Are mid-tier markets actually softening or did I just pick a bad property

The thing I've never seen work is buying into an unfamiliar STR market on PM projections alone without at least two full calendar years of verifiable listing history for that specific comp set. What happens instead is you get the honeymoon numbers from when supply was thinner, and by month eight you're staring at the same occupancy erosion you're already watching in Dayton. Springfield Branson corridor was genuinely undersupplied for cabin inventory through most of 2021-2022, but I've been watching AirDNA pull data on Ozarks-adjacent markets and the cabin segment specifically has seen pretty aggressive listing growth since mid-2023, so that $2,400 gross projection deserves real scrutiny. Pull the actual trailing 12 on whatever comps your PM used, not the forward projection, and check how many of those comps have been active for less than 18 months because new listings skew the averages optimistically. The Dayton buy makes sense to me if you already know the floor, you've lived the downside and you're still not underwater at 54%. Buying the one with better paper numbers in a market you can't stress-test yourself is how people end up with two problem assets instead of one.

The Springfield number is the one I'd be pulling apart before anything else. PM projections are almost always built on trailing 12-month data, and if that market hasn't seen the supply wave yet, the projection is pricing in demand that's about to get diluted. I'd go pull the active listing count on Airbnb directly for the Branson corridor and Table Rock Lake area right now, then do the same search filtered to properties listed after January 2023, because that ratio tells you whether you're buying into the early innings of saturation or the middle of it. $2,400 gross on a $189k cabin sounds like a 15% gross yield until you back out PM fees, seasonal dead months, and a septic system that will eventually cost you $8k in a rural zip with no contractor competition. The Dayton property is worse on paper but you actually know what 54% occupancy feels like in your hands, and that knowledge has real value when you're deciding how much cash reserve to hold.

The $2,400 gross projection on the Springfield cabin is the number I'd push back on. Branson-adjacent Ozarks cabins were hitting those numbers two years ago on a good month, but the ones I've been tracking in that corridor, and I've been watching the southwest Missouri market pretty obsessively because I nearly pulled the trigger on one in Hollister last spring, are running closer to $1,650 to $1,900 gross on anything under $200k acquisition cost right now. The cabin premium is real but it's also the segment that got flooded fastest because every HGTV-brained investor thought rustic plus hot tub equals passive income. Springfield proper versus the Table Rock Lake draw are two completely different demand pools and if that cabin isn't within 25 minutes of the lake it's competing on a much thinner base of business travel and regional weekend traffic.

The part of your Dayton situation that actually maps onto the Missouri question is the 40% supply increase you mentioned. That's the tell. I've been pulling listing counts manually on Zillow and VRBO for three markets I'm targeting and the ones where supply is still climbing after the rate shock of 2022 and 2023 are the ones where the mom-and-pop investors haven't washed out yet, which means more pain before stabilization. If Springfield's active listing count grew more than 25% since January 2022 I'd want a serious discount on that $189k ask before I touched it. The Dayton house at $161k is a worse paper number but you have two years of local operating knowledge that is genuinely worth something when the projections miss.

Springfield cabin country had a supply flood 18 months ago, not now.

Springfield cabin country in the Ozarks corridor had a rough patch but the saturation curve there looks different from a flat metro market like Dayton, because the cabin aesthetic has a demand floor that plain houses don't. People specifically search for that experience, which gives it some insulation. That said, $2,400 gross on a $189k buy is doing a lot of work before you strip out PM cuts, linens, hot tub maintenance, and the dead months January through March that crush Missouri cabin numbers.

The thing I'd want to know before touching the Springfield one is whether the listing count in that specific zip is still climbing or already peaked and flattened, because those are two completely different situations to buy into.

The thing about PM projections on cabins specifically is they almost always use trailing twelve months from the listing's best year as the baseline, and if that property changed hands in 2021 or 2022 the numbers look extraordinary because the whole cabin segment was running 75-80% occupancy in parts of the Ozarks corridor during that window. I pulled AirDNA myself on a Table Rock Lake cabin I was evaluating in late 2023 and the "projected" gross was $31k, actual trailing from the prior owner was $28k, but when I dug into the month-by-month data the 2021 and 2022 summers were carrying the whole average. Q1 and Q4 2023 had dropped to occupancy in the low 40s. The $2,400 monthly gross on that Missouri cabin almost certainly includes summer months that are doing $4,500 and winter months doing $900, and the PM is presenting you with the mean like it's a floor.

The comparison you're actually making isn't Dayton versus Springfield, it's known degradation versus unknown degradation, and I would weight that differently than the gross numbers suggest. Your Dayton unit at 54% on a $148k basis is generating roughly $820-840 a month net of platform fees before expenses, which on that acquisition cost is a yield you can still defend. The Missouri cabin at $189k needs to consistently hit that $2,400 gross to pencil even moderately, and a 15-point occupancy drop from whatever the PM used as their model would erase the spread entirely. I've never seen the "better market, worse visibility" trade work out the way people hope. What happens instead is you spend 18 months learning the Springfield market the same way you learned Dayton, except you paid $41k more