{"id":2321,"date":"2026-07-07T23:45:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T23:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skyrun.com\/broken-bow\/?page_id=2321"},"modified":"2026-07-23T00:16:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T00:16:44","slug":"an-honest-look-at-the-broken-bow-short-term-rental-market","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/skyrun.com\/broken-bow\/an-honest-look-at-the-broken-bow-short-term-rental-market\/","title":{"rendered":"An Honest Look at The Broken Bow Short Term Rental Market"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no area of the US that better represents the short term rental explosion than Broken Bow, OK. It\u2019s everyone\u2019s favorite example of real estate investing success or a bubble, depending on who you talk to. This has created an \u201celephant in the room\u201d for both people who already own a cabin here and those considering buying their first one. Is Broken Bow still worth it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a fair question. This market has moved through a lot in a short amount of time, and there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before 2020, Broken Bow & Hochatown were largely unknown<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For almost 40 years, this was a quiet corner of southeast Oklahoma, known mostly to hunters, fishermen, and families who\u2019d been coming to Beavers Bend for generations. The county\u2019s tourism authority started actively courting Dallas-Fort Worth around 2013. It worked, slowly at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the pandemic hit, and tourism numbers from the DFW area exploded. People three hours away in DFW wanted somewhere to go that didn\u2019t 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\u2019s an increase of more than 400% in five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STR growth started to slow in 2023<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Explosive growth doesn\u2019t stay smooth forever. Late in 2023, the New York Times ran a story<\/a> that many people in this market still bring up, titled \u201cWelcome to Hochatown, the Town Created by Airbnb\u201d (a non-paywalled version is available directly from the original author<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Times followed one cabin, \u201cCalifornia Dreaming,\u201d through its whole ownership history; it\u2019s 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<\/a> again for $650,000 after being listed for $725,000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2023 and 2024, the combination of falling prices and lower occupancy due to high supply had owners who\u2019d bought near the top starting to worry about whether they\u2019d be able to cover their mortgage payments and insurance.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s been considerable real investment since then. The Choctaw Nation broke ground in 2022 on Choctaw Landing<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Broken Bow isn\u2019t a market in decline. It\u2019s a market that grew too fast, corrected hard, and is now absorbing that correction along with increasing demand at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Broken Bow numbers right now<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no one clean number for the Broken Bow market. Three of the biggest short term rental data houses, AirDNA, Rabbu, and AirROI, don\u2019t agree with each other, and the gap between them is wide enough that it\u2019s worth showing all three instead of picking whichever one sounds better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rabbu <\/a>has active listings around 1,930, an average annual revenue per cabin of $46,600, an average daily rate of $319 (well above Oklahoma\u2019s statewide average of $219), and occupancy of 25%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AirROI\u2019s <\/a>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%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

<\/p>\n\n\n\n