Sun Belt States Dominate 2025 Airbnb Market Searches as Regional Destinations Outpace Major Cities

Chalet, a data-first platform for short-term rentals, released its year-end analysis of Airbnb calculator search patterns in 2025, revealing that 32.5% of all searches focused on just three Sun Belt states: Florida, California, and Texas. This concentration reflects continued Sun Belt dominance in the short-term rental market, with search activity translating directly into execution as these three states accounted for 69% of the platform's 2025 closed deals. The data offers early signals of shifting short-term rental dynamics heading into 2026, showing emerging markets and cooling former hotspots based on tens of thousands of searches across 3,080 cities throughout all 50 U.S. states.

Regional markets significantly outshone big cities in 2025, with secondary "drive-to" vacation destinations seeing higher engagement rates per listing than major urban centers. Chalet users closed 205% more short-term rental property deals in 2025 than the previous year, with big city markets accounting for only 27.3% of all closed deals. This trend is detailed in the full 2025 analysis available on Chalet's platform. Search activity skewed toward secondary and drive-to markets in greater numbers than traditional big-city vacation hubs, with almost 70% of the 30 most-searched STR markets being regional or destination-driven rather than large urban metros.

Sevierville, Tennessee, a gateway to the Smoky Mountains, ranked as the number one most-searched city on the platform with 1.8% of total searches, outranking individual major cities like Austin, Texas (1.2%), Houston, Texas (1.1%), or San Diego, California (1.0%). Despite this concentration at the top, market interest remained widely distributed, as the most-searched individual market accounted for only about 1.8% of total searches, underscoring how fragmented market interest was in 2025. Nearly 73% of Chalet-assisted deals closed in 2025 occurred in regional markets, closely mirroring search behavior and suggesting that investors are hunting for opportunities in regional gems where traveler demand is strong and competition may be lighter.

The 205% growth in STR property deals closed in 2025 compared to the previous year indicates that users are converting analysis into executed transactions at a faster pace. While market searches were widely distributed across dozens of markets, actual purchases showed more concentration at the execution stage. Austin, Texas emerged as the single most active market for closed deals, accounting for just over 9% of all transactions. A second tier of markets, including San Diego, California; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Dallas, Texas; Kissimmee, Florida; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, each represented roughly 6% of closed deals, with remaining transactions spread across a long tail of secondary and regional markets.

Strict regulations significantly suppressed market interest, with interest in regulation-heavy metros like New York City and Los Angeles accounting for under 0.2% of all city-level searches. Despite being large tourism markets, these areas attracted minimal attention within the broader search dataset, reflecting how restrictive regulatory frameworks limit STR viability. In contrast, markets characterized by more stable and host-friendly policies consistently drew higher engagement levels. This pattern highlights the regulatory environment as a critical market filter alongside traditional performance metrics, shaping where short-term rental activity concentrates over time. Ashley Durmo, CEO of Chalet, noted that the overwhelming focus on Sun Belt states represents both a warning and an opportunity, showing where momentum is strongest but also where markets may be overheating.