New Orleans edges ahead of Denver on higher occupancy (60% vs 58%), stronger RevPAR (£47 vs £39).
Head-to-head metrics
| Denver | New Orleans | |
|---|---|---|
| Median occupancy | 58% | 60% |
| Median daily rate | £99 | £103 |
| Median RevPAR | £39 | £47 |
| Active listings | 3,654 | 4,939 |
| YoY occupancy | +18.5 pts | — |
| YoY daily rate | -2.3% | — |
| Regulation risk | — | — |
| Annual night cap | None | None |
| License required | No | No |
Full analysis: Denver vs New Orleans
On the money side of this comparison — what a listing actually earns against the nights it has available — New Orleans finishes narrowly ahead of Denver. New Orleans turns its rate and occupancy into £47 per available night against £39 in Denver, a 20.2% edge on the only yield figure that nets the empty nights out. Across a full year the median New Orleans listing grosses £17,123 against £14,245 in Denver. The margin is thin enough that a single strong year in Denver would close it, so treat the ordering as a lean rather than a verdict.
New Orleans takes both halves of the yield equation, which is less common than it sounds. It charges more per night — £103 against £99 — and still fills more of the year, 60% against 58%. A market that leads on price and utilisation at once is normally one where demand has outrun supply, rather than one where hosts are discounting to keep the calendar busy. RevPAR reflects the double advantage at £47 against £39.
That verdict needs a caveat, because Denver is not simply the weaker market of the two. Denver is the less crowded of the two — 3,654 active listings to 4,939 — so a well-run property has fewer near-identical rivals to out-rank. Its strongest submarket, Southmoor Park, clears £81 RevPAR on its own — city medians hide that kind of spread. If your model leans on that dimension, the ordering above can reasonably flip.
Neither Denver nor New Orleans currently has a verified short-term rental regulation record in our register, so the comparison above is a yield comparison only. Regulation is the single largest source of downside in this asset class — an unverified market is an unpriced risk, not an absent one.
The two calendars also behave differently. Denver peaks in October at 59.9% and bottoms in February at 31.7%; New Orleans runs from 52.2% in August down to 29.9% in December. New Orleans is the steadier of the two at 22.3 points peak-to-trough against 28.2 — easier to underwrite against a mortgage — while Denver concentrates its return into a shorter window and rewards operators who price the peak aggressively instead of holding a flat rate all year.
Who each suits, then. Denver suits buyers who want a conventional, lightly regulated entry. New Orleans answers to the same regulatory profile, so the split between them is operational rather than legal. Every figure above comes from the same Inside Airbnb snapshot pipeline on both sides, dated 2025-09, filtered to listings with at least one booking in the last twelve months. Occupancy medians are drawn from 1,254 active Denver listings and 1,475 in New Orleans.
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