Two houses on the same street in Houston can produce completely different results as short term rentals. One property books solid all year, with good occupancy rates, steady bookings, and healthy nightly rates. The other sits empty half the time no matter how the pricing is set or how good the guest experience is. Same neighborhood, same zip code, same “market data.” I have watched this play out across the rentals we manage, and it is the reason we built the Surge Score™.
The problem that pushed us to build it
Short term rental investing has grown into a multi-billion dollar corner of real estate, but the tools most buyers use to evaluate potential deals are still crude. The typical investor looks at neighborhood reputation, an agent’s opinion, or annual revenue averages that treat an entire zip code as one data point. None of that answers the question that matters: will this specific property, at this specific address, deliver the occupancy, revenue, and cash flow the investment needs?
Managing vacation rental properties across Houston taught us what the averages hide. A three-bedroom near the Texas Medical Center behaves nothing like a three-bedroom four miles away, even when the platforms report them as the same market. Guests do not book zip codes. They book proximity to a hospital, a stadium, a convention center, or the beach, and they book rentals configured for their trip.
So we turned that operating data into a rental investment performance prediction model. The Surge Score™ rates any residential listing in a supported market on a 0 to 100 scale, combining two dimensions that both have to be strong. A Demand Score measures how close the property sits to real demand drivers across 16 categories, using distance decay calibrated per category. A hospital one mile away carries real weight in bookings. The same hospital at five miles contributes almost nothing. A Property Score then evaluates the characteristics that drive STR revenue: bedroom count, bathroom ratio, pool, parking, outdoor space, and square footage per bedroom.
The two scores multiply rather than add. A great property in a dead location cannot score well, and neither can a weak house in a prime spot. Additional factors reward properties whose configuration matches the guests the area attracts, and properties fed by several independent demand sources instead of one seasonal pattern. Regulatory gates flag HOA restrictions on short term rentals and high-risk flood zones automatically, since regulations can sink an otherwise profitable deal.
What this changes for investors right now
The immediate benefit is that short term rental investment scoring finally happens at the property level, before money is committed. Instead of guessing from market averages or copying pricing strategies from Airbnb forums, an investor can pull up any active listing in a supported market and see a single score backed by data, with a full breakdown of the demand and property components behind it.
Calibration is what makes the number trustworthy. This is not a national formula applied everywhere. Each city’s model is tuned against the complete set of active local listings and their verified revenue performance, including real occupancy rates and annual revenue. Houston, our launch market, was calibrated against thousands of active short term rental properties. What drives high returns in Houston real estate is not what works in Austin or San Antonio, and the model reflects that.
For a buyer comparing five properties on a Saturday morning, this compresses weeks of market analysis into minutes and creates real insights instead of guesswork. It also cuts the most expensive mistake in short term rentals: buying a beautiful house in a location that cannot feed it guests. An STR property analysis tool is only useful if it catches that failure mode before the expenses start, and ours was designed around it.
Where Surge goes from here
The next step is geographic. Houston is live today through our investment portal, and we are expanding to additional Texas markets, with Dallas-Fort Worth next in line. Every new city gets its own dedicated calibration pass against local listing and revenue data before we publish a single score there. We would rather launch a market late than launch it miscalibrated.
Beyond Texas, the goal is to make property-level scoring the standard way people evaluate short term rental investments, the way a credit score became the shorthand for lending risk. When investors understand exactly why a property scores high or low, they make better rental investment decisions and maximize their returns. Averages had their moment. Investors deserve better resolution than a zip code.
The Surge Score™ is live now at gowithsurge.com, where investors can view scores for any active listing in supported markets.
Author Bio:
Humberto Marquez is the Founder of Surge, a Houston-based short-term rental management and investment brokerage. Surge developed the Surge Score™, a proprietary system that predicts STR investment performance using market-specific calibration data. Humberto helps investors identify high-performing rental properties across Texas markets through data-driven analysis.
