Melbourne Short-Stay Market Report

This report is built on a dataset almost no one publishes: a single operator's complete book, read directly from its property-management system. The BNB Success Mentorship founders operate 83 short-stay properties in Melbourne (as at 27 August 2026), and this edition covers every one of them across the 2025–26 financial year — thirteen months of night-attributed gross booking revenue, reconciled against the PMS's own analytics to within a quarter of a percent.

Night-attributed matters. Most published short-stay figures book a stay’s whole value to its check-in month, which turns one long booking into a fake spike. Here, each night’s revenue sits in the month the night was actually slept, so the curve below is the shape of demand, not the shape of check-ins.

Every dollar figure in this report is gross booking revenue — what guests paid, before rent, cleaning, platform fees and all other operating costs. None of it is profit, and this report does not estimate profit.

Across FY25–26 the book took $3,994,563 in gross booking revenue while growing from 29 properties to 79. The strongest calendar months were December 2025 ($461,448) and January 2026 ($459,668) — within half a percent of each other, which is the first finding worth pausing on: Melbourne's summer is not a single-month spike but a two-month plateau. An operator who staffs and prices for a December peak and treats January as the wind-down leaves one of the year's two best months on the table.

July 2026 posted the highest raw month in the series ($479,649) — but that is a book-size effect, not a seasonal one. By July the book had reached 83 properties; on a per-property basis, mid-winter sat near the bottom of the year. Raw monthly totals flatter a growing operation, which is exactly why the next section divides them.

Dividing each month’s revenue by the number of properties on the book gives a simple per-property average — a crude but honest normaliser. On that basis, December 2025 read roughly $8,900 per property and April 2026 roughly $4,500: a peak-to-trough swing of about 2×. Two caveats temper it. Properties acquired mid-month contribute partial months, which deflates fast-growth months (April’s book jumped from 64 to 73), so the true seasonal swing is somewhat less than the raw 2×. And an average across studios and four-bedrooms is a blend, not a benchmark for any one property.

The March effect is cleaner, because the book grew only modestly that month: March 2026 — Grand Prix month — read about 26% above February on a per-property basis. That is the recurring shape of Melbourne’s event calendar showing up in operating data: a single event week capable of lifting a whole month by a quarter.

The practical reading for operators: annual planning in this market has to survive a winter in which per-property revenue runs at roughly half the summer rate. A property that only works at summer rates does not work.

The pricing on this book is set nightly by NightlyIQ, BNB Success Mentorship's in-house revenue-management system, which benchmarks each listing against its own comparable set — 215,544 comparable properties nationally, a median of 349 behind each listing. Across community properties connected to it, guest ratings average 4.86★ over 2,961 reviews (read 27 August 2026).

One pattern from that benchmarking underpins both the software and the curriculum, and will get its own report: two listings in the same building routinely produce completely different results — same floorplan, same nights, different revenue. Market-level averages conceal it; listing-level data is where the money actually moves.

This edition publishes what we can fully stand behind today: a complete, reconciled, first-party operating record. The next edition extends it two ways — a same-store view (the properties held across both years, so growth and season fully separate) and Melbourne market-wide occupancy bands, published once independent collection or licensing for market data is in place. The methodology page records what this report deliberately does not claim.