In the dynamic world of short-term rentals (STRs), understanding how your market operates can give you the edge needed to stay ahead. This is especially true for more extended stays, which are increasingly popular among travelers. With the right tools, you can uncover the secrets behind your competitors’ success and adapt your strategies accordingly. One such powerful tool is the PriceLabs Market Dashboard.
Market Dashboards provide personalized, automated insights into your market, helping you track critical data through easy-to-digest graphs and charts. Here’s how to leverage Market Dashboards to discover your competitors’ performance in the 30-plus-day rental market.
Build a Strong Comp Set
A well-curated comparison set (comp set) is the foundation of any practical market analysis. To get started:
- Customize Your Comp Set: PriceLabs Market Dashboard allows you to create custom comp sets for your listing. Ensure you’re comparing apples to apples. This means selecting properties that closely match your size, amenities, location, and target market. If you manage a 2-bedroom apartment in a high-rise building, your comp set should include other 2-bedroom apartments in similar high-rise buildings. Avoid including studios, 1-bedroom units, or 3-bedroom houses, as these cater to different guest needs and have different pricing and occupancy trends. For 30+ day rentals, focus on properties catering to longer stays.
- Gather Sufficient Data: Include at least 30 listings in your comp set if possible. A larger sample size helps minimize the impact of outliers—unusually high or low values that could distort your analysis. For example, if one property has exceptionally high pricing due to luxury features not standard in your market, its impact will be diluted in a more extensive comp set.
Understand and Prioritize Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you have your comp set, it’s time to dive into the data. Focus on KPIs that align with your goals:
- Revenue and Occupancy: Revenue and occupancy are often the most telling metrics. Remember that Market Dashboards use scraped data to estimate these figures. However, they provide valuable directional insights to guide your pricing strategy.
- Average Daily Rate (ADR): Compare your ADR with your competitors. This will show whether you are pricing above or below the market and highlight potential areas for pricing adjustments.
The Market Summary Section in PriceLabs Market Dashboard helps you take a quick glance at average revenue, average RevPAR, ADR, and Occupancy trends in your market based on your competitor data,
Analyze Market Trends
Before focusing on individual competitors, it’s essential to understand the broader market trends:
- Booking Windows: Look at how far in advance guests are booking their stays. For 30+ stays, guests tend to book their rentals in advance. Looking at this data can inform your own pricing and availability strategies.
You can use the length of stay versus booking window graph to help you analyze how long your competitors are getting booked and how much advance.
- Length of Stay (LOS) Trends: Analyze guests’ length of stay at competitor properties. Your market may not be a popular mid-term rental destination, or your competitors might get more bookings with a more relaxed or stricter minimum length of stay restriction. Once you have understood prevailing length of stay trends in your market, adjust your minimum length of stay requirements accordingly.
Determine Market vs. Individual Issues
You must understand that the market greatly influences how your listings perform. Analyzing future and historical market data and listing data is important to conclude your revenue management strategies. You can also use the data to differentiate between market-wide trends and issues specific to your property:
- Future Pricing and Occupancy: Compare your future booking data with the markets to see if there are any disparities. If the market is trending upward but bookings are lagging, it may be time to reevaluate your pricing or marketing strategies. You could also identify high-demand periods you may otherwise have been unaware of.
- Revenue and Occupancy YOY: Before you start thinking your low occupancy or revenue indicates a problem in your strategy, look at the market’s year-over-year comparison. This comparison can reveal whether broader market conditions affect your performance or if you need to make pricing or other adjustments.
The future occupancy trends graph in PriceLabs Market shows occupancy, bookings, and cancellation trends for up to one year. It also allows you to view historical data to compare your listing year on year.
Analyze Length of Stay and Amenities
Understanding how your competitors maximize their revenue with amenities and different stay restrictions can uncover hidden opportunities for you:
- Minimum Length of Stay (MLOS): Could adjusting your minimum stay restrictions increase bookings? Competitors might be capturing more revenue with flexible stay requirements. Your market may also change from a weekly destination to a weekend destination, which warrants you to adjust your minimum stay restrictions accordingly.
- Amenities: Make sure your amenities match or exceed those offered by competitors. Missing or underrepresented amenities in your listings could be why guests choose other properties.
Fine-Tune Your Strategy
With all this data at your fingertips, you’re ready to make informed decisions:
- Adjust Cleaning Fee and Cancellation Policies: Analyze what cancellation policies and cleaning fees are popular in the market and see how to position your property competitively. PriceLabs Market Dashboards help you see the common cleaning fee or cancellation policies and how many bookings your competitors got with certain fees and policies.
- Make Your Listing Appealing: Ensure your property descriptions highlight the amenities and features most guests desire. It is very important to click great pictures of your property as the first impression counts the most. This can help improve your appeal relative to competitors. You can use the Airbnb Description Generator to write appealing titles and descriptions for your listings.
Conclusion
Market Dashboards by PriceLabs offer a wealth of data that, when used correctly, can provide a significant competitive advantage. By building a robust comp set, focusing on the right KPIs, and understanding the market and individual trends, you can uncover your competitors’ strategies to dominate the 30+ day rental market. With these insights, you can refine your approach, optimize your listings, and ultimately increase your bookings and revenue.
Key Takeaways:
- Customize Your Comp Set: Ensure precise comparisons by selecting properties that match your size, amenities, location, and target market. This tailored approach provides relevant insights into competitive pricing and occupancy trends.
- Gather Sufficient Data: Include at least 30 listings in your comp set to minimize the impact of outliers. A robust dataset allows for more accurate analysis of market trends and competitor performance in the 30+ day rental market.
- Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Prioritize metrics like revenue, occupancy, and average daily rate (ADR) to gauge competitive positioning. These KPIs offer valuable insights into pricing strategies and market demand shifts.
- Analyze Comprehensive Market Trends: To understand broader market dynamics, look beyond individual competitors. Analyze booking windows, length of stay trends, and year-over-year comparisons to adapt your strategy effectively.
- Optimize Your Strategy: Use data-driven insights to adjust pricing, minimum stay requirements, and amenities. Enhance your property listings based on competitive benchmarks to attract more guests and maximize revenue.
About PriceLabs
PriceLabs is a revenue management solution for the short-term rental and hospitality industry, founded in 2014 and headquartered in Chicago, IL. Our platform helps individual hosts and hospitality professionals optimize pricing and revenue management, adapting to changing market trends and occupancy levels.
With dynamic pricing, automation rules, and customizations, we manage pricing and minimum-stay restrictions for any portfolio size. Prices are automatically uploaded to preferred channels such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and 100+ property management systems and channel integrations.
Every day, we price over 350,000+ listings globally across 135+ countries, offering world-class tools like the Base Price Help and Minimum Stay Recommendation Engine. Choose PriceLabs to increase revenue and streamline pricing and revenue management. Sign up for a free trial at pricelabs.co today.