The portfolio was earning 32% less rent per available night than its bedroom-matched market. One summer later it is 17% behind. RentPAR grew 34.0% against a market at 10.5%, while RevPAR grew 7.2% against a market at 6.6%. The distance between those two numbers is the point of this case study.
RevPAR counts every dollar a guest pays: rent, cleaning, damage waiver, channel markup, tax. RentPAR counts only the rent, which is the line an owner statement is paid from. Most operators track one number and assume it speaks for the other. It does not, and the gap between them is where owner earnings quietly leak.
Read the first two panels together. RevPAR grew 7.2%, so the business took in modestly more than its market did. RentPAR grew 34.0%, so owners were paid dramatically more. Both are true at once because the mix of what the guest was paying for changed: less of it went to fees, more of it went to rent. Levels, for reference: RentPAR $69.07 to $92.59 against a market moving $101.03 to $111.60; RevPAR $121.16 to $129.83 against $136.62 to $145.58.
Long Valley's RevPAR was never the problem. Going into this summer the portfolio sat about 11% below its market on RevPAR, roughly where it finished. On RentPAR it sat 32% below. The business was collecting close to a market-normal amount from each guest and passing an abnormally small share of it through to owners, because an inherited fee structure was absorbing the difference.
That is the condition that ends relationships. Owners do not see RevPAR. They see the deposit. A portfolio can look healthy on every dashboard the operator watches while every owner in it is quietly deciding the returns are not good enough.
"The revenue management strategy helped us gain trust with our owners after a somewhat tumultuous transition. We feel confident that Pacer is the best partner to help us achieve our goals."
RentPAR gap to bedroom-matched market: -32% in summer 2025, -17% in summer 2026. Nearly half the gap closed in one season.
Pacer presented the fee strategy audit on May 12 and the cleaning rebuild six days later, and Long Valley approved and implemented it in-season. From that point the fee load fell in a straight line, from 77.7% of rent in March to 35.7% in July. The prior year moved the opposite direction across the same months, which is what happens when nobody touches it.
Fees and tax as a percentage of rent, 83-home same-store cohort, night-allocated from PriceLabs. Market reference from the Key Data comp sets used in the May 12 audit. Independently corroborated in Guesty, which puts the summer shift at 73.7% to 42.2%.
Not a blanket discount. Cutting fees is easy and usually just moves the loss somewhere else. The work was to rebuild each charge against what it actually costs to deliver, so owners earn more, guests see a cleaner price, and the operator keeps the margin it needs to run the business.
The guest cleaning fee averaged $172 against a contractor departure rate of $128. Pacer reset the fee to the true cost of the clean, cutting the guest charge 26% while still sitting 28% above the operator's own departure piece rate.
A model fee per bedroom class with a 30% band for occupancy and square footage, replacing outliers where a 2-bedroom carried a higher fee than a 3-bedroom in the same town.
The inherited waiver was charged per night. Combined with housekeeping it added 18.3% on top of nightly rent. Moving it to a per-stay basis was the single largest driver of the reduction.
OTA markups sat above what distribution actually costs. Pacer reset them: VRBO 10% to 8%, Airbnb 20% to 15.5%. Pet and hot tub fees were folded into the nightly rate rather than charged separately.
What this does to an operator's revenue base. Management fees are earned on rent, and rent rose 34%, so the commission line rose with it. The reductions came out of fixed add-on charges, the most fragile revenue a manager carries: capped by what a guest will accept at checkout, flat when the portfolio performs, and the first line owners scrutinize. Commission on rent has none of those limits and compounds with every point of RentPAR. Source: Pacer revenue strategy audit presented 2026-05-12 and cleaning fee rebuild presented 2026-05-18.
Both measures are reported so the result cannot be an artifact of the fee restructure it describes.
RentPAR is rent divided by available nights. RevPAR is all guest revenue, including fees and tax, divided by the same available nights. Both are reported against the same market on the same basis.
83 homes with booked nights in the May to July window in both 2025 and 2026, so every home was demonstrably active in both summers. Availability is identical across years.
Key Data comp sets matched to each unit's own bedroom count, then unit-weighted. RentPAR uses adjusted RevPAR and RevPAR uses adjusted total RevPAR, so like is compared to like.
Pacer went live 2026-03-01. March and April were transition months and are excluded. The performance window is May 1 to July 31 against the identical calendar window in 2025.
Portfolio figures night-allocated from PriceLabs for both years, cancellations excluded, corroborated against the Pacer production database. Figures as of August 21, 2026.
Pacer is a preferred revenue management partner to the Casago franchise network. We can benchmark your portfolio against bedroom-matched market performance and identify where revenue may be leaking, before you make any commitment.