number to blend with any neighboring Keys market's figures. Islamorada, a separate city along the same general highway corridor, publishes its own distinct $46,255 typical year on 368 listings; that figure belongs on its own line, not folded into Marathon's.

This is not legal or investment advice. It's a factual read of Marathon's own published 2026 market data - the typical year, the seasonal pattern, the guest-origin data, the booking-minimum distribution, and the professional-management landscape - intended to give an independent host or a prospective buyer an accurate, city-specific picture rather than a generalized Florida Keys estimate. This is not legal advice.

The Published Year: $56,513 on 1,067 Listings

The core figure for this report is Marathon's published typical year of $56,513, measured across a sample of 1,067 active listings for the August 2025 through July 2026 vintage. Average daily rate for this sample is $534, occupancy is 39.3 percent, and RevPAR comes to $220.

This figure describes City of Marathon listings specifically - not a broader Florida Keys average, and not a blend with any neighboring city's data. A buyer packet or marketing document that presents $56,513 as though it applied to a Key West or Islamorada property would be materially misrepresenting the underlying data.

Year-over-year, this vintage shows revenue growth of plus 1.3 percent, alongside supply growth of plus 19.1 percent across the same period - a market that's both growing in revenue and adding new listings at a meaningfully faster rate, worth factoring into any forward-looking projection built on this data.

These are the headline figures worth citing accurately in any Marathon-specific marketing, underwriting, or buyer conversation: $56,513 typical year, $534 ADR, 39.3 percent occupancy, $220 RevPAR, all specific to this 1,067-listing City of Marathon sample for the stated vintage.

What the 1,067-Listing Sample Looks Like

Beyond the headline revenue figures, this 1,067-listing sample carries a specific composition worth understanding for anyone comparing a particular property against the broader market. Entire-home listings make up 96.0 percent of the sample, and houses specifically make up 79.4 percent - a market dominated by whole-house, entire-property stays rather than shared or partial accommodations.

Three-bedroom properties are this market's single most common size, at 27.7 percent of the sample, while a guest capacity of eight or more is the most common capacity setting, at 49.5 percent - together suggesting a market genuinely oriented toward larger groups and families rather than smaller couple-focused stays.

Superhost status applies to 48.0 percent of this sample - close to half of all active listings - a meaningfully high share worth noting for anyone benchmarking a specific listing's guest-review performance or service standards against the broader Marathon market.

Average stay length across this sample is 7.3 nights, with an average booking lead time of 104 days - both genuinely useful figures for understanding typical guest booking behavior, distinct from the revenue and occupancy figures covered above.

None of these composition figures should be confused with the headline revenue numbers. A listing's bedroom count, capacity setting, or Superhost status is a descriptive fact about the sample, not itself a revenue or occupancy claim - useful for comparison, but not interchangeable with the $56,513 typical-year figure.

Peak-3 Is March, February, and April - Not a Guess

Marathon's published peak-3 months are March, February, and April, based on the same August 2025 through July 2026 AirROI vintage as the headline revenue figures. March specifically is the single peak month within that three-month window - the strongest month on the calendar for this market.

This is a specific, data-backed seasonal pattern, not a general assumption about Florida winter tourism or a guess based on typical school-calendar timing. June and July - summer months that might intuitively seem like tourist-season peaks in a beach market - are not named as peak-3 months in this data set.

Marketing copy or a booking calendar that treats June or July as this market's peak season, or that assumes a generic "summer is best" pattern without checking Marathon's own specific data, would be pricing against the wrong months entirely.

The practical application: price and market a Marathon listing's high season around March, February, and April specifically, informed by this published data rather than a general seasonal assumption borrowed from a different type of destination or a different Keys market.

Given the 104-day average lead time noted earlier, marketing and pricing decisions for the March-February-April window benefit from being made well ahead of the season itself - a host waiting until February to price March is working against a booking pattern that clearly favors advance planning.

September Is the Hole, October and November Sit Low

September is this market's softest revenue month, and the low stretch overall spans September, October, and November. This is a specific, named seasonal pattern from the published data - not a vague sense that "fall is slower" without a specific month named.

October and November sit within this same low stretch, but they're distinct from September itself and from the March-February-April peak - a host shouldn't treat either month as an early return to peak pricing, nor should they be treated as identical to September's specific low point.

