An Honest Look at The Broken Bow Short Term Rental Market

There’s no area of the US that better represents the short term rental explosion than Broken Bow, OK. It’s everyone’s favorite example of real estate investing success or a bubble, depending on who you talk to. This has created an “elephant in the room” for both people who already own a cabin here and those considering buying their first one. Is Broken Bow still worth it?

It’s a fair question. This market has moved through a lot in a short amount of time, and there’s no shortage of noise about it out there, some from people trying to sell you a cabin, some from people trying to sell you fear. We live here. We manage cabins here, so we wanted to lay out what we actually see, plainly, without the pitch and without the doom.

Before 2020, Broken Bow & Hochatown were largely unknown

The original Hochatown no longer exists. It sat along the Mountain Fork River until the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the river in the 1960s to create Broken Bow Lake, and the old townsite went under roughly 200 feet of water. What we now call Hochatown grew up a few miles away along Highway 259, near the lake created by the dam.

For almost 40 years, this was a quiet corner of southeast Oklahoma, known mostly to hunters, fishermen, and families who’d been coming to Beavers Bend for generations. The county’s tourism authority started actively courting Dallas-Fort Worth around 2013. It worked, slowly at first.

Then the pandemic hit, and tourism numbers from the DFW area exploded. People three hours away in DFW wanted somewhere to go that didn’t require a plane ticket, and this is about as close as you can get to a real mountain cabin within reasonable driving distance. Before COVID, the entire Broken Bow/Hochatown area had somewhere around 400 cabins listed for rent online. By late 2023, that number had passed 2,400. That’s an increase of more than 400% in five years.

The local area struggled to function as a town through most of that growth. On a typical weekday, Hochatown has somewhere around 220 to 240 full-time residents. On a busy weekend, as many as 50,000 people pass through. Try running an area like that with no police department, no municipal sewer system, and a rural water supply built for a few hundred people, and you start to understand why something had to give.

To deal with the surge in tourism, Hochatown residents voted 129 to 18 in November 2022 to incorporate as an actual town. County commissioners approved the articles later that month, and the first town board met in January 2023 in a local church, appointing Dian Jordan as the first mayor. Hochatown, as a functioning municipal government, is barely three years old.

STR growth started to slow in 2023

Explosive growth doesn’t stay smooth forever. Late in 2023, the New York Times ran a story that many people in this market still bring up, titled “Welcome to Hochatown, the Town Created by Airbnb” (a non-paywalled version is available directly from the original author). For the first time since the pandemic recovery, the supply of rental cabins in Broken Bow had outpaced demand. Occupancy had dropped to around 55% that March and 40% that August. Cabins that used to sell within hours of being listed were sitting on the market for months with no offers.

The Times followed one cabin, “California Dreaming,” through its whole ownership history; it’s a fairly accurate snapshot of what happened to cabin prices across the board. The cabin sold for $590,000 in 2020. The new owners sold it again a year later for $1.1 million. It went back on the market in 2022, asking $1.299 million. By the time the story ran, the asking price had been cut to $899,000. California Dreaming sold in December of 2025 again for $650,000 after being listed for $725,000.

In 2023 and 2024, the combination of falling prices and lower occupancy due to high supply had owners who’d bought near the top starting to worry about whether they’d be able to cover their mortgage payments and insurance.  

Mayor Jordan described that slowdown as something close to a blessing in the NYT article. Not because anyone wants revenue to drop, but because it gave the town breathing room to build infrastructure it should have had years earlier. And there’s been considerable real investment since then. The Choctaw Nation broke ground in 2022 on Choctaw Landing, a resort and casino in Hochatown that opened in spring 2024. Reported project costs have ranged from $165 million on the low end to $238 million, depending on the source, and it’s projected to attract roughly 443,000 additional visitors a year. As part of the project, the Choctaw Nation also invested $7 million in road improvements and built a new electrical substation that stabilized power for homes and businesses within about 6 miles of it.

Broken Bow isn’t a market in decline. It’s a market that grew too fast, corrected hard, and is now absorbing that correction along with increasing demand at the same time.

The Broken Bow numbers right now

There’s no one clean number for the Broken Bow market. Three of the biggest short term rental data houses, AirDNA, Rabbu, and AirROI, don’t agree with each other, and the gap between them is wide enough that it’s worth showing all three instead of picking whichever one sounds better.

Rabbu has active listings around 1,930, an average annual revenue per cabin of $46,600, an average daily rate of $319 (well above Oklahoma’s statewide average of $219), and occupancy of 25%.

AirROI’s numbers run higher across the board, with listings closer to 3,000, average daily rates in the $430s to $450s, and occupancy closer to 37%.

