The short-term rental amenities that move revenue are the ones you can underwrite: a cost to install, and an incremental annual revenue number the comp set in that specific market supports. Rob Nardelli, who runs a short-term rental fund with homes in Nashville, Palm Springs and the Poconos, treats a hot tub the same way he treats a mini golf course — as capital allocation, not decoration.
This guide walks the sequence in the order it actually has to happen: pick the market and the target guest first, run the spend-versus-lift math on each amenity, convert dead square footage into the features guests photograph, theme the house to the guest, hit the photo date, and then hand it to a manager you have actually vetted.
Key takeaways
- Choose the market and the target guest group before choosing a single amenity — the guest profile dictates every design and amenity decision downstream.
- Nardelli reports a hot tub installed for roughly $10K–$15K producing $30K–$50K in additional annual revenue depending on the market. Run that same cost-versus-annual-lift test on every amenity you consider.
- Dead square footage — a garage, an unused side lawn, an oversized owner’s closet — is the cheapest place to build a booking driver, because you already own it.
- The photo date is a hard deadline that sets the listing’s entire first season. Be physically on site for staging; plans fall apart on launch week.
- Judge a property manager on revenue performance and responsiveness during a crisis, not on marketing reach. Nardelli left two firms, including one with impeccable craftsmanship, over declining revenue.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Rob Nardelli of Select Properties on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Dylan Silver.
Pick the Market and the Guest Before You Pick a Single Amenity
Start wide, then narrow. Nardelli screens at the macro level first — top beach destinations, top ski destinations, bachelorette markets — and only then drills into specific submarkets and homes. Picking amenities before you know who is sleeping in the house is how investors end up with a beautiful property that does not book.
His buy box is four-to-six-bedroom-plus homes in markets where comparable properties are producing $200,000 or more in gross annual revenue. Bedroom count matters because large group trips and multi-family stays are where the nightly rate math works hardest.
For data, he uses AirDNA as the foundational layer, with a caveat worth repeating: it is not perfect. His reasoning for using it anyway is practical — if it is good enough for the lenders writing loans to short-term rental owners, it is good enough as a starting point for market selection. Treat it as the first filter, not the final answer, and verify against what specific homes in the market are actually doing.
Target guest is where the real work happens. Nashville taught him the bachelorette market, largely by accident — he bought there pre-2017/2018 and the city turned into the bachelorette capital around him. Palm Springs and the Poconos skew toward families and large group trips. Most properties end up serving a mix, and you need to know which mix before you spend a dollar on furniture.
Some markets you write off entirely. Northern New Jersey is on Nardelli’s zero list because Airbnbs were outlawed there. No amount of design solves a regulatory ban, so confirm the rules before you confirm anything else.
Amenity Math: Spend Versus Annual Revenue Lift
Every amenity decision reduces to two numbers: what it costs installed, and what the comp set in that market says it adds to annual revenue. If you cannot answer the second number, you are decorating, not investing.
The hot tub is Nardelli’s cleanest example. He puts installation at roughly $10,000 to $15,000 at the top end for a good unit, against a revenue lift that, depending on the market, he has seen run $30,000 to $50,000 more per year. Those are his figures from his markets, not a universal benchmark — but the structure of the decision travels.
Apply the same frame to everything else on the list:
- What does this cost fully installed, including permits, electrical, and the surface it sits on?
- Which homes in this specific market are outperforming, and which amenities do they have that the rest do not?
- What is the realistic nightly rate premium or occupancy gain, and what does that come to over twelve months?
- What does it cost to maintain and clean every turnover?
The research step is the one most investors skip. Nardelli’s instruction is blunt: know your market, know which homes are doing better, and find a way to do it better than they are. That is a comp-by-comp exercise in one market, not a general list of Airbnb amenities that increase bookings pulled off a blog.
Some amenities will fail this test in your market and pass in another. A hot tub in the desert and a hot tub in a ski town are not the same underwriting.
