Insights on Short-Term Rental Success

SGR Nation, what's up guys? Thank you all so much for coming. I would typically reintroduce myself, but I feel like I've had a one-on-one conversation with almost every single one of you here since I've gotten here. This has been really fun. I actually love the size of this event. I was going to call it community. because by now I feel like we're much more of a community than we are an event. Who's with me on that? Yeah. So I wanted to put together something new, which having taught Airbnb short-term rentals for over eight years, it's really kind of hard to come up with a new topic. right? Yeah. That's where the gray in my beard came from, was actually trying to come up with slides for this thing. So today, I want to talk to you guys about utilization. Utilization isn't typically a word that we would use in short-term rentals. It's usually something they would use in more of an inventory-driven business that isn't accommodations. I hope to kind of realign the way your brain looks at your properties and how you can maximize your utilization, because utilization is how you're going to make your money. So he actually... Killer intro, by the way. Thank you so much for that. I don't have to tell you too much of my life story because he did such a great job with that. And yes, I did live in a van for about four months before I started my first successful business. And I did get into Airbnb by accident. So I was going to actually talk about my childhood. So I'm glad that he queued that up. My parents were both alcoholics. They struggled with addiction. They were both Marines. Both of them in and out of jail. Not the coolest thing. This is my house. that I grew up in. It is currently in foreclosure because my mom is losing her house. It's very sad. I only found out because my brother called me and told me because I'm actually no contact with my mother from the whole child abuse thing. Both my brothers ended up in foster care for child abuse. That's how little of a direction we had in life. This house is no longer in our family possession. It was worth maybe $80,000 when they bought it. She couldn't keep up with the mortgage. because of her addiction. It's really sad. But because my brothers and I and my older sister, who was basically our mom, a godsend, we grew up without much. We grew up extremely scrappy and street smart, and we made things work. We figured it out. I was a musician, and I pushed grocery carts at a grocery store to buy my first guitar that I still own today, and I keep it in a case, and I'll have that thing until the day I die. Knock on wood, right? And because of that, utilization became a... superpower and utilization is using what you have. Who here has an Airbnb property? Who here has it 100% full? Yeah, it's hard to do, right? Really hard to do. So over the last eight years of doing short-term rentals and being involved in short-term rentals, not because of real estate, but because I was a sales business guy, I always looked at the inventory as something a little bit different than a real estate person. person did. And so because of that, my inventory has been over 90% occupied for over eight years and at over 150 properties. 92 to 94% occupancy is our average. And if we don't get 90% occupancy on a listing one month, we're going, what's wrong? Which means in nine different cities, multiple different markets, we found a way to fill these things up. And I'm going to try to give you guys some of my tricks for utilization to get. get that done. Utilization isn't a ones and zeros game either. What's really cool about having an Airbnb or short-term rental is you can make a ton of money one night, right? You can make a little bit of money one night. Only if you absolutely fail will you make zero dollars, right? But even beyond getting a booking, there's ways that you can make money on your property even beyond just their nightly rate. So when we look at utilization as a company, we're looking at a, I guess what we believe to be our best case scenario. Where can we make the most money? How can we make the most money? And if our plan doesn't work, we've got a plan B, plan C, plan D to try to get that thing full and used multiple different ways. So, today, I'm going to teach you utilization using a few of my favorite technologies and maybe a few of my favorite concepts. Who's ready? And one thing I'm surprised about with this event is with how intimate this is, I've actually had a chance to meet some of my students who've been part of my program for a while. If you're part of my coaching program, please stand up. Some of you may be in here. Yeah, there's one. And we've got a new guy, William, who actually just joined the program. Don't worry, you don't have to stand up, William. I know you're shy. But for those of you who have started your Airbnb business from my free YouTube content, how many of you are here? Stand up. I want to see you guys. All these people took free content and are making money from free content. And one thing that I find is so hard to do... Congratulations, by the way, guys. You're awesome. One thing that's super hard to do is to take some bullshit that some guy on YouTube says seriously enough to try to change your life, right? Because here I am... on the other end of a screen, trying to tell you that my life is so cool and I've done something that you should do too. And, you know, imagine if I pushed a Lambo in front of you guys. That's probably one of the few things I probably haven't done, is push a car in front of you. But that's what we see all day. There's so much white noise on the internet. And we have... have no absence of information. Everybody's got an angle. Everybody's got a secret. Everybody's got a system. And Tony Robbins said something like, if you invest money, you're much more likely to do something, right? Because your attention goes where your money goes. So to build a business off of free content without context, that's amazing. That takes