AirDNA has even higher numbers: almost 4,500 active listings, an annual revenue per cabin of $51,800, a $53 ADR, and 45% occupancy.    

But the bigger point all data providers agree on is this: supply grew a lot over the past year, anywhere from around 30% by one estimate to nearly double by another, depending on how you count, and nightly rates have mostly held up even as occupancy has softened. Bigger cabins earn more per night, no surprise there. Rabbu’s data shows a one-bedroom pulling around $206 a night on average, while a six-bedroom-plus cabin can pull $755.

Seasonality makes a huge difference in Broken Bow, and it’s something that needs to be taken into account when planning and forecasting. Different data aggregators put the calendar peak in slightly different spots, but in general, the winter sees a draw down, January and February is the softest month, and spring break, summer, and fall color season each pull their own weight in between. If you’re modeling revenue for a specific cabin, don’t average the whole year together.

Certain amenities for Broken Bow rentals are basically table stakes at this point rather than differentiators. A full kitchen. Self check-in. A washer and dryer. A fireplace and some sort of outdoor space. Nearly every listing has these now, which means having them doesn’t set you apart; it just keeps you in the conversation. Hot tubs are becoming common place too, showing up in almost 86% of listings in the Broken Bow area.

What none of these averages show you is the gap between a well-run cabin and a poorly-run one. That gap is enormous, and it’s only gotten wider as the market has matured. Two nearly identical cabins two doors apart can post very different numbers depending on how they’re priced, photographed, maintained, and managed.

Where your cabin is within Broken Bow matters a lot

One thing that trips up a lot of owners, even ones who’ve been here a while, is that “Broken Bow” isn’t one place with one set of rules. It’s really three.

There’s the City of Broken Bow itself, an incorporated city with its own zoning code. There’s the Town of Hochatown, incorporated in 2022, which now requires a short-term rental license and monthly lodging tax remittance, a process the town moved to a new vendor in October 2024 to make it less painful. And there’s unincorporated McCurtain County, which has no formal short-term rental ordinance at all. That last one is where this area’s old reputation for having basically no rules comes from, and it’s still true there. Just not everywhere.

Within the City of Broken Bow, short-term rentals are allowed only in two zoned areas: Commercial C-5 Highway Commercial and Commercial Recreation District, with a few grandfathered exceptions. There is no specific STR license needed to operate a vacation rental in Broken Bow,    

Oklahoma charges a 4.5% state sales tax, and the major booking platforms generally collect and remit that automatically on bookings made through them. If you take direct bookings outside those platforms, that responsibility falls on you. There’s no statewide short-term rental license in Oklahoma, and no state law protecting rental operators from local restrictions, which means cities and towns here can regulate, or even restrict, short-term rentals if they choose to. Most haven’t gone that far. But the door isn’t locked shut against it either, and that’s worth knowing going in.

The Broken Bow real estate “sell-off”

If you’ve looked at Zillow or Redfin recently, you’ve probably noticed there are quite a few Broken Bow and Hochatown listings. As of early July 2026, there are just over 450 active listings in the McCurtian County/Broken Bow market, with a median list price near $675,000 and homes sitting for around 101 days before selling. Compared to the rest of the United States, McCurtain County, OK has 4.5x to 5x as much for-sale inventory per capita. In May 2026, the county had about 33 active listings per 1,000 housing units, compared with roughly 7 per 1,000 housing units nationally.  

Sales of Broken Bow properties are moving slower than they used to and more slowly than the country as a whole right now, too. As of June 2026, the median home nationally spent 53 days on the market before selling. In Broken Bow, it’s close to double that. Nationally, asking prices are down about 2.5% year over year, the steepest annual drop recorded since 2017, and down more than 4% from the 2022 peak. The whole country is working through a slower, more balanced market than it’s seen in years. Broken Bow is just feeling it a bit more sharply, partly because DFW households make up so much of both the buyer and seller sides here, and Texas metro home prices have themselves gone flat to slightly negative over the past year.

Don’t trust any single “median home price” figure you see for this area month to month. We’ve watched that number swing from around $197,000 to $1.64 million within a few months on some reporting sites, simply because so few homes sell here in any given month that one or two big cabin sales can swing the whole average. If someone hands you a single median price and tells you what it means, ask what it was doing three months earlier. The answer might surprise them too.

Why owners are selling in Broken Bow

There are a handful of reasons property owners in Broken Bow are selling, and none of them are secret or particularly dramatic.

