The Oak Island STR Numbers Problem: Why Four "Authoritative" Datasets Disagree by 2x, and Which One Actually Belongs in Your Pro Forma

Paste an Oak Island address into four short-term rental analytics tools this month and you will get four different businesses back. One says the average listing clears $41,757 a year at 38% occupancy. Another says $72,000 at 59%. A third splits the difference. A fourth grades the market a 41 out of 100 and quietly moves on.

None of these platforms is lying. They are measuring different things, on different calendars, against different denominators. If you are buying an Oak Island second home that has to perform as a rental, the gap between those numbers is the gap between a deal that works and a deal that eats your reserves.

The four dashboards, side by side

Here is what the leading STR data providers were publishing about Oak Island as of mid-2026:

Revenue estimates span from roughly $42K to $77K on the same town. ADR estimates span $252 to $467. Occupancy estimates span 24% to 59%. That is not noise. That is methodology.

Why the same island produces five different numbers

The disagreement resolves once you look at what each platform actually counts.

Occupancy denominator. Occupancy is the share of available nights that get booked, averaged across active listings over the trailing 12 months. It measures real demand, not how many nights a host chooses to list. A dataset that divides booked nights by available nights will always report higher occupancy than one that divides by calendar nights, because most Oak Island owners block out weeks for personal use. That single choice explains most of the AirROI-to-Airbtics gap.

Listing pool. Rabbu was tracking 454 listings in the same window AirROI counted 1,398. That is not a rounding error. Different providers scrape different combinations of Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, and some filter out listings that booked fewer than a threshold number of nights. A smaller, more selective pool tends to skew average revenue upward.

Trailing window. Airbtics was still quoting a November 2024 to October 2025 period into early 2026. AirDNA's July 2026 snapshot captures a market that has absorbed a full extra year of new supply. On Oak Island specifically, that matters more than usual.

Property mix. Entire-home listings on Oak Island command materially different rates than the handful of condos and rooms in the same dataset. Providers that separate the two get cleaner numbers; providers that blend them get muddier ones.

The number the platforms can't fake

There is one Oak Island STR figure that does not depend on scraping methodology, and almost no out-of-state buyer looks at it: the town's own accommodations-tax receipts.

Oak Island charges a total 5 percent on stays under 90 days, and owners or their agents file monthly by the 20th. Divide the town's reported monthly receipts by 0.05 and you get gross lodging revenue for the entire island, filed under penalty of perjury. It is a lagging number and it captures only compliant filers, but it is grounded in dollars that actually changed hands rather than in inferred bookings from a listing calendar.

Two things follow from that.

First, the tax data lets you sanity-check any analytics dashboard. If a platform's implied town-wide revenue is wildly higher than the tax-back-solved figure, that platform is probably overcounting bookings or undercounting blocked nights. If it is wildly lower, it is probably missing a chunk of the listing pool.

Second, half of that 5% is earmarked in a way that changes the physical asset you are buying. Of the 5 percent, 2 percent is dedicated to beach protection and renourishment, which funds shoreline projects. Every night a guest sleeps in your rental, forty cents on the dollar of that tax is being routed into the sand in front of the house. That is a mechanism worth understanding before you evaluate an oceanfront pro forma.

What 97.7% supply growth actually did to the math

The single most consequential Oak Island STR fact of the last twelve months is buried in the AirROI report: Supply grew 97.7% over the past year, yet revenue and nightly rates both trended upward — a signal that traveler demand is outpacing new inventory rather than being diluted by it.

Read that carefully. The listing count roughly doubled and per-listing revenue still climbed. That is unusual, and it is the closest thing this market has to a defensible bull case. It also means the historical Airbtics window that includes 2024 is describing a smaller, less competitive market than the one you would actually be buying into. A pro forma that leans on the $72K figure is quietly assuming a version of Oak Island that had half as many rentals competing for the same summer.

The pattern to internalize: on Oak Island, revenue is holding up under a doubling of supply, but that resilience is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in properties that were already positioned to win, and it leaves entry-level listings absorbing most of the new competition.

Best-in-class properties (Top 10%) command rates of $827+ per night, often due to premium features or locations. Strong performing properties (Top 25%) achieve nightly rates of $547 or more. Typical properties (Median) charge around $355 per night. Entry-level properties (Bottom 25%) earn around $247 per night. That is roughly a 3.3x spread between the top decile and the bottom quartile in the same town. The median is not a useful planning number. The quartile band you are buying into is.

