Kansas City’s Airbnb hosts are still waiting for their World Cup windfall | Opinion
Ever since FIFA picked Kansas City as a World Cup host city four years ago, homeowners have been daydreaming about a big payday on the horizon.
When the teams and crowds flooded KC in 2026, we were all going to move out of our houses and apartments for a few weeks, list them on Airbnb or VRBO, and cash in. Brits and Brazilians would be begging us for the privilege of temporarily leasing our residences in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. The city even loosened its short-term rental rules to make the process easier.
But that was back during the headier phase of World Cup optimism, when it still felt plausible that the tournament might function as an economic miracle for Kansas City. Since then, a different reality has set in.
Hotel bookings are soft. Airline traffic does not appear dramatically elevated over a normal summer. And the oft-repeated projection of 650,000 “visitors” — pushed by FIFA and Visit KC, the city’s tourism agency — looks wobblier and wobblier the more you probe it.
As expectations plummet, the narrative from local leaders is quietly evolving. We have gone from “the world is coming to Kansas City” to hoping fans from Oklahoma and Iowa might drive in for a couple of days.
When hotel occupancy numbers started coming in lower than expected, we were told international visitors simply book differently and that reservations would start materializing around 60 days out.
Then the timeline shifted to 30 days.
Now, with the first match less than a month away, we are being asked to take seriously the idea that many of these missing visitors simply plan to camp out instead.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to treat all of this as anything other than wishcasting.
Still, there remained one possible explanation for the disconnect: Maybe the visitors were bypassing hotels altogether and staying in short-term rentals instead. Maybe that’s where the missing visitors were hiding.
So this week I started calling local hosts.
KC Airbnb hosts talk
The first was Alex Glenn, who operates roughly a dozen short-term rentals near the Country Club Plaza and Overland Park.
“It’s been terrible,” Glenn told me. “There were all kinds of numbers floating around a year ago making people think they were going to hit oil, and there’s just nothing like that happening.”
He has priced his properties at roughly triple their normal rates on World Cup match nights.
“We have a two-bedroom with a booking, but none of our houses are booked,” Glenn said.
Glenn originally imposed two-night minimum stays, expecting demand to be strong. He later reduced them to one night to attract more bookings. “But there’ve been no new reservations to speak of in the last six weeks,” Glenn said.
He compared the hype to the NFL Draft in 2023, another local event that generated massive projections before producing a far more modest outcome. He worries the tournament could actually cannibalize his normal summer business. June and July are usually peak season. Instead, Glenn thinks they may end up being unusually weak months financially because non-soccer visitors are steering clear.
“People are avoiding KC because they don’t want to be part of the circus,” he said. “But there’s not going to be any circus.”
Unlike Glenn, Mark Ebbitts is not a professional short-term rental investor. He is the president of Shelton Travel Service, just off the Plaza. He viewed the World Cup as a chance to rent out his daughter’s four-bedroom Brookside-area home near Ward Parkway.
They started at $3,500 per night. Then they cut the price to $2,000. The original seven-night minimum stay became three nights. At one point they even reduced the listing from four bedrooms to three in hopes of lowering the effective price point.
“Still no bites,” Ebbitts said.
He said he has no interest in dropping to one-night rentals because the risk of property damage from guests is too high for a million-dollar home. And even at $2,000 per night, he said the margins shrink quickly once platform fees, city taxes and cleaning costs are removed.
“We had grandiose ideas,” he said. “We’re much more realistic now. It seems it’s not going to be the big thing we hoped it would be.”
‘Actually a little embarrassing’
That fading optimism is not confined to professional operators or owners of expensive homes.
Theresa Davila, who rents out a one-bedroom property in Riverside near the Netherlands team’s training site, told me she has had exactly one booking since listing it in March — and that reservation later fell through. She already lowered her prices once and said she may do so again, though she is also considering giving up on the effort altogether. She bought new linens and supplies for the rental in anticipation of stronger demand, expenses that look increasingly likely to become sunk costs.
“It’s just been extremely disappointing,” Davila said.
Kylee Nicolay, who lives in South Hyde Park, obtained a short-term rental permit specifically because of the tournament. Nicolay and her wife — a teacher — thought they might leave town for part of the summer and earn extra money renting out their four-bedroom house.
They listed it for around $1,000 per night. Someone booked three nights, then canceled in March. Then nothing. They eventually pulled the listing.
“We decided that if we had to drop the price, it wasn’t going to be worth it to move out of the house and do all the work that we would need to do to get it ready,” Nicolay said.
Jamie Burks came to a similar conclusion. A real estate agent, Burks was actually interviewed by The Star in February, back when the prevailing concern was that Kansas City might run out of places for World Cup visitors to stay.
“It’s actually a little embarrassing to look back on that story now,” Burks told me.