another level of commitment to change your life, right? To sift through dirt online and find stuff that may or may not be done. valuable to digest information from a stranger like me and then go into your own life without a mentor, without putting money on the line and actually risking that change all alone. That's a lot. And so for those of you who may not have a property yet, I just want you to know there are people here who used literal free content and probably are making seven figures a year now, right? Really cool. And when I first got started, this industry was just so young, there was nobody online for me to go, I wonder how to do this, right? I started teaching Airbnb 2017 on YouTube, and there was a few creators back then, but back then I wasn't looking for content. Nobody was talking about it as a thing, so I didn't even think to go to YouTube to look for education. So I think one of my favorite things, which is not in this slide, is probably YouTube for you guys. Because there's not only me, but there's a lot of other creators out there, and you know them, they're here today too. A lot of us, we put our love into our content because we want to pay it forward. A lot of us grew up broke who here grew up broke. broke. Who here grew up like not filthy rich? I'm sure everybody here grew up not filthy rich, right? There's no Hiltons here, right? Yeah, okay, cool. And it's because we had less than we have now that I think a lot of us want to give you guys content. So anybody that you've heard, like anybody that you've heard speak today, anybody you've talked to that's given content, give them a follow on Instagram. Follow them, check them out. Stalk them until you can trust them. If you don't trust them, you can always unfollow them later, right? Like I'll say something probably that will offend you on Instagram one day and you can unfollow me then. But... Until then, maybe give me a shot, too. The first one is Raboo. Who here has heard of AirDNA? Drash. Absolute trash. Now, me and AirDNA have a little bit of beef because of a campaign they tried to get us to buy their thing. They wanted me to spend like $70,000 to then also promote their thing. It was really weird. But AirDNA and Mashvisor and all the rooms, all of them stopped giving away free data. They used to give away cool free data that we could use. to do market research, to inform our pricing strategies, and they took the charts down. AirDNA used to have a chart that looks just like this, that was the revenue projection for every single month for any market. There's other data that they gave, like occupancy percentage projected month over month, and all sorts of other stuff, like how many listings were on Vrbo or Airbnb or both. I used to tell people, go to AirDNA for their free information. We're going to use it in these ways. Ever since then, everybody shut down all of those goodies except except Rabu has this one chart. And this is monthly revenue projection like over the course of over 12 weeks. I don't believe these numbers. I'm going to teach you how to use this. I think that says like 7,000 and 3,000 or something on the low side. What I do is I take a chart like this and I will turn this into a fraction. And so let's say the top number was 10,000 and the bottom number was 5,000. That means that peak season makes... twice as much money as slow season. Does it make sense? So if you have a property in a market that makes $20,000 in peak season, you could project that your slow season would make $10,000, right? And so if you're doing market research to try to find out how much a property can make, and you find out that a listing made $18,000 one month, you could go to Raboo, look at that chart, and you can then use this 12-month chart to guesstimate what every single month could make by creating a relative swing, percentage-wise, to get a final answer. final annual. This is one of the main things that I teach my students to do, is we will go into Airbnb and look at a listing, look at their future bookings, look at their reviews, look at their prices, weekdays, weekends, see if they change their prices. We just stock a listing, and we can make a pretty solid guess what money they're going to make over the next 45 days, and then we go back to a chart like this, and we sketch out its annual revenue. When we do this, we are far more accurate than AirDNA can ever be unless AirDNA has direct access to your information, if you have an Airbnb property. Who here knows the three ways that AirDNA collects its information? Have you heard that? this? I know it's a secret. They don't want to talk about it. So AirDNA will guesstimate. They'll crawl through Airbnb and pull data and they'll look back at listings and pull data again and they'll make assumptions over time over like how much they think listings are making. when dates disappear. Another one is they have channel manager partners. If you're connected into certain channel managers like Guesty, OwnerRes, some of them give your data to AirDNA. And that's how they get some of that data. And a lot of you don't know that, that these PMSs will share data inside of your privacy agreement that you signed when you came on. Third, AirDNA has a suite of software stuff that they want you to log into, like their pricing metrics. They're trying to give you pricing suggestions. They only did that to try to get your listing plugged into AirDNA. to AirDNA so they can see every single reservation that you have. That's how they can give you more accurate data. But the majority of the data that they've collected over the years has been like extrapolated or guesstimated data. And to have data that you can't be sure about is what we would call unhygienic data, data hygiene. And so I like charts like this because even if they're wrong about like certain listings, this kind of broad market data here, it's too wide for you to make make a mistake on an individual listing, I can take this chart and the very basic relative data that it gives me and I can