SOAR analysis is a four-part screen — Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results — that lets you decide whether a short-term rental market, property, or landlord partnership deserves more of your time, and you can finish it in under two hours. You write down the edge you can prove, the window that makes the timing work, the number you are actually trying to hit, and the modeled result the deal produces. If the modeled result does not clear the number, you stop. I've spent 18+ years in real estate, focused on short-term rentals since 2016, and trained more than 10,000 operators through CashFlowDiary; this is the screen I run first, because it replaces a two-week gut feeling with a dated page you can hand to a partner, a lender, or your future self.
SOAR Analysis: How to Evaluate Any STR Opportunity in Under Two Hours
A two-hour screen beats a two-week gut feeling. SOAR forces you to write down the edge, the window, the target and the measurable result before you sign anything.
Table of Contents
What SOAR Actually Screens For
SOAR is not a valuation model and it is not underwriting. It is the gate in front of underwriting. Full underwriting on an STR — pulling comparable set revenue, building a furnishing budget, reading the lease, checking the ordinance, calling an insurance broker — costs you eight to twenty hours. You cannot afford that on every address that looks interesting. The screen exists to kill eighty percent of candidates before they eat that time.
Three things go wrong without it. Operators fall in love with a property and back-fill the numbers. They chase an opportunity that was real eighteen months ago and is now saturated. Or they never write down a target, so every deal looks acceptable because nothing can fail a test that was never set.
Each letter carries a job:
Letter | The question it answers | The failure it prevents |
|---|---|---|
Strengths | What do I bring that a random buyer does not? | Competing on price with better-capitalized operators |
Opportunities | What external condition makes now the moment? | Entering a market at the top of its supply curve |
Aspirations | What number and what life am I buying? | Accumulating doors that do not produce the outcome you wanted |
Results | What must be true financially for this to work? | Optimism substituting for arithmetic |
Order matters. Most people run S and O, get excited, and skip to signing. Aspirations before Results is what turns the screen into a decision instead of a pitch deck.
S — Strengths: The Edge You Can Prove
Strengths means a documented advantage held by the operator, the property, or the market — not an adjective. If you cannot produce evidence for it in the next ten minutes, it is not a strength; it is a hope.
Work the worksheet one row at a time and write the evidence next to the claim.
Question | Evidence required | Disqualifier |
|---|---|---|
What do I have that a new entrant does not? | Named relationships, existing listings and their review count, cash on hand with a bank balance date | The only answer is "I work hard" or "I learn fast" |
What does this property have that its comparable set lacks? | Photos of the comps, feature-by-feature list, amenity gaps you can verify on the listing pages | The differentiator is one you can buy for under $2,000 — so can everyone |
Why does this market support nightly rates at all? | Named demand drivers: hospital, university, venue, park gate, convention center, employer campus | Demand rests on a single annual event |
Can I operate it from where I live? | Named cleaner or co-host with a phone number, drive time or flight time, backup contact | No boots on the ground and no plan to hire one |
Do I already know this guest type? | Prior bookings, message history, or direct professional experience with that guest segment | You have never hosted or served that segment |
Two hard rules. First, capital by itself is not a strength — it is fuel, and fuel does not produce an edge. Second, a strength you would lose if one person quit is a single point of failure, so log it in the row and plan a backup before you count it.
For a landlord or partnership deal, the strength questions shift to the counterparty. Does this owner hold multiple units? Have they permitted a short-term rental before? Is the unit sitting vacant right now, and for how long? A vacant unit with a motivated owner is a documented strength. "They seemed open to the idea on the phone" is not.
O — Opportunities: The Window and Its Expiry
An opportunity is an external condition with a date on it. Write the expiry next to every one, because an opportunity you do not act on inside its window is just trivia.
The conditions worth checking in the screen:
Supply trend. Is active listing count in the submarket rising, flat, or falling over the trailing twelve months? Rising supply against flat demand compresses occupancy first and rate second.
Regulatory posture. Has the city passed, amended, or scheduled a vote on a short-term rental ordinance? Read the city or county page, not a forum thread.
Demand shocks. New employer, new terminal, new venue, new hospital wing. These carry publication dates you can cite.
Softness in the lease or purchase market. Longer days on market, concessions offered, or vacancy in the exact building you are targeting.
Channel-level changes. Platform policy shifts on cancellations, cleaning fee display, or listing quality standards change what a listing must do to convert.