A meaningful share of this market's supply - 273 listings, or 25.6 percent of the 1,067-listing sample - has set a thirty-plus-night minimum stay. This is a real, specific booking-policy fact, but it isn't itself evidence that September, specifically, gets filled by longer stays; it's a market-wide setting distribution, not a seasonal occupancy claim.

Marketing copy that leans on a generic tourism narrative - hospital tours, migratory wildlife, or another seasonal draw - to imply that September performs better than this published data shows would be overstating a genuine visitor-landscape fact into an occupancy claim the data doesn't support.

The honest approach to this softer stretch: acknowledge September as this market's named low point directly, price accordingly rather than inflating expectations, and treat any longer-stay or remote-work angle as a genuine product decision rather than a way to quietly reframe a slow month as a hidden peak.

Miami Is the Origin, Not the Product

Miami is the leading guest-origin city in this market's extract, with domestic guests overall making up roughly 93 percent of the sample. This is useful demand-side context - Miami travelers are a meaningful source of Marathon's guest base - but it's a fact about where guests are traveling from, not a description of the Marathon product itself.

A listing description or buyer memo that treats Marathon as though it were effectively a Miami beach extension, or that tries to borrow Miami's own market identity or pricing power, is conflating a guest-origin statistic with a genuinely separate city's own identity and figures.

Marathon's own identity - the Overseas Highway drive, Sombrero Beach, the Turtle Hospital, Seven Mile Bridge, Crane Point - is what guests are specifically booking when they choose this city, regardless of where they're traveling from. That identity, not the origin city, is what marketing copy should center.

The practical distinction worth holding onto throughout any Marathon-specific report or packet: origin data describes demand geography, while ADR, occupancy, and RevPAR describe the property's own performance. Neither substitutes for the other, and blending them risks a genuinely confused underwriting narrative.

The Common Minimum Is 7-29 Nights, Not 30-Plus

This market's most common minimum-stay setting is 7-to-29 nights, applying to 61.7 percent of the 1,067-listing sample - a genuinely week-to-month-scale booking pattern rather than either a strict short-stay or a strict long-stay market.

Thirty-plus-night minimums, by contrast, apply to a smaller but still meaningful 25.6 percent of the sample - 273 listings. This is a real, specific segment of the market, but it's the less common setting overall, not the dominant pattern this market's supply has settled into.

A host considering a longer-minimum-stay strategy for a Marathon property is working with real, if smaller, company in doing so - 273 other listings share that approach - but should recognize it as a deliberate minority strategy rather than an assumption that most guests or most competing listings are already booking that way.

Average stay length of 7.3 nights, combined with the 61.7 percent share of listings set to the 7-to-29-night range, together paint a market where a genuine week-plus stay is the norm - useful context for a host deciding where their own minimum-stay setting should sit relative to the broader competitive landscape.

Professional Management Sits at 35.3 Percent

Professionally managed listings make up 35.3 percent of this 1,067-listing sample - a meaningful but not dominant share, leaving a majority of listings independently self-managed by their owners rather than run through a property management company.

Vacation Rentals Of The Florida Keys is a named property manager active in this market with 117 listings under management - a real, specific, sizable presence worth being aware of as a competitive benchmark, though it's worth being precise that this is the specific named manager the data identifies, not a general assumption about which national brand leads this particular market.

This composition detail matters for an independent host evaluating their own competitive position: with roughly two-thirds of this market's supply independently managed, a well-run independent listing is competing within a market where independent management is already the norm, not an exception to a professionally-managed majority.

None of this professional-management data changes the underlying revenue figures. $56,513 typical year, $534 ADR, and 39.3 percent occupancy describe the market as a whole, regardless of whether a specific listing within that market happens to be independently run or professionally managed.

Don't Blend Islamorada's $46,255 Into This Year

Islamorada, a separate incorporated village sitting along the same general Overseas Highway corridor, publishes its own distinct typical year of $46,255 across a 368-listing sample - genuinely different figures, on a genuinely different and smaller sample, from Marathon's own $56,513 across 1,067 listings.

The two markets do share the same broad seasonal pattern - March, February, and April as peak-3 months - but a shared calendar doesn't make the two cities' revenue figures interchangeable. A buyer memo or marketing packet that averages or blends the two would misrepresent both markets.

Key West is a third, genuinely different island and market entirely, with its own separate identity and figures, unrelated to either Marathon's or Islamorada's data. Key Colony Beach, a separate incorporated city sitting directly next to Marathon, is a fourth distinct jurisdiction, and Duck Key functions in this data only as neighbor-table context, not as part of Marathon's own figures.

