Wichita KS Hosts: Planning 2027 While the 2026 Numbers Hold
If you host in Wichita, Kansas, June and July are when the smart operators stop reacting to whatever the calendar throws at them and actually sit down with last year's numbers. That is what this piece is for. It is the newest companion to our earlier Wichita report, published at crestcove.co/post/wichita-ks-str-market-report-2026, and it exists because it is annual season-planning time, not because a fresh set of 2027 vendor numbers landed on anyone's desk. Nothing here is a new figure. Everything here is the same confirmed 2026 baseline, presented plainly, with a checklist for what has to happen before anyone treats it as current again.
Here is the number that matters and the one you should already recognize if you read the 2026 report: Wichita short-term rental hosts, across roughly 628 active listings, generated about $16,797 in annual revenue at a $150 average daily rate. That figure came from the official Wichita desk data and AirROI/AirDNA benchmarking pulled for the 2026 report cycle, and it remains the last confirmed vintage for this market. We are not pretending a year has not passed. We are also not inventing a 2027 number just because a new calendar year needs a new headline. Those are two different failures, and this report is built to avoid both.
A fresh check of AirDNA for Wichita as of September 2026 shows roughly 911 tracked listings, with typical annual revenue around $26,900, occupancy near 67 percent, and an average daily rate around $121. Those figures differ meaningfully from the AirROI numbers cited elsewhere in this report, which show $16,797 across 628 active listings at roughly 40.7 percent occupancy. The two vendors are measuring different snapshots of the market, and the gap between them is wide enough that you should keep both sets labeled on separate lines in your own planning rather than averaging them into a single blended number. Use AirROI as your conservative floor and AirDNA as the more optimistic case, and let your own trailing-twelve-month performance tell you where your property actually falls between the two.
One more thing before we get into it: Derby, Andover, and Cottonwood Falls are not Wichita, and we are not going to blend them into Wichita's numbers to make a bigger or shinier statistic. Derby and Andover sit just outside the city as distinct submarkets with their own permitting rules, their own guest mix, and their own pricing dynamics. Cottonwood Falls is a different kind of market entirely, a Flint Hills tourism draw with almost nothing in common with Wichita's urban and airport-adjacent demand. If you host in any of those towns, use their own data. If you host in Wichita proper, keep reading.
What the Last Confirmed Wichita Numbers Actually Said
The 2026 Wichita report, still live on our site under the headline citing $16,797, pulled together two things: a listing count of roughly 628 active short-term rentals operating inside Wichita city limits, and a blended average daily rate of $150 across that inventory. Multiply the two together with typical occupancy assumptions for a mid-size Midwestern metro and you land in the neighborhood of that $16,797 annual revenue figure per listing, which is why the sibling post uses it as the headline number for hosts trying to size up whether Wichita is worth their season.
That number was never meant to describe every property in the city equally. A three-bedroom house near Wichita State University with a fenced yard and a garage is going to outperform a one-bedroom condo downtown that competes against extended-stay hotel inventory, and both of those are going to look different from a property near the airport that leans on business travel and layover guests. $16,797 and $150 ADR are averages across a real, counted inventory, not a promise for any single door. Treat them as the market's center of gravity, not as your personal budget target.
It is also worth remembering why that number stayed under $45,000 in the 2026 report's framing. Wichita is a value market. It does not command the nightly rates of a mountain town or a coastal destination, and it never has. What it offers instead is steadier, less seasonal demand tied to the university, the aerospace industry, medical travel to Wichita's hospital systems, and event weekends tied to Century II and the Intrust Bank Arena. Hosts who understand that Wichita is a volume-and-consistency market, not a peak-rate market, tend to plan seasons that actually match what the data shows.
Why We Are Not Publishing a New 2027 Average Yet
It would be easy to take the 2026 number, add a plausible-sounding percentage bump, and call it a 2027 figure. We are not doing that, and this report exists partly to explain why. Every number in the 2026 sibling post came from two sources: Wichita's own municipal short-term rental data desk and the AirROI and AirDNA benchmarking pulls that fed the 2026 report cycle. Neither of those has been re-run for 2027 as of this writing. Publishing a new average without re-pulling both sources would mean guessing, and guessing dressed up as data is worse than no data at all, because a host might actually rely on it.
This matters more in a market like Wichita than it would in a market with wild year-over-year swings, precisely because Wichita's numbers move slowly and look stable. That stability is exactly what makes an invented figure dangerous. If we published a made-up 2027 number that looked reasonable, most hosts would never think to question it, because it would fit the pattern of a market that does not jump around much. The safest assumption a host can make right now is that the 2026 figures are still directionally useful, but that they are not confirmed for 2027 until someone actually goes back to the source.