make some guesstimations on that. But if I'm going to look at an individual listing and try to determine its profitability or its revenue, I will never trust any software ever because they don't know where they got their data. I would rather call the host and go, hey, can I give you a hundred bucks and can I look at your reservation information? Because I really want to know if you're profitable or not. I'd rather just call a host direct and try to get the res information because that's the only clean data you can get. right from the horse's mouth. So Rabu, if you want a chart like this, you can use it for market research to extrapolate out what somebody makes all year. But also until we get a free occupancy chart, which is I'm asking, I'm asking a Rabu to make it for us. Until we get that, you can also guess that any month that has low revenue would also have lower occupancy, right? They have a correlation. So when you do pricing strategy for your market, if you have months that are low occupancy. Those are the months that you need to deviate from your regular pricing strategy to try to get booked before your competitors. That's one of my primary rules of my pricing strategy is in slow season, get booked first. Who here is connected to Price Labs or Wheelhouse or anything? So I want you all to imagine you're on the same block or in the same city, right? And Price Labs is feeding you all the same information. Let's say there's 30 of you. And in slow season, only 5 of you will get bookings, right? 25 of you won't get booked. But Price Labs is giving you guys all the same recommendations. They're optimizing all of you against each other. How do you know which five of you are going to get booked, right? At this point, I would deviate from what Price Labs is telling me because I don't want to risk being the one of the 25 that's not booked. So in those points of low demand, if you can really nail down when there's low occupancy, you'll know how many mouths won't get fed. You can deviate from what Price Labs tells you to do months in advance and get booked first before anybody else wakes up and... and realizes that they're in slow season. So a chart like this, you can use that. Now, Price Labs is going to kill me. Sorry, Price Labs. I like Wheelhouse. It's one of my favorites. The reason why, this has a steep learning curve. Wheelhouse is harder to learn, but Wheelhouse is so granular. The one thing that the owner of, or the CEO of Wheelhouse and me have in common is we are both on the spectrum and his ass is on the spectrum. And if you've ever heard an interview, you can tell that guy is, he's there, but he's sharp. And- And one time I told him about adjacency. Who here knows adjacency from my YouTube channel? Who's heard that phrase before? You guys need to learn your pricing strategy, guys. I saw no hands. Was that really like one hand? Okay, adjacency is any day next to a reservation. Who here has a reservation? Right? Who here has had a reservation check out on a Sunday and that Sunday does not get booked? The reason why that didn't get booked is because that day is adjacent and it never shows up in search. Know why? Because any search for that Sunday has to check in on Sunday. You can't have a Friday, Saturday, Sunday booking because Friday, Saturday is always already booked, right? An adjacency is the hardest date to book on your calendar, right? And when I explained how I changed my prices for adjacency to Wheelhouse, within a month, they had a completely new widget built in to automatically adjust prices for adjacencies. Because he's like, that was hot. We're going to put that in there. So I like Wheelhouse because they're open-minded to feedback from hosts like us and look for use cases. And so I'll use Wheelhouse to automate things like adjacencies, seasonality. They give you the ability to choose how much control you want them to have and how much you want to put in your own parameters because everybody knows their own market. If you guys are relying only on a... software like Wheelhouse or Price Labs, you're making a mistake. Because they're meant more to automate the obvious stuff. But anytime that you have an empty calendar with like three weeks out, if you've got empty inventory within three weeks, just assume that your pricing software failed, and you need to be getting in there. and making some changes yourself. I like Wheelhouse because it automates more things that I do, but Pricelabs probably is easier to work with. This has a learning curve, but at a high level, I really like Wheelhouse. Who here has ever loaded the Airbnb platform before? Come on, guys. Who here is awake? We just had lunch, right? I guess I'm going to give you guys that. We just had lunch, right? Okay, cool. I could tell you who had lunch, you know, some of you, like two of you would raise your hand. All of you have loaded an Airbnb, like, search page before, and all of you know that at the top right of a... listing, there's a heart. Click, click. Super cute, right? Airbnb changed that feature to also have a shared wish list feature, which I think is going to be really telling. I don't have data for you on it yet, but we're going to use it in cool ways. But I use wish lists to... to stalk my competitors. Whenever you search on Airbnb, it'll say over 1,000 listings available, and it will push you all the listings it wants to sell you, because it is an algorithm, right? But your listing has very relevant competitors that you're competing against. Some are four-bedroom houses, some are two-bedroom houses, some are studios. Not all of those are your competition, right? So what I do is when I'm doing market research and when I'm doing pricing sets, I will take all of my relevant competition and I'll put them into a wish list so I can follow them around and see what they're doing. Also if I want to see if a certain type of property performs well on Airbnb I will take as you see at the bottom of the bottom row some of you may not see this because it may not