Month: August 2022

Having the right pricing strategy is one of the key components to utilizing your property to its maximum potential. However, a lot of consideration and planning goes into optimizing your pricing. You need to analyze the important vacation rental KPIs in-depth to make sure that you are adopting an appropriate pricing strategy.

Your property’s location

• Find out if your property has unique features, such as tourist attractions, theme parks, festivals, events, natural attractions, etc.
• If these features drive demand throughout the year, you should be able to set your prices at their maximum during peak season.
• Change your pricing as the season changes.

Your Property Types and Amenities

• Your property deserves to be priced higher if you go above and beyond the basic amenities for your guests.
• Another major factor that influences your property’s pricing is your property type, as you move higher on the extravagance meter, your property moves to the higher end on the pricing.

Your target guest

• Understand the type of guest you want to attract and price accordingly.
• Tailor the experience to each guest based on their specific preferences.
• If you offer luxury accommodation, you will price it to the maximum rate, affordable only to people with deep pockets.
• Business travelers or students might not be looking for exclusive, luxury amenities.

Your expense

• Make sure your profit outweighs your expenses.

Service fees

• These are the fees that are paid to a property manager to cover the costs for the management services they provide such as guest communication, booking management, maintenance, etc.

Restocking supplies

• You will have to constantly restock supplies like food supplies, toiletries, bed accessories, etc.

Maintaining amenities

• You will have to maintain the quality of these amenities to make sure that the guest experience is always at its peak.

Your Business Goals and Objectives

• A properly chartered business plan with clear goals and objectives can help your short-term and long-term growth.
• In line with your revenue goals, you need to continuously monitor and adapt your pricing strategy.
• Portfolio Analytics is a real-time reporting system that provides high-level metrics.

Understand the market

• Understand how people in your locality are pricing their properties.
• PriceLabs’ dynamic pricing solutions provide pricing recommendations based on historical and current booking data, market supply and demand, seasonal and day-of-week trends, special events and holiday predictions, and days left to book.

Location

• Shows detailed information of all the listings in your neighborhood for the next 60 days.

Compare competitor calendar

• You can compare the calendars of your competitors (up to 10) with this feature.
• Select the listings that you want to compare, and click on ” Get Calendar” to see your competitor’s rates.
• Hotel data shows your prices compared to the closest hotels in your area.

What is a percentile?

• A percentile is a term that describes how one score compares to the other scores from the same set.
• There are four percentiles: 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th.
• With this data, you can analyze how your pricing compares with the pricing of the other listings in your competitive set.

How to Access the Bedroom Filter

• At the top right of the Neighborhood data tab, you can find the bedroom filter.
• Click to add or remove listings with the number of bedrooms you’re interested in, or click ‘Select All’ to see the full group of listings we’ve assigned as your PriceLabs neighborhood.

What is the current price?

• It is the price that our algorithm saw for your listing on your *** channel, or channel manager.
• Updated any time a sync or save & refresh is done.
• If the listing you are analyzing has been syncing for a day, we usually showcase yesterday’s rates.

Color chart for the future charts

• Future prices chart shows your current occupancy and the recommended prices along with the percentile range of daily rates for the next year.
• The future occupancy chart shows the average occupancy in your area for each date for the upcoming year, along with any existing blocked dates.
• You can also download this data as CSV (excel format) and analyze them independently.

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What is property Maintenance?

Property maintenance is the process of preserving a residential, commercial, apartment, or hospitality building and its immediate surroundings through a set of specific maintenance activities.

Why is Vacation Rental Maintenance so important?

Regular vacation rental property maintenance consists of specific tasks that prevent or slow down the normal wear and tear of your vacation rental property. Maintaining your home consistently can make the difference between getting a good guest review and a mediocre one. It can help you save time and money by avoiding costly repairs. And, most importantly, it can help drive a steady flow of bookings.

Regular maintenance is important for various reasons. Not only does it help to ensure the safety of your guests or long-term tenants, but it also has long-term benefits for you as a property owner. Guests want vacation rentals that are well designed and well kept, inside and out.

Fruitful Tips for vacation rental maintenance

Here’s how to stay on top of your vacation home’s maintenance to keep it in prime condition all year long.

Perform In-depth Inspection:

Even though some tasks only need to be completed once a year, the same does not apply when it comes to inspecting your property. It is advised that you complete a routine inspection once a quarter by walking around your property. Tour your property with a discerning eye, similar to how a home inspector would. The key is to catch things early before they become a massive headache. Check for any pest or water damage. Test your outlets for any outages and faucets for any plumbing issues. Don’t overlook your home’s exterior—overgrown trees and encroaching roots can cause major damage down the road.