There is also a practical reason to wait: municipal short-term rental desks update their public reporting on their own schedules, not on ours, and AirROI/AirDNA refresh their trailing-twelve-month windows continuously rather than on a clean calendar-year cutover. Pulling either source too early in a re-verification cycle risks capturing a partial or transitional dataset that looks like new information but is really just noise. Waiting until both sources have settled into a clean 2027 read is the more disciplined move, even if it means this report leans on last year's numbers a little longer than a host might prefer.
The Re-Verification Checklist Before You Trust Any 2027 Number
Rather than ask you to take our word for it that the 2026 numbers still hold, here is the actual checklist we use before treating any Wichita figure as re-confirmed for 2027. Run through this yourself if you want to independently verify anything in this report, and use it as a template if you track other markets alongside Wichita.
First, pull the current listing count directly from Wichita's official short-term rental registration or licensing desk, and compare it against the roughly 628 figure cited in the 2026 report. A meaningfully higher or lower count changes the competitive picture even before rate and occupancy come into play. Second, re-run an AirROI and AirDNA pull specifically scoped to Wichita city limits, not the broader metro area, and check whether the trailing-twelve-month average daily rate still sits near $150 or has moved. Third, check the reported vintage date on whatever AirROI or AirDNA page you land on. If the page still shows the same trailing-twelve-month window that fed the 2026 report, you have not actually gotten a new data point, you have gotten the same one relabeled.
Fourth, cross-reference any new revenue-per-listing figure against occupancy separately from rate, because a market can hold a flat ADR while occupancy shifts meaningfully in either direction, and $16,797 as an annual figure hides that distinction. Fifth, keep Derby, Andover, and Cottonwood Falls data in entirely separate spreadsheet tabs or filters during this process, because it is very easy for a quick pull to accidentally include neighboring ZIP codes and quietly inflate or deflate the Wichita-proper numbers. If you go through all five steps and the numbers still land close to $16,797, $150 ADR, and roughly 628 listings, you can treat the 2026 figures as re-confirmed for 2027 planning purposes. If they have moved, trust the new pull, not this report.
Keeping Derby, Andover, and Cottonwood Falls on Their Own Lines
This gets repeated on purpose because it is one of the easiest mistakes to make when planning a season around regional data. Derby sits just south of Wichita and has its own city government, its own short-term rental rules, and its own guest demand tied more to suburban family travel and youth sports tournaments than to Wichita's downtown and airport traffic. Andover sits northeast of the city and skews even more suburban and residential, with a rental market shaped by longer-stay corporate relocations and Andover's own schools and family draws. Blending either of those into Wichita's city-limits numbers would quietly shift the average in a direction that does not reflect what a Wichita-proper host actually experiences.
Cottonwood Falls is a different case entirely and deserves its own separate mention. It sits roughly an hour northeast of Wichita in the Flint Hills, and it functions as a small-town tourism destination built around the Flint Hills landscape, the Chase County Courthouse, and agritourism traffic rather than anything resembling Wichita's urban demand base. A host in Cottonwood Falls competing for weekend nature-and-scenery travelers is playing an entirely different game than a Wichita host competing for aerospace contractors, university parents, and medical travelers. Any report that folded Cottonwood Falls numbers into a Wichita average would produce a figure that describes neither market accurately.
The practical takeaway for a Wichita host is simple: when you see regional short-term rental data online, always check whether it is scoped to city limits or to a broader metro or county area before you use it to benchmark your own listing. A metro-wide number that includes Derby, Andover, and outlying areas will almost always look different from a Wichita-city-limits number, and neither is wrong, they are just answering different questions. This report answers the Wichita-proper question, and it will keep doing so in every future update.
How to Use Last Year's Numbers for This Year's Season Planning
Even with a pending re-verification flag attached, the 2026 figures are still useful for a specific kind of planning: setting realistic baseline expectations rather than fine-tuning exact pricing. If you are deciding whether to keep a Wichita property in your portfolio, whether to add a second unit, or how aggressively to compete on amenities this season, the $16,797 revenue figure and $150 ADR give you a directionally sound floor to plan against, even before a fresh 2027 pull confirms the exact number.
Use it this way: treat $150 as your market-anchor rate for a standard Wichita listing during typical demand periods, and adjust up for proximity to Wichita State, downtown event venues, or the airport corridor, and down for units competing directly against extended-stay hotel inventory. Treat the roughly 628-listing count as a rough measure of how crowded your specific submarket is likely to be, understanding that new licensing activity since the 2026 pull could have shifted that number in either direction. Neither number should dictate your exact nightly rate, but both should inform the range you consider reasonable before you start layering in your property's specific strengths and weaknesses.