Where the evidence comes from matters more than which vendor you pay. Use market data platforms for active listing counts, occupancy and average daily rate by submarket and bedroom count. Use the census programs for household, income, and housing-unit context by tract. Use the city's own short-term rental page for permit types, caps, and enforcement language. Use the platform help center for the operating rules and fee mechanics that apply to your listing. Each of those is telling you a different thing, and none of them tells you the answer by itself.
Disqualifiers at this letter: the ordinance requires owner occupancy and you will not be occupying; a permit cap is at its ceiling with a waitlist; the only tailwind you can name is "travel is coming back"; the window closes before your realistic start date. If your furnish-and-launch timeline is ninety days and the condition expires in sixty, the opportunity is not yours.
A — Aspirations: Your Number, Written Down First
This is the letter almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why portfolios drift. Aspirations is a written target — dated, numeric, and personal — set before you look at the deal's output. Set it after, and you will quietly adjust it to whatever the deal produces.
Answer five questions in writing:
Question | Acceptable answer format | Disqualifier |
|---|---|---|
Monthly net cash flow target per unit | A dollar figure after all operating costs and reserves | "As much as possible" |
Doors in 24 months | A count plus the capital you will need per door | A count with no capital plan behind it |
Hours per week you will personally work | A number, and which tasks are yours | "Whatever it takes" |
Cash reserve floor you refuse to breach | A dollar figure, held separately | No reserve line at all |
What this portfolio is for | A named outcome: replace income, fund tuition, build a sellable operating business | A vague wish for freedom |
Reserves are the row people delete first and regret most. Set the floor as a number of months of full carrying cost per unit and treat it as untouchable. A deal that clears your cash flow target only by spending the reserve has not cleared it.
Write the page, date it, and keep it. When a deal three months from now looks tempting, you compare it against a target you set while calm.
R — Results: The Floor the Deal Must Clear
Results is the arithmetic. You are not building a ten-year pro forma in this screen — you are finding the floor and checking whether the deal clears it.
Model three scenarios and keep them on one line each:
Scenario | Occupancy assumption | Rate assumption | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
Break-even | Solve for it | Comp-set median ADR | The occupancy you must hold to avoid feeding the unit |
Base | Comp-set median occupancy for your bedroom count | Comp-set median ADR | The honest expected case |
Stress | Base minus 15 points | Median ADR minus 10 percent | Whether a soft year is survivable or fatal |
Cost lines the screen must include, because they are the ones people leave out: furnishing and setup, platform and processing fees, cleaning cost you actually pay when a turn is missed, utilities and internet, insurance written for short-term rental use, permit and licensing fees, lodging or occupancy tax remittance, software, supplies, repairs, and a reserve contribution. Rental income and the expenses you may deduct against it are described in IRS Publication 527 and the related tax topic pages; this article is not tax or legal advice, so confirm your treatment with your own CPA.
Disqualifiers at this letter are blunt. Break-even occupancy above the comp-set median means you need to outperform the market just to pay bills. The stress case that burns reserves inside twelve months is a no. Setup capital that leaves you under your reserve floor on day one is a no, regardless of how good the base case looks. And any deal whose entire margin depends on one nightly-rate assumption you cannot support with comparable listings is a no.
How to Screen a Deal in Two Hours: A Five-Step Process
Time-box it. The limit is the point: a screen that expands to six hours is underwriting, and you have not yet earned the right to spend that.
Minutes 0–15 — Aspirations first. Open your dated target page. If you do not have one, write it now, before you look at the deal. Do not let the deal set the target.
Minutes 15–45 — Opportunities. Pull submarket supply, occupancy, and ADR trend for your bedroom count. Read the city or county short-term rental page end to end. Write each condition with its expiry date. Kill the deal here if the ordinance or the permit cap ends it.
Minutes 45–75 — Strengths. Fill the strengths table with evidence, not adjectives. Name your cleaner, your co-host, your comps, your relationships. Mark any row that depends on one person.
Minutes 75–105 — Results. Build the three scenarios and the full cost stack. Solve for break-even occupancy. Compare the base case to your Aspirations number.
Minutes 105–120 — Decision and write-up. Write one of three verdicts: proceed to full underwriting, renegotiate a named term, or pass. Add one sentence saying what would have to change for a pass to become a proceed, then date the page and file it.
Anything you could not verify inside the box gets written down as an open question, not as an assumption. Open questions are what the next session is for.