The key here is research. You need to know your market. You need to know what homes are doing better. And you need to be able to find a way to do it even better than they are.
— Rob Nardelli, Select Properties
Turn Dead Square Footage Into the Reason People Book
The cheapest booking driver is space you already own and are not using. Nardelli has done this three times, and in each case the converted space became where guests actually spend their time.
In Palm Springs, the garage became a 1920s speakeasy with a secret door and a passage to get you in. The side lawn — what he calls “purgatory for pool toys,” an unused strip with a loud HVAC unit on it — got a structure built to contain the HVAC noise plus a four-hole mini golf course, lit so it plays at night. His summary of the result: where does everyone spend their time? The speakeasy and the mini golf.
In the Poconos, the house came with a giant owner’s closet. Because it is held in the limited partnership, he refused to use it for storage — he says he might have left an extension cord in there and that was it. Instead the team built a Narnia room: you open the wardrobe doors, push the fur coats aside, and walk into a kids’ space with bookshelves and a TV setup.
The principle underneath all three is zoning the house by guest group. A five-bedroom with open floor plans means noise travels and everyone competes for the same room. Give the guys a place to watch the game and play pool, the adults a place to watch a movie, and the kids a space of their own, and the house works for the large groups you are targeting.
Before you add square footage, audit the square footage you are wasting.
Theme the House to the Guest, and Get a Real Design Eye on It
A theme is only valuable if it coordinates with your target market. This is where Nardelli says you get “nano-specific” — the macro decision is the market, the micro decision is the theme, and the second has to serve the first.
Palm Springs is themed room by room around the Hollywood hideout idea: a Marilyn Monroe room, a Sean Connery James Bond room, a Rat Pack room, and a Frank Sinatra room with custom art. He was initially convinced a Bond room would read as corny if a guy built it. It worked because it was balanced against the Marilyn room — the house reads as a coherent era, not one owner’s hobby.
He is candid that the execution is not his. Design is outsourced to his wife, a fashion designer, and he notes he is red-green colorblind, so shade decisions are not a judgment call he can make. The point generalizes: vision and taste are different skills. Pick the targets, set the concept, and put someone with a real design eye on the finishes.
Budget does not have to be the constraint it looks like. His first Nashville property was a brand-new build, which meant buying literally everything including the washer and dryer. He furnished it through Facebook Marketplace and clearance and floor-model hunting at stores like West Elm — the rug a showroom had out for two weeks and wants gone. He calls these the dark arts of furnishing on a tiny budget.
A well-marketed, well-photographed listing routinely punches above what the house looks like from the curb. Drive by and it’s a nice home; see it online and the marketing is doing real work.
Launch Day: Staging, Photos, and Being On Site
Nardelli now requires himself to be present for all staging. He rates market research as an eight or nine out of ten in intensity; he rates the staging and photo date a ten, or as he puts it, a thirteen out of ten.
Here is why. On one Palm Springs launch, the contractor had a family emergency mid-job — his daughter was in an accident — and left. The hot tub was filled but had no cover and no steps. Desert evaporation drained it over two or three days. The backyard hose turned out to be about twelve feet short of reaching it. Hours before guests arrived, Nardelli was filling a side table that doubles as a cooler with four or five gallons at a time and deadlifting water across the yard in the desert sun.
No amount of planning removes that. What it tells you is that furniture goes in at two or three in the morning on launch week regardless of how well you planned, and someone accountable has to be physically on site when it does.
Treat the photo date as a fixed deadline, not a milestone that can slide. Those images carry the listing through its entire first season — they set the nightly rate you can ask, they drive the first reviews, and the first reviews drive everything after. Even with a professional photographer, details get missed: Nardelli notes the Sean Connery photo ended up hanging in the Sinatra room.
Who Runs It After Launch — and How to Vet a Manager
Judge a short-term rental manager on two things: revenue performance and how they behave during a crisis. Marketing reach is not one of them.
