Know if the STR you're eyeing is great — or just good.
Grade any property against 5,470 active STR listings nationwide. Diamond = top 10% by bonus-eligible %. Bronze just meets the bar. Unearth the diamonds in your shortlist before you offer.
The four grades
Same fixed thresholds for every property, every market. Stone set in a tinted disc, name engraved below.
Medal tiers by bonus-eligible %
Thresholds are fixed; the nationwide share shows where each tier typically falls across the properties we analyze.
The formula behind every grade
Every listing runs through the same six-step calculation. No black box, no per-property judgment call — the same math applies whether we're grading a Palm Springs condo or a Poconos cabin.
Isolate the depreciable basis
Land can't be depreciated, so we start with the market's typical land-ratio from public assessor data. Structure basis = 1 − land ratio. A market with a 20% land ratio has 80% of purchase price as depreciable structure; a market with a 10% land ratio has 90%.
Start with the 13% baseline
Every STR property gets a 13-percentage-point baseline for the portion of structure that lives in short-life IRS classes — 5-year FF&E (fixtures, appliances, decorative finishes, smart-home) and 15-year land improvements (driveways, landscaping, outdoor amenity stacks). Set by calibration against formal cost-seg studies.
Adjust for price/sqft rank
Higher-end listings within a market carry more FF&E per square foot. We rank each listing by price/sqft against its own market's distribution, then apply a linear ramp: −4 points at the market's cheapest end, +8 points at the top.
Adjust for property age
Newer construction pushes more content into short-life classes (LED lighting, smart systems, engineered surfaces). Linear ramp by build year: −5 points at 1970 or older, +5 points at 2020 or newer.
Bounded 10 – 35% of structure
We clamp the running total to a defensible range. A ceiling of 35% prevents luxury outliers from exceeding what a formal engineered study would typically find; a floor of 10% keeps 1970s rentals from bottoming to zero when structure still has qualifying components. Result is multiplied by structure basis to get bonus-eligible % of purchase price.
Compare to the fixed cutoffs
The property's final bonus-eligible % is checked against the four fixed thresholds: ≥ 24% = Diamond, 22.0 – 23.9% = Gold, 20.0 – 21.9% = Silver, 18.0 – 19.9% = Bronze. Below 18% is unranked.
Why the thresholds are fixed, not percentile
A Diamond property today is a Diamond next quarter — regardless of what the rest of the market does.
18 · 20 · 22 · 24
Two-percentage-point gaps between tiers so grades don't blur into each other at the boundaries. A property at 21.9% is unambiguously Silver; at 22.0% it's unambiguously Gold.
Grades don't drift
Percentile-based thresholds move every quarter as new listings come and go. Fixed thresholds mean a Diamond grade means the same thing in July as it does in January, and the same in Ketchum as in Kissimmee.
Easy to explain
"This property has 24% of its purchase price qualifying for bonus depreciation" is a sentence anyone can act on — investor, CPA, or listing agent.
Where the thresholds actually land
How markets compare — density, not medals
A market never earns a medal. Instead, each market is described by density: the share of its active listings that clear each threshold. That's what "stacked with Diamond-tier properties" actually means.
Same $99 median list price band. Vastly different medal density. The difference isn't luck — it's what the components add up to when the formula runs across every active listing.
See the methodology in action.
Every market's density and every property's grade uses the same six-step formula on this page.