Short-term rental marketing to grow bookings and nightly rate in Round Top, from farmhouses on acreage along Highway 237 to cottages near the town square, group houses that fill during the spring and fall antiques shows, and the stays that need a reason to book in the quiet weeks between them.
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* Market averages from AirROI data for Round Top, Texas, the 12 months October 2025 to September 2026 (page updated October 1, 2026). ROI is Cavmir's estimate. A single home's numbers depend on its size, its location and how it is marketed.
Cavmir is an Airbnb marketing agency. We build the brand, the direct-booking website and the marketing for short-term rentals in Round Top.
Round Top is a small Fayette County town on the old La Bahía Road between La Grange and Brenham. It had 87 residents in 2020, according to the population table in the Texas State Historical Association's handbook. Twice a year, buyers come from across the country for the antiques shows. The Original Round Top Antiques Fair, which began here in 1968, now shares its season with nearly a hundred venues spread over 11 miles on either side of State Highway 237, and the Round Top Area Chamber of Commerce counts more than 65 venues within about 20 miles, in Round Top, Warrenton, Carmine, Burton and Fayetteville. AirROI counts 209 active Airbnb listings in its Round Top market, up 16 percent in a year. About two-thirds are entire homes, about three in ten are rooms AirROI classes as hotel or boutique listings, and among the entire homes, four in ten have a single bedroom.
The market splits into products that book and price differently. Three- and four-bedroom farmhouses and group houses carry the top tier: in AirROI's data a three-bedroom home averages about $729 a night and a four-bedroom about $819, against about $300 for a one-bedroom. Cottages, guesthouses and cabins near the square or down a county road sell a couple's weekend. Rooms in the area's small hotels and inns compete for the same couples, and the neighboring towns have their own supply: AirROI counts 41 listings in Carmine, 65 in Fayetteville, 68 in Burton and 192 in Brenham. During a show week all of them are chasing the same buyer, and a listing titled 'Round Top farmhouse' competes with every one of them at once.
The year has two very full seasons and a lot of quiet weeks. AirROI's typical-year figures put March and October, the spring and fall show months, at about $6,920 of revenue per listing a month with 44 percent occupancy, while the low months, December to February, April and May, and August and September, average about $2,690 at 20 percent. October earns about 3.2 times what February does, and the three strongest months bring in 40 percent of the year's revenue. The guests are Texans first: Houston sends 22.6 percent of them, Austin 9.9 percent, Dallas 3.9 percent and San Antonio 3.6 percent, and 98 percent are domestic. In show weeks they're design buyers, dealers and decorators. The rest of the year they're mostly weekenders from the same cities.
What sets Round Top apart is how much of a year rides on a few weeks, and how wide the gap is between the listings that plan for the rest of it and the ones that don't. AirROI's median listing books about 22 percent of its nights and earns about $2,260 a month; the top quarter books 33 percent or more and earns $4,600 or more, and the top tenth books 48 percent or more and earns $8,960 or more. Show weeks raise rates and occupancy across the market. What separates the top of it is the rest of the calendar: the summer music festival at Festival Hill, the Fourth of July, Shakespeare in a barn at Winedale, the short winter show, and the Houston couple who wants a quiet weekend in February. That's work a marketing plan can do.
Nearby Markets: Austin | Houston | Fredericksburg
Photo: Mustangsally · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Cavmir markets Round Top homes as the small hospitality brands they are, the farmhouse that hosts the same Houston design team every March and October, the cottage near the square that an Austin couple books for a quiet weekend in February, the group house with a pool that fills for the Fourth of July, rather than as interchangeable show-week inventory. We put your property in front of the guest who chooses Round Top on purpose, the decorator booking the fall show in June, the family planning a summer weekend around a concert at Festival Hill, the returning buyer who wants the same rooms next spring, wherever they search, from Google and AI assistants to the email list that brings last season's guests back.
Round Top's story starts long before the antiques. English-speaking settlers came first: the Stephen Townsend family arrived from Florida in 1826, and the Texas State Historical Association's handbook says the Townsends sent more men to the Battle of San Jacinto than any other family. By the mid-1830s the settlement was known as Jones Post Office. In the early 1840s Alwin H. Soergel, a German member of the Adelsverein, settled here and built a white house with an octagonal tower, and the odd-shaped tower gave the town its name; by 1847 Round Top was listed as a U.S. post office. German families followed. The town held its first Fourth of July celebration in 1851, which some sources call the oldest continuous Independence Day celebration west of the Mississippi. During the Civil War it served as a recruiting station for the northern half of the county. The Reverend Adam Neuthard organized a Lutheran congregation in 1866, and its massive stone church was completed in 1867, with a pipe organ Traugott Wantke carved from native cedar. Round Top was incorporated in 1870.