The discipline that keeps this report honest: cite $56,513 specifically for Marathon, keep Islamorada's $46,255 clearly labeled as a separate city's figure, and keep Key West, Key Colony Beach, and Duck Key entirely off any calculation meant to describe Marathon's own market performance.

This matters most concretely in a financing or acquisition context. A lender or buyer underwriting a Marathon property using Islamorada's lower typical year, or vice versa, would arrive at a materially wrong revenue projection - the two markets' figures simply aren't substitutes for one another, regardless of geographic proximity.

Compliance Facts That Belong in Any Underwriting Packet

City of Marathon requires its own vacation rental license, which is annual and does not transfer at the sale of a property - a detail worth flagging directly in any buyer-facing packet, since a new owner can't simply inherit a previous owner's existing license.

City Fire Rescue, located at 8900 Overseas Highway, is reachable at (305) 743-5266 for questions related to a City of Marathon parcel's licensing status. This office is specific to City of Marathon parcels, distinct from whatever office would apply to a Key Colony Beach or unincorporated Monroe County parcel instead.

Monroe County's Tourist Development Tax, at 5 percent, is a separate obligation from the city's own vacation rental license - a host or buyer needs to account for both, not assume that paying one covers the other.

None of this compliance detail should be confused with, or used to inflate, the revenue figures discussed throughout this report. A valid, current license and confirmed TDT registration make a listing legally operable; they don't themselves raise ADR, occupancy, or RevPAR above the published $534, 39.3 percent, and $220 figures.

What Supply Growth Means for a Host Already in This Market

Supply growth of plus 19.1 percent on this vintage means new listings have entered the Marathon market at a meaningfully faster clip than revenue growth's plus 1.3 percent over the same period. That gap - more competing listings, proportionally less new revenue to go around - is worth taking seriously rather than assuming the market can simply absorb new supply at no cost to existing hosts.

This doesn't mean an existing, well-run Marathon listing is in trouble. It does mean that a listing coasting on stale photos, an outdated description, or pricing that hasn't been revisited against this year's data is more exposed to that growing competitive set than it might have been in a slower-growth year.

The composition data from earlier in this report becomes more useful in this context. Knowing that three-bedroom is the dominant size, that eight-plus capacity is the common setting, and that 96.0 percent of the market is entire-home gives a specific benchmark for how a listing's own specs compare to what's actually flooding into the market as new supply.

A host evaluating whether to compete on price, on presentation, or on a specific amenity like a tested remote-work setup or a documented beach-access routine is making that decision against a backdrop of real, measurable supply growth - not a static market where last year's positioning is guaranteed to still work this year.

It's also worth pairing the supply-growth figure with the 104-day average lead time noted earlier. A market where guests are booking well in advance, combined with a market adding new listings faster than revenue is growing, rewards hosts who get their pricing and presentation locked in early for the March-February-April peak window, rather than waiting to react once the season is already underway.

Superhost share sitting at 48.0 percent of this sample is a useful data point in the same conversation. Close to half of active listings have already cleared that specific review-and-service bar, meaning a listing without Superhost status is competing directly against a market where nearly half its peers have already established that credential with guests browsing search results.

How to Read this market as a Whole

Read Marathon's 2026 market data as one complete, internally consistent picture: $56,513 typical year, $534 ADR, 39.3 percent occupancy, $220 RevPAR, across 1,067 listings, for the August 2025 through July 2026 vintage - with March, February, and April as peak-3, and September, October, and November as the low stretch.

Layer the composition detail on top of that core figure: 96.0 percent entire-home, 79.4 percent houses, three-bedroom as the dominant size, eight-plus guest capacity as the common setting, 48.0 percent Superhost share, and 35.3 percent professionally managed - a market of primarily independent, whole-house, family-scale listings.

Add the booking-behavior detail: 7.3-night average stay, 104-day average lead time, 61.7 percent of listings set to a 7-to-29-night minimum, and 25.6 percent set to thirty-plus nights - a market where week-to-month stays are the genuine norm rather than either quick weekend trips or exclusively long-term stays.

Keep Miami correctly labeled as the leading guest-origin city, not the product itself, and keep every neighboring market - Islamorada's $46,255, Key West's separate identity, Key Colony Beach's separate jurisdiction, Duck Key's neighbor-table status - clearly on its own line, never blended into Marathon's own figures.

