KC has ‘highest occupancy’ of World Cup cities. Is effort to add rentals working?
As a Realtor, Jamie Burks of Kansas City knows when there’s money in housing.
So in December, when Kansas City — with the 2026 FIFA World Cup looming — expanded its short-term rental rules to allow residents to open their homes on Airbnb, Vrbo and other rental platforms for just the 90 days surrounding the games, she paid her $50 and submitted a city application. She was given a registration number and was approved.
Two weeks later — cha-ching! — Burks logged a short June booking for her three-bedroom home with its hotub in Kansas City’s West Plaza neighborhood.
“Our first booking was $3,000,” she said. “It works out to about $1,000 a night.”
With 650,000 fans expected to jam the city over the course of the month-long tournament, Burks assumed hundreds of other Kansas City homeowners must surely be doing the same, yes?
Well, no. Or maybe. Or, perhaps, not enough, which in itself could become an issue.
According to the city’s figures, beyond the 450 properties in Kansas City proper that are currently registered as short-term rentals, only 17 additional property owners — not 170, or 71, but just 17 in all of Kansas City — have so far been approved to allow their homes to be “major event” short-term rentals for the 90 days surrounding the June 11 to July 19 tournament.
Since December, hotels (there are some 36,000 in the area) had already begun filling, with some rooms going for $500 to $1,000 a night.
These numbers are among several that suggest that Kansas City, which this month was chosen to be the base camp for three of the cup’s most competitive teams — Argentina, England and the Netherlands — may be in desperate need of more short-term rental hosts as game days near.
“Unlike any host city globally,” said Luke DaMommio, the director of brand and product marketing for AirDNA, a short-term rental analytics firm, “Kansas City has the highest occupancy rate already.”
Tight squeeze: Game-day occupancy
On June, 16, when Argentina faces Algeria at Arrowhead Stadium, short-term rental occupancy throughout the Kansas City metro is already booked at 44%, the company’s data shows.
The same number holds for the June 20 match of Ecuador v. Curacao. For the Netherlands v. Tunisia match on June 25, occupancy is already at 47% and then dips to 44% for the June 27 match game between Algeria v. Austria. Occupancy is just above 30% for the “Round of 32” game and for the quarter final, without any knowledge as to which teams will be competing.
“The reason,” DaMommio said, “is that supply is really constrained in Kansas City, because there’s not like an insane amount of hotel rooms. There’s not an insane amount of short-term rentals, because it’s not necessarily seen as a short-term rental destination, while Miami and LA and San Francisco and even DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) have so many hotels. Miami and LA have such big supplies of short-term rentals.
“So Kansas City is really squeezed.”
How tightly is hard to tell.
Because hosts come and go from platforms such as Airbnb, Vrbo and booking.com, it can be difficult to keep track of the precise number of properties that exist for short-term rental in Kansas City’s five-county area.
AirDNA, however, does track the number of available listings across various sites at any one time.
The company’s data show that in June, some 3,862 short-term rentals were listed in the greater Kansas City area. But as the hype around the impending World Cup has risen month-by-month, so has the number — to 4,095 in November, leaping to 4,248 active listings in December.
The latest number for January shows 4,454 active listings — suggesting that as many as 600 new Airbnb, Vrbo and other hosts may have made their properties available online since June.
Six hundred potential new hosts metro-wide is far more than the 17 “major event” rentals approved so far in Kansas City.
Susan Brown believes she has an explanation, one having to do with Kansas City’s fee for the new initiative: $50 for residents to register as a short-term rental for 90 days versus $200 to register for a full year.
“So here’s why,” said Brown, the president of the Kansas City Short-term Rental Alliance, a local advocacy group. “Because, for $200, you can get an annual license, so I think a lot of people decided to do that. The city didn’t open up this temporary license until (recently). I think people were like, ‘Well, should I wait for this process to open, or should I just go get an annual license?’ Whether they plan on keeping it open beyond the World Cup or not, they just went ahead and got the license.”
It may be a factor. City numbers show that the city received 234 short-term rental applications in the most recent stretch of December, January and February, up 91, or 63% over same period last year. The city has approved 158, or about two-thirds, of those applications.
Although it has approved 17 “major event” 90-day applications so far, the city actually received 112, with 85% somewhere else in the pipeline ranging from pending approval to possible rejection.
‘Enough room for everybody’
To be sure, just because short-term rentals have begun to fill on each game day (and each game day eve) doesn’t mean that thousands of rooms aren’t still available. There are many, particularly in early June before the tournament goes into full swing and, obviously, after Kansas City’s last game, the quarter final on July 11. More rooms are also available in between match days.
In early June, in the run-up to the matches, short-term rental occupancy rates currently sit at 12% to 28%, meaning that four months out, 72% to 88% of rooms are still unbooked. Far more rooms are also currently available on the days in between matches.
Brown, of the local short-term rental alliance, thinks that now that the base camp teams have been announced, and with June inching closer, both bookings and the number of people interested in becoming hosts will pick up.
“My sense is that supply is growing,” Brown said of the number of rentals. “I think people are behind. I hear a lot of people are just now starting out. They’re just thinking about it. They feel like they’ve got time. So I do think that there’s going to be a good supply. I think there’ll be plenty of space for everybody.”
Average Airbnb and Vrbo prices doubling, tripling
Whether Kansas City’s World Cup will turn out to be a financial bonanza for hosts, however, remains to be seen.
The average asking prices for nightly stays have skyrocketed, more than doubling and tripling. AirDNA’s data says that the average rental rate on the day of the quarter final currently sits $731 a night, for a place that might otherwise book for $202. Even on non-game days, places that might normally rent for $175 a night, are going for $496.
To give potential hosts a sense of how much their house might reasonably bring in over the entire course of the World Cup, AirDNA has created an online revenue calculator. It allows potential renters to put in their street address, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and guest limit. Then it churns out a range of potential revenues during the World Cup.
When Burks’ West Plaza address is placed in the calculator, it estimates a revenue range of $9,835 to $14,752.
Burks and her daughter, Halle, 13, have moderate expectations.
Her boyfriend and his family, she said, run a few high-profile short-term rentals in Kansas City. While he also has bookings on World Cup game-days at about $1,000 a night, his properties also still have many open dates.
“So people are paying those rates,” Burks said, “but they’re not coming in as quickly.”
Putting up a house as a short-term rental takes effort and sacrifice, Burks said: cleaning the home, locking away her and her daughter’s clothes and personal belongings, relocating nearby. She plans to remain in town, close at hand, in the event any renters have issues or, perish the thought, cause any.
Early on, Burks said, she heard people exaggerating what they could make during the games.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “the number that everybody was throwing around was around $30,000. I think that’s figuring that you’re going to basically rent it out the entire time — all of June, and then that first part of July.
“But I think that with the rentals coming in slower than what people anticipated. I think a lot of people who’ve done this thought, ‘Oh, I’d have, you know, a bunch of bookings by now.’ I think most people do only have maybe one or a few.”
If, as time nears, her reservation calendar doesn’t fill, Burks said, she’d be OK with that.
“I will tell you,” she said. “I don’t have a huge hope either way. Now that we did get one booking, it would be kind of nice to get maybe a couple of more, just because you’re going through the work to get it ready for the booking.”
She said later, “For me, there’s a limit where it no longer makes sense for us. Like, if we’re not looking at where we’re listed now” — at around $1,000 a night — “I’d probably go down a little, but it was more like a combination of filling a need and making a little extra money, right?
“But I wouldn’t take half of what I’m listed at, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t drop it down that low.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2026 at 6:19 AM.