The town itself stayed small. The handbook's population table shows 360 people in 1900, 150 in 1925, 81 in 1990 and 87 in 2020. What grew instead was a set of places that still bring visitors. Concert pianist James Dick founded the Round Top Festival Institute in 1971, and its campus, Festival Hill, covers 210 acres; its 1,200-seat concert hall is the permanent home of the Texas Festival Orchestra, and the James Dick Foundation carried out major restorations there. The Bybee Foundation restored Henkel Square, a group of 1800s buildings once home to German immigrants that now house shops and restaurants. Four miles northeast, Winedale began around 1870 as a German settlement called Truebsal, took the name Winedale with a post office in 1879, and later moved about two miles to center on Sam Lewis's Stopping Place, a stop on the Sawyer and Risher stage line from Brenham to Austin. The Lewis home and farm became the centerpiece of the Winedale Historical Center from the 1960s, and the complex, with 19th-century buildings on 225 acres, is part of the University of Texas at Austin's Briscoe Center. For more than fifty-five years, UT's Shakespeare at Winedale program, founded by Professor James B. Ayres, has staged the plays in a century-old hay barn converted into an Elizabethan-style theater.
The antiques came in 1968. Emma Lee Turney organized the first show that year at the Round Top Rifle Hall with 26 dealers, and the Original Round Top Antiques Fair still calls itself the show that started it all. Turney retired in 2005 and sold the fair to Susan Franks, and she died in 2021 at 92, by which time antique shopping in and around Round Top had a very large following. The fair now runs at the Big Red Barn and The Continental, and other venues set up along Highway 237 on their own schedules; the chamber notes that there's no official governing body over the show dates, and that most venues stay open for the whole window while a few open only on certain days. The growth reached the town's rules too. In 2017, KWHI reported that Round Top had exploded with growth over the previous couple of years, as the council worked through a revised Land Use Ordinance covering building size, height and density, yard and lot sizes, parking, antiques-fair regulations and, in one proposed amendment, connection to the town's wastewater system when a home or business is built or sold.
Today the market is mid-sized, growing and lopsided. AirROI's twelve months to September 2026 show 209 active listings averaging about $448 a night at about 26 percent occupancy, for annual revenue of about $28,500 per listing, up 5.4 percent on the year while the number of listings grew 16 percent. That nightly rate is about 69 percent above the Texas average. The town's own hotel tax shows the money moving: Round Top reported $259,355 in hotel occupancy tax revenue for fiscal 2025 to the state Comptroller, up from $207,876 in its previous report, and put 70 percent of what it allocated toward advertising. The gaps we look for first are the ones that cost money: a listing that sells only the show weeks, photos that never show the porch, the pool or the land, a title that doesn't say where the house sits on the show route, no answer for a guest who needs room for a carload of purchases, and no plan for the rest of the year, when the shows are over.
Round Top pricing is tiered by product first. Three- and four-bedroom houses carry the top tier: AirROI puts three-bedroom homes at about $729 a night and a median of $50,300 a year, and four-bedroom homes at about $819 a night and $62,400, against about $300 a night and $13,400 a year for one-bedroom homes. The nightly distribution shows the same spread: the median listing averages about $290, the top quarter $505 or more and the top tenth $835 or more, while the bottom quarter sits at $225 or less. The single top-earning listing in AirROI's set, a six-bedroom home, grossed about $190,600 at about $1,815 a night. A house that belongs in the top tier but presents like the median is an expensive mistake, and the fix is usually positioning before price.
The calendar does the heavy lifting. In AirROI's latest twelve months, October 2025 averaged about $497 a night at 48 percent occupancy and $7,837 of revenue per listing, and March 2026 about $502 at 43 percent and $7,461. February averaged $387 at 19 percent, and August, the weakest month for occupancy, 17 percent. Guests book far ahead for the shows: on average, October stays were booked about 128 days out, in June, and March stays about 114 days out, in late November, while June stays were booked only about a month ahead. They also stay longer for the shows, 4.6 nights in March and 3.8 in October, against 2.2 nights in February and 3.4 across the year.
