We talk about all the vacation rental data sources you have at your disposal and how to use them to help price your vacation rental on Airbnb, VRBO, or any site.

1. Data-Driven Pricing:
How to Use Data to Make Pricing Decisions
Kam Bain, Director of Operations
Beyond Pricing

2. ANTITRUST STATEMENT
It is the policy of the Vacation Rental Managers Association (VRMA), and it is the
responsibility of every VRMA member, to comply in all respects with antitrust laws.
VRMA—and, in particular, VRMA meetings and other functions—shall not be used as a
means of pursuing anti-competitive practices, including:
a) Setting prices or other customer charges;
b) Ensuring parallel contract terms and conditions;
c) Agreeing not to compete, including allocation of territories or markets; and
d) Refusing to do business with any supplier, vendor, or customer.

3. Learning Objectives
• Discover new data sources to help you price
• Understand the pros and cons of different pricing
strategies
• Learn how to improve your pricing

4. Some Quick Clarification
• What is revenue management?
• Selling to the right person at the right time for the right price
• Can include:
• Dynamic pricing
• Cancellation fee policies
• Length of stay adjustments
• Channel management
• Promotions
• Marketing
• Today we are going to focus on the first part of revenue management: pricing

5. What is Dynamic Pricing?
Changing your price based on
changes in supply and demand

6. Why is this important?

7. Demand Changes A Lot
2014 San Francisco Short-Term Rental Occupancy

8. As Demand Changes, So Do Prices
Price
Rooms Booked
High Season
Demand
Low Season
Demand
$200
$150

9. Sometimes, Supply Changes, Too

10. Pope’s Visit to Philadelphia

11. What is Variable Pricing?
Charging a different price for
different nights of the year

12. All Managers (We Hope) Do Some
Degree of Variable Pricing

13. Example Manager

14. Homewood, Tahoe Occupancy

15. Example Sophisticated Manager

16. Clearly, There is A Lot More We Can Do
with Truly Dynamic Pricing

17. Two General Goals When Setting Prices
• Setting initial static prices
• Changing prices as demand changes

18. What Kind of Data Can You Use to Help Price?
• Comparable properties
• Occupancy of your own listings
• Market occupancy
• Other sources

19. Comparable Properties
• Managers often use “comps” in a similar way to how real
estate agents do: to find a similar property and copy its
pricing
• When trying to get a ballpark idea of a new listing’s
value, this is the go-to method

20. Comparable Property Pitfalls to Avoid
• Finding the “right” comps
• Copying off of “D” students

21. Finding the “right” comps
• 3 bedrooms, 1,000 sq ft
• Older bungalow
• 6 blocks from beach

22. Finding the “right” comps
• 36 nearby 3 bedrooms
• $249-$700 avg price
• Which do I pick?

23. Finding the “right” comps
• Nearest comp
• Avg price: $467
• My avg price: $247
• My occupancy: much
higher in low season

24. Finding the “right” comps
• While comps can get you in the ballpark, every property
is unique
• At the end of the day, the market sets your average price,
not comps

25. Copying off of “D” students
• Using comps to set your different seasonal and event
prices can help
• But make sure to copy off of “A” students who know
what they are doing

26. Copying off of “D” students
• $450 weekday, $550
weekend in high season;
• $450 weekday, $485
weekend in low season

27. Copying off of “D” students

28. Copying off of “D” studentsOccupancy
AveragePrice

29. Copying off of “D” studentsOccupancy
AveragePrice

30. Where to get the data?
• Listing sites
• Competitor websites
• PMT Tools, Beyond Pricing, Airdna, VRM Market Data

31. Your Own Occupancy Data
• Hotels have traditionally used data on how their rooms
are “pacing” to determine if demand for a single day is
higher or lower than expected and adjust pricing
accordingly
• Vacation rental manages can do this as well

32. Your Own Occupancy Data
• Hotels use their inventory of, say, 200 rooms to see how quickly they are filling up vs. last
year
• This works for hotels because they are trying to optimize prices across the whole
PORTFOLIO of rooms
• So if they don’t realize until half of the rooms are booked that there is more demand
than expected, they make it up on the second half
• If you do this with vacation rentals, half of your owners will get booked at too low of a
rate
• However, it’s better than all of your owners getting booked at too low of a rate

33. What to look for
• Year over year occupancy trends
• Are certain days/weeks booking up slower or faster than last year?
• Aberrations in forward-looking occupancy
• Are certain days/weeks booking up slower or faster than the other
days/weeks around them?
• Segment data as much as possible (by bedrooms, by location,
etc.)

34. Pitfalls of Using You Own Inventory to See
Demand Changes
• Hotel style occupancy matrices require
you to decide when and by how much
to change price
• In our Tahoe example, the PM might
have sold out 80% of their inventory
before they raised prices
• Better than not raising prices, but
better to use market demand trends
to see increased demand before your
places get booked

35. Where to get the data?
• Your own PMS
• Ask your PMS if they have occupancy reports
• If not, do an export of reservations and track occupancy by week (or
day if possible)
• Third-party software layers
• Some third-parties can help you create a better dashboard of your
data by connecting to your PMS

36. Market Occupancy Data
• Market occupancy data (historical and forward-looking)
can help you identify supply and demand trends

37. Historical Occupancy

38. Forward-Looking Occupancy

39. Where to get the data?
• Listing sites (see following example)
• Competitor websites
• VRM Market Data, Destimetrics (historical), PMT Tools,
Beyond Pricing, Airdna

40. Using Listings Sites to Track Market Occupancy
Changes
• In our Tahoe example,
you can track the
number of units
available for a date range
by simply querying
HomeAway

41. Questions?
Contact: kam@beyondpricing.com
www.beyondpricing.com
Twitter: @beyondpricing