Nardelli outsourced fully to Evolve, a large national firm, while he was working as an executive at a tech company and had become the bottleneck in his own business. The result: more than $20,000 in fraudulent stays booked through booking.com on last-minute stolen credit cards. By the time the charges were reported, guests were already in the house throwing large parties. Revenue also declined on both properties he held at the time. The salesperson he dealt with would not return his call about the fraud.
His read is that a national firm of that size functions largely as a marketing arm that will introduce you to anybody in its network. The one genuine benefit he got from it was a local property manager — an independent operator inside their network, not an employee — who was all over the fraud problem and who he still works with today.
A second firm, Air Concierge, did impeccable work. He praises the craftsmanship and attention to detail without reservation. Revenue still went in the tank, so he moved on. Good work and good results are not the same thing, and only one of them pays the mortgage.
He found his current manager, who now runs all three properties, through a strategic alliance in the short-term rental world — the same relationship that sourced the Poconos house.
The practical rules when vetting short term rental property managers:
- Expect to meet scammers. Nardelli is explicit that you will, and that it is not all green pastures out there.
- Source through your own network and ask for the introduction, rather than taking whoever a platform assigns you.
- Ask for revenue performance on comparable properties in that market, year over year.
- Ask what happened the last time a guest situation went wrong, and who picked up the phone.
Frequently asked questions
Which short-term rental amenity has the clearest payback?
A hot tub is usually the easiest call to underwrite. Rob Nardelli puts installation at roughly $10,000 to $15,000 for a good unit and has seen it produce $30,000 to $50,000 in additional annual revenue depending on the market.
That is his experience in his markets, not a guaranteed return. Verify it against your own comp set before you commit — the lift depends heavily on climate, season length, and whether competing listings already have one.
How do you decide what theme a short-term rental should have?
Work backward from the target guest. Nardelli’s rule is that the theme has to coordinate with who your target market is, which is where you get what he calls nano-specific — the market decision is macro, the theme is micro, and the theme serves the market.
In Palm Springs, that produced room-by-room Hollywood themes: Marilyn Monroe, a Sean Connery James Bond room, a Rat Pack room and a Frank Sinatra room with custom art. In the Poconos, where the guest is a large family group, it produced a Narnia room behind a wardrobe for the kids. Same principle, completely different execution.
Is AirDNA reliable enough to pick a short-term rental market?
Use it as the foundational data layer, not the final decision. Nardelli calls AirDNA the industry standard for understanding where the right spots are, while stating plainly that it is not perfect — no data source is.
His justification for relying on it is that lenders who write loans to short-term rental owners use it. That makes it a credible first filter. Confirm what it tells you by looking at which specific homes in the market are outperforming and what they have that others do not.
Should you use a national short-term rental management company or a local manager?
Judge on results, not size. Nardelli’s experience with a large national firm included more than $20,000 in fraudulent stays booked on stolen credit cards, declining revenue on both of his properties at the time, and a salesperson who would not return his call during the fraud.
His view is that the largest firms can function as a marketing arm that will introduce you to anyone in their network. The one lasting benefit he got was an independent local manager inside that network. He now works with a manager found through a strategic alliance in the short-term rental world, across all three of his properties.
How many bedrooms should a short-term rental have to maximize revenue?
Nardelli specializes in four-to-six-bedroom-plus homes and says that is where you get the best bang for your buck in short-term rentals. Larger homes capture large group trips and multi-family stays, which support higher nightly rates than a one- or two-bedroom unit in the same market.
Pair the bedroom count with the gross revenue screen. He looks at markets where comparable homes are producing $200,000 or more in annual gross revenue, which narrows the field considerably before any property-level analysis begins.
The bottom line
Before you buy another thing for your rental, build a one-page list of candidate amenities with two columns — installed cost and the annual revenue lift your market’s comp set actually supports — and spend only on the lines where that second number clears the first by a wide margin.