The common mistakes are pricing a show week like any other week and pricing the quiet weeks as a discount instead of as a different product. Most of the market still accepts one-night stays, 54 percent of listings in AirROI's data, and 42 percent use a two-night minimum, so a three- or four-night rule over the opening days of a show, matched to how long show guests actually stay, is often the stronger structure. Cancellation terms are already strict, with 84 percent of listings on a firm policy or stricter. Cleaning fees average about $154, with a median of $110, about 8.8 percent of revenue. Watch value, too: guests rate Round Top 4.89 overall, and value, at 4.75, is the lowest of the six category scores. A clear list of what the rate includes, from early coffee to a place to store purchases overnight, protects that score.
High seasonality with two peaks. March and October carry the year; June, July and November form AirROI's shoulder, at about $3,520 a month and 25 percent occupancy; and the low months average about $2,690 at 20 percent. In 2026 the chamber listed the spring show from March 12 to 29 and the fall show from October 15 to November 1, and the winter show runs January 21 to 24, 2027. The other reasons to come are spread across the calendar. Burton's Cotton Gin Festival is April 17, 2027, and Shakespeare at Winedale's spring class performs Measure for Measure on April 22 to 24, 2027. The Round Top Festival Institute's summer festival ran six weeks of lessons and concerts from June 7 to July 12 in 2025, the town's Fourth of July celebration reached its 176th year in 2026, and the chamber ran a Wine + Whiskey Weekend on October 2 to 4, 2026, about two weeks before the fall show opened.
The revenue most owners miss sits in two places. The first is the quiet weekend. Houston and Austin send the most guests, and outside the show weeks they're couples and friends looking for two nights in the country, pie at Royers and a concert or a play; a weekend product with a two-night minimum, a Friday check-in after the drive and a guidebook built around what's on that month turns empty Saturdays into income. The second is the longer stay in the slowest months. December, January and February bookings arrive late, about 51 to 63 days out in AirROI's table, and a weekly rate for people renovating a house nearby, writers who want a quiet desk, or buyers looking at land gives those weeks a product of their own.
At the state level, the rule that touches every Round Top rental is the hotel occupancy tax. The Texas Comptroller sets the state hotel occupancy tax at 6 percent of the cost of a room and says it applies to bed and breakfasts, condominiums, apartments and houses as well as hotels. People leasing their houses must collect it from their guests, and online travel companies and other third-party rental companies may also be responsible for collecting it. Returns are due by the 20th of the month after each month, or after each quarter if you qualify, and a guest who has the right to stay at least 30 consecutive days is exempt as a permanent resident. Airbnb collects and remits the state's 6 percent on the listing price, including the cleaning fee, for Texas reservations of 29 nights or fewer. Local hotel taxes are a separate layer, collected by the local taxing authority, and Airbnb's Texas list of places where it also collects local tax doesn't include Round Top, Carmine, Fayetteville, Burton, Brenham, La Grange, Fayette County or Washington County. Any local tax there, and every tax on a booking that doesn't run through a platform that collects, is yours to report.
The Town of Round Top adds its own tax. In its reports to the Comptroller, the town lists a local hotel occupancy tax of 7 percent; it reported $259,355 in revenue for fiscal 2025, and of the hotel tax money it allocated that year, 70 percent went to advertising, 14 percent to the arts and 5 percent to day-to-day operations. Carmine, Fayetteville, La Grange and Brenham each report a 7 percent city hotel tax of their own, and Washington County, which takes in Burton, reports a 7 percent county tax; Fayette County doesn't appear among the reporting governments. Inside the town's limits, that puts a stay at 6 percent for the state plus 7 percent for the town, and Airbnb collects only the state's share, so ask the town office how it wants the local tax filed and whether your address is inside its limits. We found no short-term rental ordinance, permit or registration for the town in its state filings or in local news coverage of the council, and AirROI shows none of the market's listings displaying a permit number. The town does regulate land use inside its limits. It has a Land Use Ordinance, and the revision taken to a public hearing in October 2017 set out rules for building size, height and density, yard sizes and the use of buildings and land, after a summer meeting on changes covering parking, lot sizes, antiques-fair regulations and connection to the town's wastewater system. Get the current version from the town before you build a guesthouse or let vendors use your land during a show.