be big enough but there are two wish lists for Venice right now. One is near the beach and one is with a water view. I took that data set and found that stuff with a water view made 35% more money than stuff that was just near the beach. To have a a photo of the water in that part of the world led on a widespread listings that I use wishlist to do, I could determine how much more money all those listings made compared to the other ones. So I did this for a student in Dubai. We took a wishlist per building. We hyper zoomed in on Airbnb and found every high rise and made a wishlist per high rise. And then we tracked occupancy when they're booked per building to find which buildings were performing the best. It'll visualize something like this. One of my students... we did this in Tampa. I made a wish list of all the stuff that was kind of near the water of a certain size and it'll show you just like this what the prices are for whatever date range. If you want to do research for midterm rentals, you make a wish list like this and you then search for any month. It will tell you what the monthly prices for all the wish lists are. If you search for a specific date range and the listing isn't available, it'll put a cross out on that little bubble. So you'll see a series of crossed out listings and then a series of ones with these hearts. and their prices. So if you search for like the 15th of July, you could see if this wishlist set is half empty, mostly empty, like all the way booked, it can help you drive your like demand based decisions without paying for wheelhouse or price slams. Isn't this fucking cool? Right? You can, yeah, that's right. You can make thousands of dollars more per year by stocking your competitors with a wishlist. You can determine if a hot tub is actually worth investing in any market by having a hot tub. hot tub data set and a not hot tub data set and track the revenues for those. You can find out if pickleball courts are actually a fad or if they're making money for real by having pickleball data set and a non-pickleball data set. You can find out if adding that extra bedroom matters. You can find out if having really cool design matters. Anything you can think of, you can make a wish list of these houses have a unicorn and these houses don't, right? Anything you can think of, you can then compare them side by side. You can see what their posted rates are in trends. And also if... If you wanted to see if a certain neighborhood was booked, this is how I discovered Alpharetta, which I think Hanon lives in Alpharetta, right? I took multiple data sets of different cities in Georgia for one of my students, and we did this to see which city was the most booked at the one-week, three-week, and six-week points based on a list of 100 units. And then I found that in Alpharetta, everything, well, we didn't just search Alpharetta, but everything in that area was booking first. So on the whole data set, if we search two months in advance... the Alpharetta stuff was booking before the rest of the stuff. So it had a longer lead time. So then I started doing research in Alpharetta and found out that it was a slapping place to have an Airbnb. Because I was able to see that a certain part of the map was booking before everything else, thanks to a wish list. I use this so many ways. I could give you a two-hour coaching session right now just on the wish list. But I have to move on. I hope that was helpful. Google. Who here has ever opened Google? Don't let me down, guys. Come on. That's better. All right. Yeah, we've all used Google so much, right? Google has hotels, has vacation rentals, and just like wish lists, Google will show you all the price points for all the hotels in a certain area, and they have widgets. You can, like... screen out four or five stars, stuff like this. But even cooler, see if there's a sponsored part on there. People will have an ad spend on Google when they're trying to move their inventory. Look at the prices that are in the sponsored section for any range of dates. The way that you can use Google is when you're trying to decide if your rate should be higher or lower for a special event, like say 4th of July. Like, I don't know if anybody's going to come to our area for 4th of July. Go to hotels and see what they are doing in deviation to the... their normal prices, right? Because if you see hotels are jacked up 3x, that means that everybody agrees that 4th of July should be pretty good this year. But if you see that hotels aren't really deviating, they're the ones with the most data, right? Hotels are the incumbent and they've got data and they share a certain type of consumer with us, right? Which are guests, transients. So if the biggest data set that you can find on Google tells you to raise or lower your prices, you better damn listen, right? This is also super free. Way cool, right? So I like Google a lot. I've only been using it recently, but man, I'll tell you what. If we're trying to find a neighborhood, and we, like, for example, here's another thing you could do. If you find that there's a certain section of a neighborhood that's doing good on Airbnb, and you go over here, and you see that there's no hotels, you can ask yourself, what's going on? This happened in Fishtown, Philadelphia. The reason why all the listings were making so much money on Airbnb is because there were no hotels, because Fishtown was sketchy. They actually have a documentary on Kensington, right? Now, how it's, like, the most drug-infested. part of the country. Cops won't even go there. So Kensington Fishtown is a strip of Philadelphia that no one would have ever built a hotel. But what happened is the population density skyrocketed as Philadelphia became more dense. There was no room to build a hotel because they'd have to buy multiple houses and knock them all down. So hotels can't build in time so when Philadelphia had this hipster neighborhood, Fishtown, Northern Liberties, there were no hotels around so any Airbnb