Add smart home technology

Technology helps keep an eye on your vacation property, no matter how far away you are. If you plan on being away from your second home for an extended period of time, consider adding some smart home gadgets. Security cameras with Wi-Fi let you keep an eye on your property, while smart lighting apps program your lights to come on at various intervals, making it seem like you’re home even when you’re not. And a variety of smart home gadgets can alert you to potential maintenance issues, from failing HVAC systems to water leaks.

Exterior maintenance:

This refers to upkeep related to a property’s exterior—also known as grounds maintenance—including cleaning of a building’s exterior, roof gutters, and drains. It also includes landscaping and gardening, repairs, snow removal in common areas, and graffiti removal.

Interior maintenance:

This includes keeping the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems in working order for all units and common areas, and making repairs quickly when they’re needed.

Safety checks:

Safety checks include checking and maintenance of smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors. They also cover proactive inspections of electrical and mechanical systems and periodic safety inspections of the property and grounds.

Prepare for the seasons:

Some vacation homes require even more maintenance based on extreme seasonal changes where they’re located. Beach houses could be exposed to potential thunderstorms and strong winds during hurricane season. Meanwhile, mountain cabins can be subject to freezing temps and snow in the winter. Preparing a vacation home for winter conditions can mean checking the roof, protecting outdoor furniture, draining the water from your pipes, and insulating your home properly.

Assemble a vacation rental maintenance team:

No one expects you to know how to clean your pool, inspect your pipes, and check the roof yourself. Whether you live across town or across the country from your vacation home, hiring the right people to work on the right things is one of the best ways to take care of your property. Find vendors you can trust, then put them on speed dial. You’ll never know when you’ll need to call in a local arborist to inspect a tree in your backyard or an HVAC technician when the heat stops working mid-winter.

The best solution: Rely on a trusted professional property manager

In the event that you work with Manage My STR to deal with your vacation home, we come prepared with a checked Rolodex of vendors and maintenance services in each market-from exterior decorators to handymen. Our nearby groups will frequently set up any arrangements, work with the vendors directly, and handle any administrative work and follow-up.

Performing standard support on your rental home will save you from making repair costs in the future, in addition, to guaranteeing that guests just experience your home in its top-quality condition. Follow this guide to help with your home’s upkeep throughout the year.

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Revenue management is the practice of analyzing the vacation rental performance and market data to draw insights and set a strong pricing strategy. It predicts customer behavior at micromarket levels, fine-tunes product pricing, and adjusts availability to maximize revenue. However, some factors are more crucial than others when developing a pricing strategy

Why do you need a solid revenue management strategy?

• Increases revenue and profit by helping you identify improvement areas in your strategies by analyzing past performance, market data, and other information.
• A good strategy helps you make informed data-backed decisions based on fact instead of guesswork.

Who are revenue managers and how can they help?

• A revenue manager uses performance data, competitor rates, local market information, and important vacation rental KPIs to optimize property availability and price to maximize your revenue growth.
• Usually, revenue managers choose to combine their market experience and the data provided by revenue management software to design a pricing strategy.

Why is a revenue manager important if a tool can adjust prices automatically?

• As a property manager, your primary goal is to grow revenue and establish a successful business model
• You need to prioritize revenue management and have a dedicated person to take care of this aspect of your business
• A revenue manager can help homeowners release the burden of managing one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of their business

Someone with vacation rental industry experience

• Have an eye for occupancy demands, market trends, and the unique characteristics of individual properties

The importance of data in revenue management

• The volume and accuracy of the data greatly determine the agility of your revenue management strategy
• Leading data helps you make future predictions
• Authoritative data includes all the data you have stored in your property management system
• Lagging data are measurable data points that can be used to analyze the listing’s performance

Start by analyzing your listing’s data

• Data from your property management system is the best source
• Valuable data to have: average check-ins, number of guests staying, average number of check-outs
• Reservation data can show you the differences in reservations over time

Key vacation rental KPIs to analyze

• Average Daily Rent (ADR): This is the average nightly rate for a property (or a cluster of properties), calculated by the total rental revenue / the total nights sold
• Occupancy Rate: The number of occupied nights for the property or a group of properties
• Revenue per Available Room Night (RevPAR): This number is a more accurate way to judge the performance of a rental because it takes the occupancy rate into account

How does the revenue management tool work?

• PriceLabs analyzes market data days in advance to provide you with price recommendations while offering you various customizations to enable the implementation of your strategy.
• This helps optimize bookings while saving time, so you never miss out on opportunities to earn more.

Tips for choosing a revenue management tool

• Know what you want
• Identify the revenue goals you want to achieve
• Check if the software provides flexible updates
• Ensure the software is consistent with its updates and adopts modern revenue management methods
• Their customer support services should be great

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