New Orleans edges ahead of Portland on higher occupancy (49.3% vs 37.8%), stronger RevPAR (£76 vs £54).
Head-to-head metrics
| New Orleans | Portland | |
|---|---|---|
| Median occupancy | 49.3% | 37.8% |
| Median daily rate | £175 | £134 |
| Median RevPAR | £76 | £54 |
| Active listings | 4,619 | 2,945 |
| YoY occupancy | -5.5 pts | +0 pts |
| YoY daily rate | +68.8% | +57.9% |
| Regulation risk | — | — |
| Annual night cap | None | None |
| License required | No | No |
Full analysis: New Orleans vs Portland
On the money side of this comparison — what a listing actually earns against the nights it has available — New Orleans finishes decisively ahead of Portland. Revenue per available night — rate and occupancy combined, the figure that actually reaches an owner — is 42.1% higher in New Orleans: £76 against £54. New Orleans sells 11.5 more points of its calendar — 49.3% median occupancy against 37.8% in Portland. That is not a rounding difference, and it compounds over a hold period.
New Orleans takes both halves of the yield equation, which is less common than it sounds. It charges more per night — £175 against £134 — and still fills more of the year, 49.3% against 37.8%. 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 £76 against £54.
That verdict needs a caveat, because Portland is not simply the weaker market of the two. The twelve-month direction favours Portland too: occupancy there moved +0 points while New Orleans moved −5.5 points. Portland is the less crowded of the two — 2,945 active listings to 4,619 — so a well-run property has fewer near-identical rivals to out-rank. If your model leans on that dimension, the ordering above can reasonably flip.
Neither New Orleans nor Portland 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. New Orleans peaks in September at 49.2% and bottoms in December at 30.6%; Portland runs from 61.4% in September down to 28.3% in February. New Orleans is the steadier of the two at 18.6 points peak-to-trough against 33.1 — easier to underwrite against a mortgage — while Portland 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. New Orleans suits buyers who want a conventional, lightly regulated entry. It is the contrarian side: buying it means buying a market that has cooled. Portland 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 2026-09, filtered to listings with at least one booking in the last twelve months. Occupancy medians are drawn from 4,619 active New Orleans listings and 2,945 in Portland.
Frequently asked questions
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