At the time, Burks had successfully booked her West Plaza bungalow for three nights during the Netherlands match at roughly $1,000 per night. Like many hosts, she expected more to follow. She even advised some clients to delay selling their homes until after the World Cup because of the expectation they could earn significant rental income during the tournament — advice she now regrets.
“All we were hearing at the time was how much money you could make from renting out your home, so of course if you can make $20,000 just by renting it out for that month, you should wait to sell,” Burks said. “But obviously, that’s not what’s happening.”
Burks said she has had only one additional booking inquiry since she talked to The Star in February, and it later canceled. She said she is unwilling to slash prices to the point where the money no longer justifies the hassle of vacating her own home.
“At $1,000 a night, sure, we’ll leave our place and go to Florida for the weekend,” she said. “But I’m also a real estate agent, and this is my busy season. It’s more lucrative for me to be here selling houses than renting my house for $500 a night and living out of a suitcase somewhere else.”
Optimism from AirDNA
I talked to 10 hosts in all, chosen basically at random from the city’s list of licensed short-term rental operators. I just kept working my way down the list until somebody picked up my phone call.
One person described the World Cup hype as a “boondoggle.” Another still held out hope, calling himself an eternal optimist who believed late bookings might yet save his summer. But none of the hosts I spoke with said business was where they’d hoped, and all felt the city had oversold the scale of the opportunity.
But maybe I had simply called the wrong people.
So I also reached out to AirDNA, a short-term rental analytics company that tracks Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia and Booking.com listings by scraping platform data. Its numbers are widely cited throughout the industry, though the company also sells market intelligence and forecasting tools to short-term rental hosts and investors — meaning it benefits from continued enthusiasm around the short-term rental market.
An AirDNA analyst named Bram Gallagher had some positive statistics to share. According to AirDNA’s figures, bookings during match nights and the nights immediately before them — 12 nights total — are up 72% in KC compared to those same days last year. Average nightly rates have climbed sharply as well, from roughly $170 last year to about $256 now.
But supply has exploded even faster. AirDNA says the number of available short-term rental listings in Kansas City has surged 43% year over year. Gallagher said it’s the largest increase of any World Cup host city.
In other words: Thousands of new properties flooded the market chasing the same World Cup windfall, and now they are all competing for the same pool of travelers.
As of mid-May, Gallagher said, only about half of the available inventory tied to World Cup game periods had been booked. He said he expected the next few weeks to be “the most intense period of reservations yet.” We’ll see.
Adjustment from top Airbnb operator in KC
There was one last guy I wanted to talk to. His name is Lance Pierce, and he’s been in the Airbnb business since the dawn of short-term rentals as a category. Locally, he’s one of the biggest names in the game.
Pierce today runs Karat Vacation Rental Management, which oversees more than 80 short-term rental properties in Kansas City — half of which he owns personally, the rest managed on behalf of clients.
“We had clients early on who were telling us that they didn’t want their rates to be anything less than $10,000 per night,” Pierce told me. “But there’s not a lot of people out there that will pay $30,000 for a three-night stay in Kansas City. So part of my job has been to be like, ‘Look, I’ve been in this business for 14 years — I’ve lived through Taylor Swift shows and Beyonce shows and the NFL draft and all these other hyped events. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.’”
Though he priced his properties at a premium initially, Pierce soon adjusted the rates downward.
“We realized pretty quickly this wasn’t going to be the win we all wanted it to be,” Pierce said. “We’ve since come to a more appropriate pricing strategy and are seeing some things book.”
He said he’s had to talk several clients out of over-investing in their properties ahead of the tournament. Pierce mentioned one who wanted to spend $15,000 sprucing up their home.
“I’ve had to tell people, ‘Are you sure you want to invest that much when yours is a brand-new listing and other listings that have 200 positive reviews aren’t even getting booked?’” he said.
Pierce said he now expects his properties — the ones that end up booked, anyway — will likely fetch double their normal nightly rates during the World Cup. He estimated his overall operation might ultimately finish only about 20% ahead of a normal summer financially.
“But I have absolutely no idea,” he added. “The only information inputs I have are what Visit KC says and FIFA says. 650,000 people, that’s what they’re telling us, right? We’re just trusting that those organizations know what they’re talking about and hoping for the best.”
I’ve been hearing that about Visit KC a lot lately — from bartenders, restaurateurs, hotel operators, homeowners and other people who made real financial decisions based on the numbers that organization put out. Like Pierce and everybody else who lives in this city, I too hope the people at Visit KC know what they’re talking about. I hope everybody makes a lot of money this summer.
But if the current trends continue, and we’re all sitting around in late June asking each other where the crowds are, I hope people remember who gave them the impression that this event was going to be so much bigger than it was. And I hope they join me in asking harder questions about how that happened.