in the area did not have to compete against hotels. So if I find a a market that doesn't have hotels but the Airbnbs are doing good, I'll probably set up some studios. Because studios are hyper-price-efficient properties, but they compete with hotels the most. And in the absence of hotels, I'll do a bunch of cheap properties. I'll just print. I'll print on that. So this is another way to take cross-data from Airbnb and cross-data from Google and jam them together. But on the means of utilization, the goal of using Google for utilization is to know... whether hotels feel confident in their prices so that way you can make pricing decisions that lead to you getting bookings. Who's following me? Yeah? Cool, thanks, guys. I've got a whole 22 minutes left. I've got to slow down. I'll probably have to tell you guys a joke or something. So the HostCo, they're not here, I don't think, but they're cool. And he's awesome, by the way. And this hit me at one point, and I'm going to tell you a few stories about this type of utilization. You can make money... after someone's in your house. Super cool. We sell late checkout, early check-in, super common. I think a lot of people do that. That's probably the easiest thing to start doing. You can also sell snacks, goodie baskets. One of the very first things that I did, and we actually changed this. I'm going to tell you a story of how we changed this. We used to sell movie night boxes where we would buy movies like Mulan or by Dune, like pay-per-views. We'd advertise that we have them in our studio apartments and people would come and stay or one bedrooms. And then we'd have this box. It was. was like full of like um sour patch kids popcorn coca-colas but then we had the white and red cups and the the popcorn boxes so they could have a movie night with their kids and just pop popcorn and make it look like it's a theater they crushed in covid by the way totally crushed in covid but those things were 30 bucks we charged 30 for some popcorn and some candies and some soda but the way that that worked is we said hey you can watch this movie that's normally pay-per-view for 25 bucks or whatever you can watch it for free and then they'd be there to watch the movie and then they're like oh there's this stuff we'll buy that we saved money on the movie, we'll just buy the movie night box. So it generated this weird form of reciprocity. And we had them locked away, like, because we were worried that people would steal the stuff, and that was the mistake that I made. We had less utilization by locking the stuff behind an acrylic lockbox where we gave them the code. You know what's really cool? If you have an honor system with a QR code to your cash app and to your Venmo, and say the movie night box is 25 bucks and it's a basket of stuff, They will send you the 25 bucks. We don't have, we haven't had any issues with theft when we are retailing stuff like that. And once we stopped using the acrylic lock boxes, sales went up, like five, six fold or something like that. Because the communicating with us to get the code, it wasn't worth it. We're about the movie. about to start, right? And so product placement and convenience the ease to purchase is really important. And HostCo, the reason why I haven't even affiliated with these guys yet, I sent them a message this morning, I'm like, hey, can I get an affiliate code real quick? Because I realized I was just putting putting them on here for free because they're that good. I'm not the best influencer. I really don't do affiliate deals like I should. But if you look at these, they have like a network of different auxiliary services that you can pay for. Some of them are massage therapists, some are like firewood, hangover kits, stuff like that. And so once someone is in your home, market to market, you might be able to sell them different things. Like I was just in Italy and people in Italy are trying to sell you like bottles of Limoncello to take home. They're just like straight, take home this like. They have it like gift wrapped in a really cool way. The price tag on it is not what they should charge. They're taking a king's ransom. Because sometimes you're traveling and you're supposed to bring a souvenir for a friend. And you forget to buy the souvenir until you're about to go to the airport. So they've got these like souvenir things that you can just pick up and go. So you don't look like a shitty unthoughtful friend. I have friends with properties in places like, like kind of the Smokies would be a good example. New Mexico is another good example. Like New Mexico has this whole hatch chili thing, right? And they sell these coffee cups that look like super cool. You can sell those types of things in your home. Like, hey, forgot to buy a souvenir? Take this one on the way out for XYZ price. If you're in a souvenir-driven area, that's a super low-hanging fruit. Stuff like that. But docking in with a host co allows you to sell, like, whatever else they provide, right? You could do some of these on your own. There's a guy here that does coaching in Dubai. And we were talking about, like, the spread of, like, revenue versus rent. And it just whacked me in the face when I was talking to him. People in Dubai make very little money per hour. You could literally put a person through... massage therapy school, right? Take them through training, buy a massage therapy bed, buy the oils, pay them six bucks an hour, which is probably super great, maybe eight bucks an hour in Dubai, and flip it and charge $35 an hour for massage. And you in-house your own massage therapy services. So now imagine you have these four bedroom villas in Dubai, right? And there's 16 people and they all want to get massages because it's only 35 bucks an hour. And next thing you know, you have 16 different 90-minute massages that you book off and you make a spread of 25. an hour per. Imagine doing that every reservation. Even if your listing broke even on revenue as a standalone Airbnb, if you can make $100 a day per car by having a driver in a black car because you can wage arbitrage the driver or making $300 a day from massage therapy services or whatnot, I would take $400 a day any day of the week. And I would let my listing lose a little bit of money if my retail was so good, right? So sometimes we will lose money on a day, right? Let's say... your listing is a $3,000 a month mortgage, you would have to collect $100 a night on average. Well, let's say in slow season, you only collect $2,600. Oops. But let's say you can recuperate that with some auxiliary sales. I think that's a really strong play. The main part that I spoke to earlier that I want to circle back to is contribution margin. This concept that you will make a certain amount of money per month on your listing if you run it right. And if you're too concerned about what you make per day, you might turn away a booking because you don't want that much money per day. But at the end of the month, you'll look back and you'll have five empty days in your calendar that you could have got full, right? So a lot of you think that you make all of your best money on your first bookings. Who here has like really big bookings on their calendar and then like the rest of the calendar can get empty? Who's been there? Do you understand that those first few bookings are all 100% expense? Your mortgage, your electricity, your internet. You might go, yeah, my mortgage is $100 per day. But no, you have 30 of those. So if you have a $2,000 reservation, you're still losing a thousand bucks, right? You make your money on these small reservations. Because if you only got the big ones and you got 12 booked days a month on the big ones, you might break even. And then from there you have to drop your price. And if you got 15 more days at a smaller price, that is a hundred percent profit. And I know a lot of you with small properties don't want to let your little property go for 70 or a hundred dollars a night, but that 70 or a hundred dollars a night at the end of the month is your profit instead of getting zero for night. That concept is called contribution margin. I want you to fall in love with contribution margin. It's the way that planes have done it too. If a plane takes off with five seats or a hundred seats, it's taken off anyway, right? They hired the pilot, they paid for the gas, they had to pay whatever for the, to be on the tarmac. They could sell almost no seats and they still have to fly. They are stuck. You could have no bookings and you still have to pay your mortgage. You're stuck. Contribution margin, you make all of your money on the last 5 to 12 days of your calendar. I want you to fall in love with getting 100% booked at all costs because that's where all of your money is. Okay? I have a QR code for you guys to get a list of. all the softwares that I was just talking about, and I've got a couple more in there that I didn't think I'd have time to talk about because I did want to give you guys time for Q&A. So what's the play on large luxury listings with not wanting to drop your price too low? for party risks and things like that. What market? San Diego. You will have one listing at like $1,500, $2,000 a night, and you're going to try like the hell to get that one booked, but then inside of 45 days on all the days that you failed, you will make six different listings per bedroom, and you'll start to rent those out only on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, right? They'll be available by the night only for a few days. With Hyperluxury, I do not like having a private room. rooms bump up to my big reservations so i may not even let wednesdays be available i don't want people checking out on thursday in a private room but sunday monday tuesday i'll rent it out by the room so that way uh because the reason guys is san diego has a lot of traffic for a lot of different group sizes your luxury house can sleep 14 or 16 you'll get a king's ransom on those but last minute inside of 30 days there's not a group of 14 planning a trip inside of 30 days right but there's tons of ones and twos planning hyper last minute trips and they will pay by the room. They won't, like a group of two, like a couple, won't pay $400 a night for your luxury home last minute when they can go get a hotel for $170. But six different couples will pay $125 a night per room. And now your listing can make $600 to $900 a night still in that hyper luxury situation. But a lot of times more realistically for more of your homes, you guys can make $250 to $400 a night for a five-bedroom house on Sunday, Mondays, and Tuesdays where they would have been empty anyway. And the... those don't have to compete with the big, sexy weekend bookings. And because Airbnb allows you to sync those listings together, it's called nesting, you can nest those together. Now Airbnb won't discount the fact that those dates didn't get booked on your main listing. You get a 50% occupancy on the whole home and 50% occupancy on private rooms. Mash them together and Airbnb will act like you've been 100% booked because it controls all of that inventory. So it won't knock you on the algorithm for being half full because they know that you still got full with a different version of a product for the same listing. Bang. That sounds like a tip of a lifetime. That was awesome. Take that to the bank. Hey, Sean. Gabe here again. Quick question. You've been talking, all your slides are all on Airbnb specifically, but you do have your properties. places too, Vrbo, Booking. How do you, one of my issues with like say Price Labs or whatever is or looking at Airbnb is your occupancy is all messed up if it only shows you know let's say 15-20% occupancy. occupancy on Airbnb, but you know you have bookings on Verbo, Expedia, all these other places. How do you kind of reconcile all that? So this may sound like contradictory advice, but I'll try to bring it home so it doesn't sound weird. Like I said for the last guy, Airbnb won't dock you for being