Summer tourism is off to an explosive start with May’s bed tax revenue numbers literally smashing the mild record that was set last year. Total collections for May of 2012 were $1,409,032.20, whereas the total collections for May of 2011 were $1,127,340.30. This equals a 24.99% increase and provides the local tourism industry clear support for another record breaking summer.
Bed Tax, or officially known as the Bay County Tourist Development Tax, is a tax on revenue generated from tourism accommodations rentals.
Read here to learn more about the Bed Tax.
Let’s look at the numbers.
May of 2011 was a weird month. Many had high expectations, yet many others were very leery as we were still distancing ourselves from the devastating impact that the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill left us with in the tourism season of 2010. Tourism numbers were up last year (2011) over the year before (2010), but only slightly (4.8%).
For May of 2012 (this May), everyone’s hopes were high, but expectations weren’t, necessarily, since April had been such a lackluster month (seeing a paltry 4.45% gain 2012 over 2011).
But, putting all speculation aside, May turned out to be phenomenal and we have the numbers to prove it.
- May of 2009: $998,779.40
- May of 2010: $1,075,882.69 (7.7% gain)
- May of 2011: $1,127,340.30 (4.8% gain)
- May of 2012: $1,409,032.20 (24.99% gain)
The numbers from Panama City Beach Luxury Properties
Being in the tourism business, I have the great luxury and benefit to have a real picture of what we are seeing. Now, grant it, occupancy stems from a variety of factors that carefully work together, including type of rental, marketing acumen, exposure and environmental circumstances.
Since we’ve experienced dramatic growth over the last 18 months, looking at raw numbers year over year would be misleading. So obviously we’d need to do a unit by unit average. And I’m not sure if it’s considered social acceptable or even ostentatious to disclose how many total vacation homes we manage, so I’ll just leave that number out. But, if you were really curious, you could always just go to our vacation rental website and count them. 😉
Please note: these numbers are an average across the board, and include properties that may or may not perform equally during all tourism periods.
May of 2011
- Total average: $843.30
- Highest performing unit: $2928
- Lowest performing unit: $182
May of 2012
- Total average: $1779.87
- Highest performing unit: $5,233.75
- Lowest performing unit: $603.09
Looking at our average revenue per unit, we had an astounding 111.06% increase in our average revenue generated per unit.
Again, this representation is extremely skewed, especially looking at the variety of rental units we host this year compared to last year. We have a large number of high-revenue properties because our flat rate management fee ($397 per month) lends itself very good to those owners (saves tons of money).
June’s bed tax revenue numbers should be out the first week in August, so expect to see some really fun numbers then as well.
PCBDaily 