The listing is not the deal

A listing is a sales document. It has a price, a bedroom count, and a photo of the porch at golden hour. None of those tell you whether the house carries the debt.

Roilyze exists because investors still size deals off a single revenue figure. AirDNA gives you one. Rabbu gives you another. The listing agent has a third, usually from a comparable that is two bedrooms bigger and a half-mile closer to the water. You average them in your head and call it underwriting. It is not. It is a mood.

Start with the address, not the story

Write down four things before you open a pro forma: street address, beds, baths, and the price you would actually write. Not list. Not "what it should be." The number that leaves your account if you win.

Then ask the only question that matters for a rental: what do nearby, similar houses actually collect? Similar means beds and baths and a walkable radius, not "the zip code." A 3/2 on a busy arterial is not a 3/2 on a cul-de-sac. Market-level occupancy is how people talk themselves into thin deals.

Use a range or you are guessing

Comps disagree. That is the point of comps. If fourteen nearby STRs did $38k, $54k, and $71k on the same trailing twelve months, the honest output is a band, not a midpoint with two decimal places.

Size the offer against the floor. The base case is what you tell your partner. The ceiling is what you do not put in the loan file. If the deal only works at the 75th percentile, it does not work. You are buying a story.

Run both strategies on the same porch

Short-term revenue and long-term rent are not personalities. They are two ways to occupy the same rooms. A house that "wants to be an STR" is a house whose STR comps are strong. Check the LTR rent anyway. If conventional rent covers the note and the STR band does not, you have a lease, not a vacation listing. The reverse happens too — especially in markets where a city just changed the rules and last year's occupancy is a souvenir.

Write the expenses where you can see them

Roilyze currently models STR operating expenses at 35% of revenue and LTR at 45% of annual rent, with 25% down. Those are stated assumptions, not local truth. Your insurance, your HOA, your cleaning, your property manager, your vacancy, your capex — put them next to the band. If you cannot name the line items, you are not sizing a deal. You are decorating a spreadsheet.

The photo of the house is allowed to be beautiful. The number you bid is not allowed to need the photo.