only 50% occupied by merging those calendars. Airbnb does track your grand occupancy as part of your algorithmic like measurement, but Airbnb is also less focused on your occupancy. considering they care more about back-end feedback than they used to. Airbnb has always called their algorithm an interest algorithm, and there will always be metrics. They want to see views, they want to see wishlist ads, and stuff like that. But Airbnb is doing what I call right-fitting more. They want to make sure that that first 24 listings are actually the right fit for the consumer, so they care about conversion metrics now more than they've ever cared. And Airbnb knows that some of the best inventory on the market is also on Vrbo, right? And if Airbnb was so... so proud that they wanted to dock you because you got 75% of your bookings on Verbo, they would lose their opportunity to swing the bat the 25% of the time that gets them their glorious fee that they collect, right? So you will be distributed multi-channel. And if you are quality, when you get bookings on Airbnb, Airbnb still has that data set to say, guests love this listing. And they will still go off the data that they have. Yeah, sure. You won't get the same kind of boost as if your listing was a hundred percent on Airbnb, completely full five-star reviews, but Airbnb is not going to spite its. like nose whatever that phrase is about noses and faces i forgot the phrase we have one back here and it's kyle with price labs now sean i just wanted to say thank you very much i think you are one of the sorry i'm back here can you stand please Gotcha, you're behind the light. Yeah, I think you're one of the better revenue management minds that's on these circuits. And I just want to say thank you, regardless of the Wheelhouse Price Labs thing. The stuff that you just presented in this room is fantastic. Thank you, sir. And by the way, I think Price Labs actually added the adjacency thing maybe like two months after Wheelhouse did, so it's not a feature that they don't have. He's too humble to tell you that. Quick question. Do you do both MTR and STR? And if you do, are you always creating kind of duplicate listings and like managing those calendars? Any tips specifically for using a hybrid strategy? Good question, because my advice will have changed over the last year on this. Our listings usually are just one listing, right? And what we'll do is in slow season, we'll go midterm a lot of times to de-risk the portfolio and fill up with midterms. that's a different consumer type than your short-terms. And because Airbnb is doing more right-fitting like I talked about, if you don't have long-term stays on your listing, Airbnb is not showing you first when you have an opportunity for a long-term stay. So it's actually better for you to now, I believe, this is still theoretical because this is too new of a thought, it's now likely better to have a completely different listing with a minimum length of stay, like 20-day or something like that. Airbnb no longer shows you. you in reviews, this is something I want you guys all to go do on a desktop, go look at any listing and look at the reviews, every single review has stayed with kids, stayed with a pet, stayed one night, stayed a few nights, stayed about a week, stayed over a week. They used to say stayed over a month, and I haven't seen that in a long time, I think they just go stayed over a week. So their version of long term I think is a week. So if you want to take advantage of the potential right fitting adjustment for Airbnb, Airbnb is going to look at your base settings and try to make a determination of where they think you are best. And if you have a minimum length of stay that's over seven days, they're going to assume that you are a long-term listing because that's the only option. They will serve you up because their algorithm, kind of like a social media, will serve you up a certain amount of action to see if you're a good fit for what you've claimed. And if it goes well, they're going to continue to push you. So if you want to get monthly listings, you probably should create a new listing with a minimum length of stay that makes sure that you don't get shown in short-term ones, but then also keep your regular short-term listing if you're going for both. If you're not going for both at one point, then you and you snooze the short one, is what I would do. I'm coming to you. Can you speak about the, first of all, thank you for everything you've done. Can you speak about the split, splitting your listing? Can you touch on that? What would you like to know more about specifically? So, to watch it, how to watch it over a period of time. So I'm going to try to, I guess I'm going to try to answer to the best I can. So, the way that I do my split strategy is I've got my main listing available into the future forever, forever, forever, right? Then each private room listing that I make is blocked by default. Calendar dates unavailable by default. Then I let my big listing get its bookings, and any time that I have two weekends booked in a row, within 90 days, I will then open up those dates in my private rooms, but I'll raise those... those rates to something a bit more premium because I'm still competing with a potential midweek stay that I know that I'm not going to get, but it's still possible, right? And so my private rooms will compete only when it's only weekdays available or only when it's within 30 days, right? Because now your big listing has to come down on price. So if you go to Airbnb on the app and go to your calendar and then go to booking settings, which is the second tab and scroll all the way to the bottom, there's going to be a link Airbnb calendars thing on the mobile app. It's then going to ask you which listing is. bigger and which listings are inside. And that's how you link them. You can do it right from the mobile app. Was that good? Good. Okay, cool. Rock on. Thanks a lot, Sean. That was incredible. So one thing about