Fayette County is the other layer, and in Texas it's a thin one. As the Texas Real Estate Research Center put it in 2025, Texas counties have limited land-use authority that doesn't include zoning; they can regulate platting outside city limits, but those platting rules can't govern use or residential density, and public land-use regulation in Texas is mainly municipal. Outside the town's limits, then, the rules that decide what you can do with a farmhouse are mostly private: deed restrictions and, where one exists, a property owners' association. In Texas their exact wording decides the question. In Tarr v. Timberwood Park Owners Association in 2018, the Texas Supreme Court held that a covenant limiting property to residential purposes didn't by itself bar short-term vacation rentals, and noted that differently worded restrictions could lead to a different result. Read your own before you list, and before you rent land to show vendors or host an event. Treat this section as orientation rather than legal advice, and confirm current requirements with the town, the county, the Comptroller and any association before you list. Cavmir handles the marketing side; tax and land-use compliance sit with you and your local professionals.
First, sell each show as its own product, and open it early. October stays were booked about 128 days ahead in AirROI's latest year and March stays about 114, so the guests who matter most are booking in June for the fall show and around Thanksgiving for the spring one. Venues post on their own schedules: as of October 2026, the Original Round Top Antiques Fair listed its spring 2027 dates as to be announced, so watch the venue sites and the chamber's page, and offer this year's show guests first refusal on the same dates next season. Then build the listing for a buyer: drive times to the Big Red Barn, to Marburger Farm at 2248 South Highway 237 and to the square; separate beds for a team that shares a house but not a room; coffee early, because the Big Red Barn opens at 9 a.m.; and a covered place to keep purchases overnight.
Second, describe the house exactly, starting outdoors. AirROI's amenity data shows where the money sits: listings with a pool average about $39,300 a year against $20,700 without, and those with a fire pit, outdoor furniture, a grill, an indoor fireplace or sun loungers all average well above the listings without them. These are averages across very different houses, so read them as a picture of what the top of the market offers guests rather than as a promise of what one addition will earn. Make the outdoor spaces visible: the porch at dusk, the pool, the fire pit, the land and the view down the drive, then the bedrooms. Listings here average just 12 photos and only 29 percent show their exact location, so a full set that shows the house, the land and the drive to the venues is an easy way to stand apart. Say how far the house is from the square and the show route, whether the drive is paved, and how many vehicles fit.
Third, give the quiet weeks a calendar of their own. Round Top's year has plenty of fixed dates outside the spring and fall shows: the winter antiques show from January 21 to 24, 2027, Burton's 38th annual Cotton Gin Festival on April 17, 2027, Shakespeare at Winedale's spring class performing Measure for Measure on April 22 to 24, 2027, six weeks of concerts at Festival Hill each summer, the Fourth of July parade and barbecue, and the lighted Christmas parade with Old Time Christmas on the Square. Give each one a short page on your site with dates, drive times and what to book ahead, and send it to past guests a few months out. Houston and Austin weekenders search for exactly these things, and each page gives search engines and AI assistants a reason to show your house for something other than antiques. Our vacation rental SEO work is built around pages like these.
Fourth, engineer the repeat and treat operations as marketing. The bar is high: AirROI's Round Top listings average a 4.89 rating, it counts about 70 percent Superhosts, and 45 percent of listings carry Airbnb's Guest Favorite badge, while fewer than half, 48 percent, use Instant Book, so a house that can be booked in one step has an edge. A design team that works both the spring and fall shows is worth more over five years than any single booking, which argues for a real direct channel: a fast direct-booking website, a complete Google Business Profile, and a past-guest list that hears about next season's dates first. Spanish is the second language among Round Top's guests, at 18 percent in AirROI's data, so a house guide in English and Spanish is worth the small effort. And collect the town's 7 percent on every stay inside its limits, including Airbnb bookings, because the platform doesn't.
The calendar is the structural challenge. Three months bring in 40 percent of the year's revenue, so a house can earn most of its year in March and October and let the rest of the calendar slide. The low months average about 20 percent occupancy, and the bottom quarter of listings books 12 percent of its nights or fewer. Hotels, inns and other boutique properties make up about three in ten of AirROI's listings, and during the shows they compete for the same buyers. Owners who live in Houston or Austin face a second problem: remotely run houses drift, with stale photos, slow replies and a winter calendar nobody opens. A strong local operations partner and current marketing close that gap.