For a June or July planning session specifically, this is also the moment to look at your own trailing-twelve-month performance against the $16,797 benchmark and ask a direct question: are you tracking above, at, or below what the last confirmed market data suggested was typical? If you are meaningfully below it, that is worth investigating now, while there is still runway before the fall and holiday booking windows, rather than after the season has already played out and the answer no longer helps you.
Reading the Two Wichita Reports Together
This 2027 report is not meant to stand alone, and it was not built to replace the 2026 report. The two are meant to be read together, with the earlier post at crestcove.co/post/wichita-ks-str-market-report-2026 carrying the full detail on how the $16,797 and $150 ADR figures were originally derived, and this piece carrying the update on where things stand now and what still needs re-verification before a genuinely new 2027 figure can be published. If you have not read the 2026 report, it is worth the ten minutes, because it walks through the underlying methodology in more depth than a check-in piece like this one needs to repeat.
The relationship runs in both directions. This report exists because the 2026 numbers are aging and need a visible flag saying so; the 2026 report remains the authoritative source for how those numbers were built in the first place. Neither post is complete without pointing to the other, and we are keeping both live specifically so a host landing on either one can find their way to the full picture rather than getting half the story.
Going forward, once a genuine 2027 re-verification happens using the checklist above, the plan is to update this post with the new confirmed figures rather than spin up a third URL, unless the market has changed enough that a fully separate report makes more sense. Until then, this page's job is narrow and specific: hold the line on not inventing numbers, keep pointing hosts back to the last confirmed data, and give a concrete path for anyone who wants to check the current state of the market themselves.
Setting Expectations With Guests and Your Own Numbers
Season planning is not just about what you charge, it is about what you tell people, including your own team if you have co-hosts or a property manager, and including any lender or partner who asks how the Wichita market is trending. If you are sharing this report or the 2026 sibling with anyone making decisions based on it, be explicit that the $16,797 and $150 ADR figures are last-confirmed 2026 data pending re-verification, not a live 2027 read. That framing protects you from overpromising and protects anyone relying on your summary from treating a stale number as fresh.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. A guest inquiry about pricing, a conversation with a business partner about whether to expand your Wichita portfolio, or an internal note to a cleaning or maintenance team about expected booking volume can all be shaped by numbers like these, and getting the vintage wrong in any of those conversations creates confusion later. Say plainly where the number came from and when. This is not legal advice, and nothing in this report should be read as a substitute for consulting your own accountant, attorney, or licensed advisor about how any of these figures apply to your specific business, tax situation, or local compliance obligations.
With that framing in place, the numbers become genuinely useful again. You are not pretending they are more current than they are, and you are not throwing them out just because a year has passed. You are using them exactly as intended: as the best available reference point until a proper re-pull replaces them, communicated honestly to anyone who needs to understand what they are looking at.
What Changes When the 2027 Re-Verification Lands
When the checklist in this report gets run for real, with a fresh pull from Wichita's official desk and a new AirROI/AirDNA scope for city limits, a few outcomes are possible, and it is worth thinking through them now rather than reacting later. The listing count near 628 could hold steady, suggesting Wichita's short-term rental supply has plateaued after its earlier growth phase. It could climb, which would suggest increased competition and possibly softer per-listing revenue even if citywide demand stays strong. Or it could decline, which in a market like Wichita often points to licensing enforcement or hosts exiting rather than a demand problem.
The $150 ADR figure has its own set of possible paths. Rate could hold flat, which given Wichita's historical stability would not be surprising. It could rise modestly if regional events, aerospace industry travel, or medical tourism to Wichita's hospital systems have picked up. Or it could soften if new supply has outpaced demand growth, which is the scenario worth watching most closely given how many markets nationally added short-term rental inventory faster than visitor demand grew over the same period.
Whatever the re-verification shows, the commitment behind this report stays the same: numbers get updated here only when they come from an actual re-pull of Wichita's official data and AirROI/AirDNA benchmarking, never from extrapolation, never from rounding up a prior year's figure to make a new headline. If you are reading this in a future season and the numbers above still say $16,797, $150 ADR, and roughly 628 listings with a pending re-verification flag, that means the re-pull has not happened yet, not that the market has frozen in place. Check back, or run the checklist yourself, before making a major decision based on any single figure in this piece.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is $16,797 a confirmed 2027 revenue figure for Wichita hosts?
No. That figure comes from the 2026 Wichita report and reflects roughly 628 listings at a $150 average daily rate as of that report's data pull. It is presented here as the last confirmed vintage, explicitly pending re-verification for 2027. No new 2027 vendor pull has been performed for this report, and no new average has been invented to replace it. Treat it as a planning reference point rather than a current market statistic until a fresh pull confirms or updates it.