The pro forma line items outsiders keep missing

Once the revenue side is bounded, the second half of the math is where deals actually break. A short-term rental income statement on Oak Island has a few items that do not appear in the platform dashboards:

1. Full-service management. Full-service management commonly uses a percentage of rental revenue, often in the mid-teens to mid-twenties, sometimes paired with fixed fees. On a $65K gross, that is a $10K to $16K line item before you touch utilities.
2. STR-rated insurance. Insurance should be a short-term rental policy, which is typically higher than a standard homeowner policy. Stack that on top of a coastal wind and flood policy and the number gets real.
3. The 5% accommodations tax and any Brunswick County occupancy tax layered on top, filed monthly whether the platform remitted or not.
4. Minimum-stay dynamics. Minimum stay rules in peak months, such as three to seven nights, can reduce turnover costs and lift per-stay revenue. This is a lever, not a given.
5. HOA and covenant review. Even in a town with no city-level STR ordinance, private restrictions can be binding.

The last item is where the biggest surprises live for out-of-state buyers who assumed "no local permit" meant "no restrictions."

Where Oak Island's rules actually live

The regulatory picture is friendlier than most coastal towns, and that is exactly why the details matter. Oak Island does not run its own STR permit program. Short-term vacation rentals are allowed in Oak Island, NC. There are no city-specific short-term rental ordinances found in the provided materials. Investors must comply with applicable North Carolina state statutes governing vacation rentals (notably the North Carolina Vacation Rental Act, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 42A), and standard safety, zoning, and tax obligations at the local and state levels.

Two structural facts flow from that.

The first is legal. State law preempts certain local "rental registration" programs. Under N.C. Gen. Stat. §160D‑1207(c), cities and counties can't require an owner or manager to obtain a permit or register a residential rental under the housing and building inspection articles, except in narrow circumstances involving chronic violators. This is why local governments increasingly regulate STRs through zoning use standards, noise, and nuisance enforcement rather than universal rental registries. Oak Island cannot suddenly require every operator to register. It can tighten zoning and nuisance rules at the margins.

The second is comparative. The City of Southport (adjacent to Oak Island) prohibits new STRs in residential districts but allows pre-existing STRs to continue as nonconforming uses if they obtained the required zoning permit by September 7, 2021. That Southport rule does not apply to properties within Oak Island. A buyer looking across the causeway at Southport inventory is looking at a fundamentally different regulatory asset. Oak Island's openness is a feature that shows up on the balance sheet.

A cleaner way to model income before you write an offer

Instead of picking one dashboard and trusting it, build the estimate from three anchors and accept the range.

Start with the Town of Oak Island's accommodations tax page and back-solve island-wide gross lodging revenue from published receipts. That gives you the ceiling and floor for what the whole market is actually producing.

Then pull ADR and occupancy from at least two analytics providers and note where they disagree. Use the lower occupancy and the higher ADR to build a conservative case, and the higher occupancy and lower ADR to build a base case. If both cases work, the deal is real. If only the aggressive blend works, it is not.

Finally, weight by quartile, not by median. Decide honestly whether the specific property you are considering belongs in the top 25%, the middle 50%, or the bottom 25% of the Oak Island listing set. Distance to beach access, elevation, bedroom count, and interior condition drive that placement more than any single amenity.

FAQ

Does Oak Island require a short-term rental permit? No city-specific STR permit exists. State law under the North Carolina Vacation Rental Act (Chapter 42A) governs the written agreement, trust accounting, and expedited eviction rules for stays of ninety days or less.

What tax do owners actually pay? Oak Island's local accommodations tax is 5% on stays under 90 days, filed monthly. State sales tax and any Brunswick County occupancy tax may apply separately. Confirm with the Town Finance Department and a tax advisor.

Why does Rabbu show such low February occupancy? Because it is reporting a single February month in a strongly seasonal market. The Oak Island vacation rental market has Strong seasonality, with July and June being the busiest months for Airbnb hosts. A February snapshot is not a proxy for annual performance.

Is a doubling of listings a warning sign? It would be, in most markets. On Oak Island the data so far shows revenue and rates still moving up under that supply pressure, which is the opposite of the pattern in oversupplied inland STR markets. It does mean entry-tier listings are absorbing most of the competition.

If you are weighing a specific Oak Island property against a rental pro forma, the useful conversation is not "what does the dashboard say" but "which quartile does this house belong in, and does the math still work at the conservative end." That is the analysis Marc Stollings does before a client writes an offer, using town tax data, on-island comps, and a realistic read of what the property will actually rent for in July versus February. Let's Connect when you are ready to run the numbers on a real address.