Supply is growing faster than revenue. AirROI's active listings grew 16 percent in a year while average revenue per listing rose 5.4 percent, the top ten hosts run 39 percent of listings, and the three management companies with five or more listings each run 22 percent between them. Professional operators set the bar for photos, response times and show-week pricing, so price a new listing to earn its first reviews before you price it like theirs. The lasting answer is a product they can't easily copy: a specific house, a specific place on the show route and a guest list that comes back every season.
Show weeks are hard on houses and on guests. The shows run for more than two weeks over 11 miles of Highway 237, the chamber notes that some venues charge about $5 to park while others are free, and each venue keeps its own dates and hours. Guests who drove out from Houston, shopped all day and loaded a truck want a door code that works, a bed that's ready and a plain answer about where the purchases go. Short stays mean more turnovers in the busiest weeks of the year, so line up cleaning well ahead, and remember that the town's 7 percent hotel tax, which Airbnb doesn't collect, is easy to miss on a crowded calendar. Plan the cleaning schedule, the check-in and the tax filing before the first show booking arrives.
Round Top insurance has to cover the country setting and the show crowds. Expect a homeowners policy that allows short-term rental use or a dedicated rental policy, higher liability limits for a pool, a fire pit and guests driving rural roads, and clear terms for wind and hail. If you let vendors set up on your land or host events during the shows, that's a different use from a rental, so tell your broker before you sign anything. Disclose rental use to the carrier, and talk to a broker who writes rural Fayette County homes before you buy.
Guests pay Texas's 6 percent state hotel occupancy tax, which Airbnb collects on its stays of 29 nights or fewer, and, inside town limits, the Town of Round Top's 7 percent local hotel tax, which Airbnb doesn't collect, so you remit it. Rental income is still federal income. Ask the county appraisal district how a rental house and its land are classified before you budget property tax, and work with a Texas accountant who knows short-term rentals.
Financing is conventional but sized for the market. Weichert's Round Top page put the estimated median home price at $960,000 in October 2026, and most of its listings that week were lots and farms: 78 lots and land listings and 44 farms against nine single-family homes. If you're buying land to build or restore a rental, model the build, the carry and the slow months before the first show week. Expect jumbo loans, second-home or investment-property pricing depending on how you use the house, and lenders who want a realistic revenue model built on two peaks rather than a flat monthly average.
Round Top's outlook is stable for structural reasons. The antiques shows have run since 1968 and now spread across five communities, the Round Top Festival Institute has held its summer festival since the 1970s, Shakespeare at Winedale has run for more than fifty-five years, and the town's Fourth of July celebration dates to 1851. Houston and Austin, the two biggest sources of guests, are a drive away, and the town spends most of its own hotel tax on advertising Round Top. None of those reasons to visit depends on a platform's search ranking.
The pressures to watch are supply, cost and the rules. Listings grew 16 percent in a year, faster than revenue, and if that continues the middle of the market gets more crowded. The town's land-use rules and its hotel tax apply inside its limits, deed restrictions apply outside them, and insurance costs need checking at every renewal. None of this threatens a well-run rental, but each one rewards owners who run the house properly and plan for more than two seasons.
The other shift is in how guests find a house. Travelers now also find stays through AI assistants and direct search, not only platform scrolls, and the properties that surface in those answers publish clear, structured, useful information: where the house sits on the show route, drive times to the venues, how many beds and how much parking, what's on in the quiet months and a fast site an assistant can read. Our guide to generative engine optimization for vacation rentals explains how that works. Round Top's show guests plan months ahead and ask very specific questions, so positioning for those answers now is one of the most durable advantages an owner can build.
Round Top is a market where the details sell. There's a town of fewer than a hundred people, a show route that runs for miles, a 1,200-seat concert hall, a pie at the cafe on Main Street, and a guest who drove out from Houston or Austin on purpose. When a listing says exactly what the house offers and where it sits, instead of generic farmhouse copy, it attracts the buyer and the weekender who are actually shopping for Round Top, and they tend to come back.
What I love about marketing here is that the calendar has two loud seasons and a quiet one that's easy to underrate. March and October belong to the buyers and the designers, June and July to the concerts, the Fourth to the parade, April to Shakespeare in a barn, and the winter weekends to the couple who wants the town to themselves. An owner who stops marketing one generic farmhouse and starts marketing four or five seasonal products often finds nights and rate that were sitting there all along.