Why didn't you just update the number for 2027?
Because doing so responsibly requires re-pulling both Wichita's official short-term rental desk data and AirROI/AirDNA benchmarking scoped to city limits, and neither has been re-run since the 2026 report was built. Publishing an estimated or extrapolated number instead of a genuinely re-verified one would risk hosts relying on a figure that was never actually checked. This report explains the checklist for that re-verification so any host can run it independently rather than waiting on us alone.
Should I include Derby or Andover data when estimating my Wichita listing's performance?
No. Derby and Andover are separate cities with their own permitting rules, guest demand patterns, and pricing dynamics, and blending their data into Wichita's numbers distorts the picture for a Wichita-proper listing. Derby leans toward suburban family and sports-tournament travel, while Andover skews toward longer corporate stays. Keep each market on its own line when you benchmark, and only compare your listing against Wichita city-limits figures if your property sits inside Wichita itself.
Is Cottonwood Falls part of the Wichita short-term rental market?
No, and it should never be treated as one. Cottonwood Falls sits about an hour northeast of Wichita in the Flint Hills and operates as a small-town tourism destination built around scenery, the Chase County Courthouse, and agritourism traffic. Its guest base, seasonality, and pricing look nothing like Wichita's urban and airport-adjacent demand. Any regional data set that merges the two produces a figure that misrepresents both markets, so always confirm the geographic scope before using a number to plan your season.
How was the 628-listing count and $150 ADR originally calculated?
Those figures came from the 2026 Wichita report, which combined Wichita's official municipal short-term rental data with AirROI and AirDNA benchmarking scoped to city limits. The listing count reflected active registered short-term rentals at that time, and the $150 figure was a blended average daily rate across that inventory over the trailing period used for that report. Full methodology detail lives in the 2026 sibling post rather than being repeated here, since this piece is a check-in rather than a rebuild.
What should I do if I run the re-verification checklist and get different numbers?
Trust your own fresh pull over this report. The checklist in this piece exists specifically so hosts can independently confirm whether Wichita's official desk data and AirROI/AirDNA figures still match the 2026 baseline or have moved. If your re-pull shows a materially different listing count, rate, or occupancy pattern, treat that as the more current and more accurate picture, and adjust your season planning accordingly rather than anchoring to a figure this report has already flagged as pending.
Can I use the $16,797 figure to set my nightly rate for 2027?
Use it as a directional anchor, not a rate-setting formula. The $150 ADR embedded in that figure represents a blended average across roughly 628 Wichita listings with very different locations, sizes, and amenities. A property near Wichita State or downtown event venues may reasonably price above that average, while one competing directly against extended-stay hotels may need to sit below it. Layer your property's specific strengths onto the market anchor rather than adopting the average as your target rate.
Why does this report exist as a separate URL instead of just updating the 2026 post?
This 2027 page functions as a year-roll check-in tied to the current planning season, while the 2026 post remains the authoritative record of how the original figures were derived. Keeping them as linked companions lets hosts land on either one and find their way to the full picture, rather than overwriting the earlier report's detailed methodology with a shorter update. Once genuine 2027 re-verification happens, the plan is to fold new confirmed figures into this ongoing companion rather than create a third separate URL.
What Wichita demand drivers should I plan around even without a new 2027 number?
Wichita's demand has historically leaned on Wichita State University activity, aerospace industry travel tied to major employers in the region, medical travel to Wichita's hospital systems, and event weekends around Century II and Intrust Bank Arena. These drivers tend to produce steadier, less dramatically seasonal demand than a vacation-destination market. Planning your season around these known demand patterns is reasonable even while the exact revenue and rate figures wait on re-verification, since the underlying demand sources have not fundamentally changed.
Is there a risk in treating outdated data as still relevant for 2027 planning?
Yes, which is exactly why this report labels the 2026 figures as pending re-verification rather than presenting them as current. The risk is smaller in a historically stable market like Wichita than in a fast-moving one, but it is not zero, especially if new supply has entered the market or licensing enforcement has changed the listing count. Use the figures as a starting reference, run the checklist in this report when you want certainty, and stay ready to adjust once a fresh pull is actually completed.
Work with Crest & Cove Creative
Wichita's numbers from last season are still the best map you have, and this check-in shows exactly how to use them wisely while you wait for the next update. Read the full picture before you set a single 2027 rate.
Bookmark both Wichita reports now so you have the full story ready when your next pricing decision comes up. Share this check-in with any co-host or partner planning their Wichita season alongside you.
Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.
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