A buyer, lender, or marketing document that reads all of this together, without pasting a Key West caption or an Islamorada figure onto this specific City of Marathon data set, has an accurate, defensible picture of this specific 1,067-listing market for the stated vintage - which is exactly the standard this report is built to meet.

This same standard applies whether the reader is a first-time buyer sizing up a potential purchase, an existing host benchmarking their own listing's performance against the broader market, or a lender reviewing a financing packet. In every case, the specific numbers - $56,513, 1,067 listings, the named vintage - are what should anchor the conversation, not a general sense of what a Florida Keys property "should" earn.

Applying This Data to a Specific Listing

A host with an existing Marathon listing can use this report as a direct benchmark: compare actual occupancy against the published 39.3 percent, actual ADR against $534, and actual seasonal booking pattern against the named March-February-April peak and September-October-November low stretch, rather than relying on a general sense of how the season "felt."

A prospective buyer can use the same figures to sanity-check a seller's or broker's revenue claims. A pro forma that assumes an occupancy rate well above 39.3 percent, or that implies year-round demand without a named low stretch, deserves a direct question about which data set it's actually drawing from.

None of this replaces a property-specific analysis - a specific listing's location, condition, photography, and management quality will always push its actual performance above or below the published market average. What this report provides is the honest baseline that specific performance should be measured against.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Marathon's published typical year for 2026?

$56,513 across 1,067 active listings for the August 2025 through July 2026 vintage, with ADR at $534, occupancy at 39.3 percent, and RevPAR at $220. This figure is specific to City of Marathon listings and shouldn't be blended with any neighboring Keys market's data.

What does the 1,067-listing sample look like by property type?

Entire-home listings make up 96.0 percent of the sample, and houses specifically make up 79.4 percent. Three-bedroom is the single most common size at 27.7 percent, and a guest capacity of eight-plus is the most common capacity setting, at 49.5 percent.

What are Marathon's peak months in this data?

Peak-3 is March, February, and April, with March as the single strongest month. This is based on the same August 2025 through July 2026 vintage as the headline revenue figures -- not a general assumption about Florida winter tourism or summer beach demand.

Which months make up the low stretch?

September, October, and November, with September specifically named as the softest revenue month. About 25.6 percent of listings (273 of 1,067) have set a thirty-plus-night minimum, but that's a booking-policy fact, not evidence that September itself gets filled by long stays.

Should Marathon be marketed around its Miami guest origin?

No. Miami is the leading guest-origin city, with domestic guests overall around 93 percent of the sample -- useful demand context, but not a description of the Marathon product itself. Marathon's own identity, the highway, the beach, the bridge, is what guests are actually booking.

Is a thirty-plus-night minimum the common setting in this market?

No. The most common minimum-stay setting is 7-to-29 nights, at 61.7 percent of the 1,067-listing sample. Thirty-plus-night minimums apply to a smaller 25.6 percent (273 listings) -- a real but minority segment of this market's supply.

How much of this market is professionally managed?

35.3 percent of the 1,067-listing sample is professionally managed, meaning roughly two-thirds is independently self-managed by owners. Vacation Rentals Of The Florida Keys is a named manager active in this market with 117 listings.

Can Islamorada's $46,255 typical year be used to describe Marathon?

No. Islamorada is a separate city with its own 368-listing sample and its own $46,255 typical year. The two markets share the same March-February-April peak-3, but that shared calendar doesn't make their revenue figures interchangeable in any underwriting context.

Does Marathon's vacation rental license transfer when a property sells?

No. The City of Marathon's vacation rental license is annual and does not transfer at sale, so a new owner needs to secure their own license. City Fire Rescue, at 8900 Overseas Highway, (305) 743-5266, is the relevant office for City of Marathon parcel licensing questions.

What's the single most important distinction in reading this report?

Keeping Marathon's own $56,513/1,067-listing data completely separate from every neighboring market's figures -- Islamorada's $46,255, Key West's separate identity, Key Colony Beach's separate jurisdiction, and Duck Key's neighbor-table-only status. Blending any of these produces a materially inaccurate picture.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

A buyer memo that averages Marathon's $56,513 with Islamorada's $46,255 has guessed a number that describes neither actual market. Two different cities, two different listing counts, and two different years that don't cancel into one blended figure.

We help hosts and buyers read Marathon's own 2026 data accurately, without a neighboring city's figures bleeding into the underwriting. Send us your draft packet and we'll flag every line that's citing the wrong market. Send the live listing draft and the facts you can actually cite.

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