And the raw material is generous. A town named for a tower, a Fourth of July celebration first held in 1851, an antiques show that started with 26 dealers in a rifle hall, and a stagecoach stop whose farm became the home of a Shakespeare program give a host more stories than a welcome book can hold. Our job is rarely to invent an angle. It's to notice the true one the owner has stopped seeing, frame it plainly and put it in front of the guest already looking for exactly that.
The picks Cavmir puts in a Round Top welcome book: the details that make a stay feel like local knowledge instead of a printed concierge script, and that quietly earn the five-star reviews.
The show that started it all in 1968 runs at the Big Red Barn and The Continental. In fall 2026 it opens with Designer Day on October 25, then runs October 26 to 31: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on opening day, 9 to 5 through Friday and 9 to 4 on the last day. Blue Hills, listed on the same page, runs October 17 to 31.
The show says hundreds of dealers set up on its 43 acres of farmland at 2248 South Highway 237. The fall 2026 show runs October 27 to 31: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 to 6 Wednesday to Friday and 10 to 5 on Saturday. Tickets are sold through the show's own site.
A shorter show for the slow season, January 21 to 24, 2027. The Big Red Barn opens January 21 to 23 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Blue Hills runs January 21 to 24, and Marburger Farm runs January 21 to 24, 9 to 6 Thursday to Saturday and 9 to 4 on Sunday. A good reason to sell a winter weekend to past show guests.
At 105 Main Street, Royers has served comfort food and its well-known pies for more than 35 years. It takes reservations during the shows, from September 10 for the fall 2026 show, so tell show-week guests to book a table when they book the house.
The Round Top Festival Institute, founded by pianist James Dick in 1971, holds its summer music festival on its campus at 248 Jaster Road: in 2025 it ran six weeks of lessons and concerts from June 7 to July 12, with concerts every weekend. Its 1,200-seat concert hall is home to the Texas Festival Orchestra. Check the institute's calendar for the current season.
The University of Texas program founded by Professor James B. Ayres stages Shakespeare in a century-old hay barn converted into an Elizabethan-style theater near Round Top. The spring class performs Measure for Measure on April 22 to 24, 2027, and the 2027 summer season adds Macbeth, As You Like It and The Roaring Girl. The barn also hosts visiting companies, such as Out of Chaos with Macbeth on October 17, 2026. Reserve through the program's Eventbrite page.
At 307 N. Main Street in Burton, home of the Burton Farmers Gin, which has stood since 1914 and which the museum calls the oldest operating cotton gin in America, powered by a 1925 Bessemer engine. The museum is free, Tuesday to Saturday from 10 to 4; gin tours run at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., $8 for adults. The 38th annual Cotton Gin Festival is April 17, 2027.
The town's celebration reached its 176th year in 2026, and the chamber calls it the longest-running Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. Festivities start at 10 a.m. and the parade at 10:30, and the Rifle Hall hosts barbecue at 11:30, antique tractors, a blacksmith display and contests until 4.
Emma Lee Turney held the first Round Top antiques show here in 1968 with 26 dealers, and the hall still hosts the town's Fourth of July barbecue. Point show guests to it as the place where the whole season began.
Old Time Christmas on the Square starts at 3 p.m., with free-will-donation beef stew, hot chocolate and cookies from the Do Your Duty Club, Santa at the gazebo from 3:15, and music from the Round Top–Carmine High School Band and the Round Top Christmas Brass Band. The lighted parade runs from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. Check the chamber's page for this year's date.
The chamber notes there's no official governing body over the show dates: most venues stay open for the whole window, a few only on certain days, and some charge about $5 to park while others are free. Leave a printed list in the house of the venues your guests care about, with their dates and hours.
Three property types that do well in Round Top, a common starting point for each, and the plan Cavmir builds for it.
A farmhouse a few miles from the venues that fills both show weeks at strong rates, sits mostly empty from December to February and through late summer, accepts one-night stays all year, and depends on one platform for every booking.
Rebuild the year around two show products and three quiet-season ones. Show weeks get a three- or four-night minimum over the opening days, open to past show guests first in June and November, with drive times to the venues, early coffee and a place to keep purchases. Summer weekends are built around Festival Hill and the Fourth of July, and the winter months get a weekly rate. Add new photography of the porch, the pool, the land and the drive, and a direct-booking site with a past-guest list.
Built to raise the rate on the weeks that set the year and to give the quiet months products of their own. Track March and October nightly rate against AirROI's peak-month averages, how far ahead each show books, occupancy from December to February and in August and September, and the share of direct and returning-guest bookings.