A Worked Example, and What to Do When Results Miss
Illustration only — the figures below are made up to show the mechanics, not a quoted market.
A two-bedroom unit on a landlord arbitrage deal. Aspirations: $900 per month net per unit, six-month reserve floor, under six personal hours a week. Opportunity: the building has four vacant units and the city permits non-owner-occupied short-term rentals with an annual license; the window closes when lease-up season starts in ten weeks. Strength: the owner manages eleven doors and has one prior licensed short-term rental in the portfolio, so the conversation starts from experience instead of from scratch.
Results, base case: rent $2,400, all-in operating costs $1,450, modeled gross revenue $4,200. Net lands near $350 — well under the $900 target. Break-even occupancy computes above the comp-set median. The screen says no as presented.
That verdict is the useful part. A miss between Results and Aspirations has exactly four honest responses, and one dishonest one.
Change the terms. Ask for lower rent, a longer initial free period during setup, a graduated rent schedule, or the landlord funding part of the furnishing. Re-run Results with the new terms.
Change the unit. Same building, different floor plan, or the three-bedroom that supports a higher rate against the same fixed costs.
Change the market. Your cost stack may simply be wrong for the revenue available in that submarket.
Change your Aspirations — once, deliberately, in writing. If $900 was never achievable at your capital level, revise the target on its own page with a date and a reason. Never revise it inside a deal.
The dishonest response is raising the rate assumption or the occupancy assumption until the spreadsheet agrees with you. That is not a decision; it is a wish with a border around it.
Re-run the screen after a renegotiation, not before. If the second run still misses, pass and keep the page — when that owner calls back in four months with a vacancy problem, you already know the terms that make it work.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a SOAR analysis take?
Ninety to one hundred twenty minutes with your data sources open. If it runs longer, you have drifted into full underwriting, which is a separate job that should only start after the screen returns a proceed verdict. Set a timer and write open questions down instead of chasing them mid-screen.
Can SOAR replace full underwriting on a short-term rental?
No. SOAR decides whether to spend the eight to twenty hours that real underwriting takes. It does not replace reading the lease, verifying the ordinance with the permitting office, getting an insurance quote in writing, or building a line-item furnishing budget.
What data do I need before I start?
Submarket supply, occupancy and average daily rate by bedroom count; the city or county short-term rental ordinance page; the platform's own help documentation for fees and host rules; and demographic and housing context from the census programs. Add your own numbers: capital available, reserve floor, and the hours you will work.
What if my Results number misses my Aspirations number?
Renegotiate terms, switch units, switch markets, or revise your target on purpose in a separate dated document. Do not adjust the rate or occupancy assumption to close the gap — that is how operators talk themselves into deals they cannot carry through a soft season.
Does SOAR work for evaluating a market rather than a single property?
Yes, and it is the better use. At market level, Strengths asks what structurally supports nightly demand, Opportunities asks about supply and regulation trend, Aspirations sets the number of units you need that market to carry, and Results tests whether a typical unit there clears your floor. Screen the market first, then screen addresses inside it.
Related Reading
Bring the completed worksheet to a complimentary one-on-one diagnostic call and we will pressure-test the Results column against what your market actually supports.
Keep reading:
How to Choose Your First STR Market — the market-level version of the Opportunities worksheet.
Rental Arbitrage Startup Costs — the cost lines your Results scenarios must include.
Who to Talk to Before Buying Short Term Rentals — the people who can verify your evidence column.
Sources
IRS — Publication 527, Residential Rental Property — defines how rental income and deductible expenses are treated, which sets the cost lines in the Results scenarios.
IRS — Topic No. 415, Renting Residential and Vacation Property — covers short-term and vacation rental use rules relevant to how you report a unit.
Airbnb — Airbnb service fees — documents the platform service-fee mechanics that must appear in the cost stack.
Airbnb — Responsible hosting in the United States — lists the local-rule, permit and insurance checks that belong in the Opportunities column.
U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey — provides household, income and housing-unit context used to sanity-check demand at the submarket level.
U.S. Small Business Administration — Market Research and Competitive Analysis — outlines the demand and competitor evidence standard behind the Strengths and Opportunities worksheets.
Disclaimer: Educational content only — not financial, legal, or tax advice; results vary.
See our full Earnings Disclaimer and Affiliate Disclosure for complete details. © 2026 West Egg Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.