Making Your Vacation Rental Listing a Success

Making your vacation rental business successful is no easy task. If you’re not careful, you can find yourself bogged down by administrative issues, pricing woes, constant communication expectations, and stagnant booking rates.

We’re proud to partner with DPGO, a dynamic pricing engine that focuses on interpreting live market data and we’ve collaborated with them for this post to find the recipe for short-term rental success.

Together, we’ve devised a five-step list of ways to boost your success and profitability in the vacation rental industry.

Step One: Build a Dependable Team

Having people to depend on is really important, especially in a business sense. Even if you live in the area, having a selection of people who you can depend on in an emergency. You’ll need electricians, plumbers, and housekeepers, just in case something goes wrong.

Without a dependable team, you’ll constantly be at the beck and call of your guests and if you don’t live in the area, it’s a recipe for a stress disorder. Trust us, building a team that you can count on is the first step to managing successful vacation rentals.

Step Two: Update Your Listing

Ranking high in Airbnb search results is akin to ranking highly on Google. In plain English, it’s not easy. If you want to keep your listing ranking high in search results, you need to keep it updated. Change your featured image, update your listing description, change your listing name, or upload new images. An updated listing is a fresh listing and Airbnb likes fresh listings.

By changing your listing often, you can also include time-relevant information, like proximity to major events, tourist attractions, sports games, and other booking-boosting happenings. For example, hosts in and around Inglewood, California, updated their listings to promote their proximity to SoFi Stadium before Superbowl 56.

Step Three: Automate Operations

Services like HostAway and DPGO help hosts achieve a level of automation that allows them to focus on more than one project at a time. Moving into more advanced automation technologies means the human error concern is removed completely. Hosts won’t need to worry about keeping their response rates high, streamlining communication, and calendar management.

An automated listing is a functioning listing and that means more time to improve your offering, grow your business and improve your bottom line.

Step Four: Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing is a vital component of running a successful vacation rental business. While you may think you know what your prices should be, using real-time data to dictate your prices means you are giving yourself the best chance of winning a booking or securing as much per booking as possible.

Services like DPGO use data collected in real-time from your local market and use it to arrive at the right price for the right guest at the right time. They offer real-time market data, advanced analytics tools, flexible adjustments, yield management, growth performance, and the ability to build a personal strategy.

Step Five: Discounts

It may sound peculiar but offering discounts can increase your profitability. Discounts can encourage bookings and even though you are charging less per night, you can still end up with a higher profit at the end of the month.

By offering a slight discount on your prices, you’re actually making more money. Why? Because without said discount, you wouldn’t have secured that booking at all. Offering discounts stimulate bookings and also shows Airbnb that your listing is a listing worth promoting as you are evidently thinking about the guests’ booking experience.

In Conclusion

Managing successful vacation rental properties is a balancing act. You have to be in a million places at once, and taking these five small steps will go a long way in ensuring that your listings succeed and stay profitable.