A small cottage inside the town limits that competes with inn rooms and bigger houses during the shows, gets lost between them the rest of the year, and has never charged the town's 7 percent hotel tax on its Airbnb stays.
Set up the tax first: confirm with the town office that the address is inside town limits and how the 7 percent is filed. Then position the cottage for couples: a walkable weekend to Royers, the square and Henkel Square, a two-night minimum with a Friday check-in, a guidebook to Festival Hill, Winedale and the Christmas parade, a midweek rate for show-week dealers who want a quiet bed, and a direct-booking page for returning couples.
Aimed at more weekends outside the shows, a stronger value score and clean tax filings. Track weekend occupancy outside March and October, the value score in reviews, direct and repeat bookings, and each local tax filing.
A large house with a pool that markets itself only as a show-week rental for buyers, competes on price with smaller houses in the summer, and gets few of the family and friends' groups who could fill it on the Fourth of July and summer weekends.
Reposition it as the group house for the whole year: a show-week product for design teams with separate beds and parking for trucks and trailers, a summer product built around the pool, Festival Hill concerts and the Fourth of July parade, and a spring weekend around Burton's Cotton Gin Festival and Shakespeare at Winedale. Add pool-first photography, a clear guest-count and parking note, and search content for group stays near Round Top backed by a direct-booking page.
Designed to keep show-week rates and fill June, July and spring weekends with groups. Measure summer occupancy, group inquiries, how far ahead the Fourth of July books, and direct and repeat group bookings.
Yes. Cavmir works with owners in Round Top and along the Highway 237 show route, in Warrenton, Carmine, Fayetteville and Burton, on branding, listing optimization, photography direction, direct-booking websites, SEO and paid campaigns. Farmhouses on acreage, cottages near the square and group houses with a pool are exactly the kind of stays we market. If you also own in the cities your guests drive from, see our Houston and Austin pages. We're a marketing agency; day-to-day operations stay with you or your local manager.
AirROI's twelve months to September 2026 put the average at about $448 a night and 26 percent occupancy, or about $28,500 a year per listing, up 5.4 percent on the year. The spread is wide: the median listing earns about $2,260 a month and the top quarter $4,600 or more, and a three-bedroom home averages about $729 a night against about $300 for a one-bedroom. Treat these as market averages, not a forecast for your house; product, presentation and pricing decide where a property lands.
During the antiques shows. October is the top month for revenue and March has the highest nightly rates; in AirROI's typical year those two months average about 44 percent occupancy against about 20 percent in the low months. June, July and November form a shoulder, carried by the summer music festival at Festival Hill, the Fourth of July and the tail of the fall show. December to February is the quietest stretch, apart from the short winter show in January.
Mainly through taxes. Texas charges a 6 percent state hotel occupancy tax, and the Town of Round Top reports a 7 percent local hotel tax for stays inside its limits. We found no town short-term rental permit or registration, Fayette County has no general zoning power under Texas law, and deed restrictions decide a lot outside the town. Inside town limits, the town's Land Use Ordinance applies. Confirm current requirements with the town, the county and the Comptroller; Cavmir handles the marketing side, not legal or tax advice.
Partly. Airbnb collects the Texas state hotel occupancy tax, 6 percent of the listing price including the cleaning fee, on reservations of 29 nights or fewer. Its list of Texas places where it also collects local tax doesn't include Round Top, so inside town limits you collect and remit the town's 7 percent yourself. On direct bookings you collect and report everything, with state returns due by the 20th of the month after each month or quarter.
Sell the reasons that already exist. The winter show runs January 21 to 24, 2027, Burton's Cotton Gin Festival is April 17, 2027, Shakespeare at Winedale's spring class performs April 22 to 24, 2027, Festival Hill's summer festival fills June and early July, and the Fourth of July parade comes next. Give each one a page and an offer, add a weekend product for Houston and Austin couples and a weekly rate for the slowest months, and send it all to past guests first. See vacation rental SEO for how search fits in.
The fall 2026 show runs from October 15 to November 1, by the chamber's count, with the Original Round Top Antiques Fair at the Big Red Barn and The Continental from October 25 to 31 and Marburger Farm from October 27 to 31. The winter show follows on January 21 to 24, 2027. As of October 2026 the spring 2027 dates were still to be announced; the 2026 spring show ran from March 12 to 29. Each venue sets its own dates, so check the venue sites before you price a week, and see our Fredericksburg page if you also own in the Hill Country.