Some owners bought near the top of the market in 2021 and 2022, priced their cabin’s future revenue on projections that made sense at the time, and then watched occupancy come in below plan as supply kept growing around them. Quite a few owners bought their property under the assumption that extremely high occupancy rates would continue, only to see their first-year revenue miss the target and their second-year revenue come in even lower as more and more competition entered the space.

A portion of sellers are builders and developers who put up new cabins during the boom and are now working through inventory that isn’t moving as fast as they’d hoped, which shows up as price cuts and incentives on new construction.

More than a few owners are simply taking profit. If you bought early and your cabin appreciated the way a lot of this market’s early cabins did, selling now can still mean walking away with significant gains, even after the correction.

There’s also a sizeable portion of owners who are finding that self-managing a rental in a market this competitive has gotten a lot harder than it used to be. When 400 cabins were competing for guests, a decent listing with a nice photo stood out. With thousands of cabins competing now, pricing, photography, guest response time, and maintenance all matter in ways they didn’t five years ago. While some owners would rather hand that off to a 3rd party, others simply don’t want to deal with any of it anymore. That’s not a knock on anyone. It’s just what a market looks like once it grows up.

So, is this a good time to get into or out of the short term rental market in Broken Bow?

We’re not going to pretend we can answer that for you. We’re not financial advisors, and your specific situation, goals, timeline, and risk tolerance matter more than anything we’ve written about the Broken Bow STR market.

What we can do is lay out both sides, though.

Getting into the Broken Bow market

Prices in some segments are down 15 to 25% from their 2022 to 2023 peak, which creates negotiating room that didn’t exist a few years ago. Demand drivers haven’t gone anywhere. DFW added just over 123,000 new residents in the most recent Census Bureau estimate, and every new household there is a potential weekend visitor here. The casino resort, which opened in 2024, is projected to bring in hundreds of thousands of new visitors each year on top of that. Oklahoma’s tourism industry brought in close to $12.8 billion in visitor spending statewide in 2025, with the state specifically calling out McCurtain County as one of its key rural tourism drivers in that report. Guests are going to keep coming to Broken Bow; it’s still one of the strongest vacation rental markets in the US.

Getting out of the Broken Bow market

Occupancy here runs well below what you’d see in more established cabin markets, and that revenue is concentrated on weekends and holidays rather than spread evenly across the year. The regulatory picture is still young and shifting, especially in Hochatown, which has had a functioning town government only since 2023. And because this market leans so heavily on one feeder city, its fortunes are tied more tightly to DFW’s economy than a market with a broader visitor base would be. The total volume of competition may thin some in the coming years, but the quality of listings is only going to improve. Owners will need to continue upping their game in terms of guest management, amenities, photography, and advertising.

The days when almost any cabin would rent itself are over. What’s emerged in Broken Bow is a market where pricing, presentation, and management decide who does well and who struggles. It’s a tougher market than the one owners experienced in 2021. In many ways, though, the Broken Bow market is in better shape than ever for owners willing to run their cabin like a real business instead of a passive lottery ticket; there’s still real money to be made here.

How Broken Bow compares to other cabin markets

It helps to see this Broken Bow next to a more mature cabin market. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains, is the best direct comparison because it’s also a cabin-heavy short-term rental market that’s been through its own growth cycle, just further along the curve.

Gatlinburg runs occupancy around 62%, well above what Broken Bow sees right now, on nightly rates that are actually a bit lower than Broken Bow’s. Part of that comes down to demand. The Smokies pull in more than 11 million visitors a year through the national park alone, spread across four distinct tourist seasons rather than mostly on weekends. Tennessee also passed a state law in 2018 that prevents local governments from banning short-term rentals outright, unlike Oklahoma.

Broken Bow’s current market, by comparison, is a higher-rate, lower-occupancy, weekend-driven market fed almost entirely by one metro area. That’s not automatically worse than Gatlinburg, just different. Purchase prices in Broken Bow have often been considered friendlier relative to potential revenue than what you’d find in the Smokies, and a smaller feeder base means less competition from other regions pulling on the same demand. It does mean this market behaves differently, and it’s worth understanding that difference before assuming it’ll perform like Gatlinburg or anywhere else you might have researched.

How SkyRun Vacation Rentals can help

We’ve watched this market grow from a few hundred cabins to thousands. We watched it cool off. And we’re watching it work through whatever comes next, right alongside the owners who trust us with their properties. Our team lives here, in Broken Bow and Hochatown, not in a call center somewhere else. When the rules change, and they’ve changed more than once in the past few years, we’re the ones on the phone with the town, not reading about it after the fact.

If you already own a cabin here and you’re wondering whether it’s performing the way it should, or you’re thinking about buying your first one and want a straight answer about what to expect, reach out to the local Broken Bow experts here at SkyRun.