It depends on scope. Current plans and one-time project pricing are on the pricing page; most owners start with a listing overhaul or the 12-step system. A conversation about your property costs nothing: contact Cavmir.
Send us the listing and we'll tell you what we'd change. Not a pitch deck — a straight read on your photos, your title, your rates against the Round Top comp set, and whether a direct-booking site would pay for itself.
You'll hear back from a person, usually inside one business day. If we don't think we can move your numbers, we'll say so. Cavmir is a short-term rental marketing agency — we position and market properties, we don't manage them.
Demand in Round Top peaks around March and October and runs quietest around February and December. Here is how the year actually books — and what to do about each stretch of the calendar.
Round Top has two peaks, March and October, when the spring and fall antiques shows bring buyers, dealers and designers to the venues along Highway 237. October is the strongest month for revenue, March carries the highest nightly rates, and guests stay longest during the shows. Hold show-week rates firm, set a three- or four-night minimum over the opening days, and have the listing, the photos and the buyer details ready by early summer for the fall show and by late fall for the spring one.
June, July and November form the shoulder. The Round Top Festival Institute's summer music festival brings concertgoers to Festival Hill for about six weeks from early June, the Fourth of July parade and barbecue fill the holiday weekend, and November catches the tail of the fall show. Sell summer weekends to Houston and Austin families and groups with the pool and the fire pit in the first photos, and use the festival calendar in your listing copy.
December through February, April and May, and August and September are quiet, with the lowest occupancy of the year and short, late bookings. Give those weeks their own products: weekend offers for Houston and Austin couples, a weekly rate for longer stays, and plans built around the winter show in January, Burton's Cotton Gin Festival and Shakespeare at Winedale in April. It's also the time to refresh photos, service the pool and plan next season's show offers to past guests.
Show weeks book furthest ahead: October stays about four months out and March stays almost as far, so the fall show fills over the summer and the spring show from late November. Summer and late-summer stays book within about a month. Have show-week rates and minimums live as soon as the venues post their dates, and keep quiet-season pricing flexible for late planners.
Most stays are a long weekend. Show-week stays run longest, with March bookings averaging more than four nights, while the quiet months are mostly two- and three-night weekends.
The winner is a three- or four-bedroom farmhouse or group house on some land within an easy drive of the venues, with separate beds for a team of buyers, a porch, a pool, a fire pit and parking for trucks. Near the square, small cottages win when they sell a walkable weekend for couples instead of competing with the farmhouses on space.
Start by naming your product, a farmhouse on acreage, a cottage near the square or a group house with a pool, and sell that in the title and the first photos. Price the spring and fall shows as their own products, open them early to past guests, and build weekend and weekly offers for the quiet months around Festival Hill, Winedale, the Fourth of July and the winter show. Add a Google Business Profile and a direct-booking site so show-week teams and Houston and Austin weekenders can rebook you directly. That's the marketing layer Cavmir builds for owners here: photography direction, listing copy, a direct-booking website and local search.
The peaks are the antiques shows in March and October, with October the strongest month for revenue and March carrying the highest nightly rates. June, July and November form a shoulder around the summer music festival, the Fourth of July and the tail of the fall show, and December through February is the quietest stretch apart from the short winter show in January.
Show weeks book furthest ahead, about four months out for October and nearly as far for March. Summer and late-summer stays often book within about a month. Have show-week rates and minimums live as soon as the venues post their dates.
Houston sends the most guests, followed by Austin, Dallas and San Antonio, and almost all of them are domestic. During the shows, dealers and designers also fly in from across the country through Houston and Austin and drive out to the venues along Highway 237.
Outdoor living leads: a pool, a fire pit, outdoor furniture and a grill show up again and again in the top-earning listings, with an indoor fireplace for the cooler months. For show weeks, separate beds for a team, parking for trucks and trailers and fast wifi matter as much as the decor.
Run your Airbnb, Vrbo, or website through Cavmir's free grader. It checks the things that decide whether guests book in Round Top — photos, listing copy, page speed, local search — and shows you where bookings leak. Takes about a minute, and there's no sales call attached.
If the report says your booking engine is the weak link, that's fixable: a direct-booking website of your own means repeat guests stop paying platform fees to come back to you. That's the work Cavmir does — see Airbnb website design in Round Top.
Talk to Cavmir today. We'll show you exactly what your Round Top property is leaving on the table — and how fast we can change that.
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