that, I mean, booking by room, what do you do about those shared spaces? Let's say kitchen, living room and all. How do you kind of, you know, have your guests... Work it out. Yeah, so this gets tricky now because Airbnb says that you can't have cameras in your home. A lot of my students are struggling with this piece, and we've come up with a couple different solutions that can work. If you want to risk it, you can say... say that the kitchen is not available as a shared space. You can define what spaces are shared. And as long as someone's not allowed access into the kitchen, technically, you can put a camera in there. A lot of people who already do shared spaces want to have a camera in the kitchen to make sure people are doing their dishes. And you can tell people unofficially, hey, you can use the kitchen, but there's a camera in there because you're not supposed to be there. And if you don't do your dishes, well, no, right? You kind of, you can do it off the books. My most recent solution for guest behavior as far as kitchen stuff goes, because this is usually the biggest problem, is you buy different colored plates and cups, and you keep them in each room. So when somebody utilizes your silverware and your dishes, they only can utilize the ones that are their color for their room. And so if they abandon their stuff and they're not being like a good neighbor, you'll find out by the plate cup color. That's what we do for that. I'm sure that there's more to this, so hold on. Shared spaces, what else can I give you guys with shared spaces? You'll have to clean them almost every day, right? Now this is something that is really hard to teach in a short period of time. I did a day-long boot camp. hiring housekeepers. Very few people actually came to that boot camp because they didn't think that they needed it. But one of the very few people that came started saving $8,000 a month on his housekeeping bill, right? Imagine that, 8,000 more revenue because you're hiring housekeepers. different way. You get off of turnover, BNB or whatever. You stop using these people that are charging you $400 a clean, just egregious money. What you do is you learn to hire like a real company, like a real business. You can then go and recruit people. And one of my favorite YouTube channels for human resources is Armin Trost, like the word frost, but with a T. Armin Trost is a professor out of Europe that teaches human resources. And one of the main things I learned from him was that that there's two types of applicants when you hire people. There's active and passive. An active applicant is one that's dropping off applications. They don't have a job, and usually for a reason, right? Hiring through applications is one of the most gruesome, ugly, expensive things a company can do. Passive applicants is where the money is. So what do you do? You go walk into Dunn Brothers Coffee, or you go walk into Starbucks. They've got really good benefits. They're hard to poach from. But you walk into In-N-Out Burger. You walk into your grocery store. Make note of who's happy at their job. right? And then you go back and see them again later. If they're happy again a second day, you go up to them and say, hey, you've always got a good attitude. Life must be good, huh? How would you like to make more money than you're making now, right? And you say, I own a company here nearby. It's not a job you have experience for, but I care more about your attitude. I'll hire you. I'll train you all the way. I'll give you a raise from your 12 that you're making to 18 an hour. And now this kid who's making 12 bucks flipping burgers is making 18 cleaning for you, right? So if you have houses and you have two cleaners that are that are making 18 an hour, now your $350 housekeeping is now $150. That $200 you saved on that one cleaning can justify the fact that you're going to send them in on a couple days a week to do the internal cleaning through the private rooms. You're still going to have a hyper-small cleaning fee for the private rooms, but it's going to be more expensive to send housekeepers in than usually you collect for a cleaning fee, but you're offsetting that because you save $200 or more per clean on the big jobs. So this is cost balancing. In order to hire housekeepers by the hour, you... you've got to give them enough work, like 20 hours a week. And if you have houses and you give them two housekeepings a week at four hours each, that's not enough for them to stick around, right? But if you do private rooms or have apartments as well, you can give them enough hours to get their loyalty. So if you have houses and you want to hire like housekeepers like I teach, then you want to pick up like a few apartments or start doing a split strategy just to give them more daily stuff. And so those housekeepers will come in every day and they'll spruce up the living room and spruce up the kitchen. And now they have consistent work. And again, like... like I said, just to restate it, you've saved $200 a week per clean on your big job. You can disperse that back through the rest of the week. Time for one more. Hey, Sean. I was curious if you could possibly elaborate a little bit on your method for pricing for adjacency. Rule number one, if you have an adjacent day inside of 90 days, drop it 20%. Probably something like that, right? depending on your average length of stay and how frequently you get weekday bookings, that number will either be more or less aggressive. Who here is in a market where your average length of stay is over four days? It's kind of... rare. In those cases, you're going to drop that thing like 35%. Who here has like a lot of two-day stays? Okay, in that market, you're going to drop it like 12%, right? If you go back and look at your calendars and see that every single Monday has never sold, the moment you have a Monday adjacency, that bitch is half off. Pardon my French. And so you're going to dial this in based on the likelihood that it's going to get booked otherwise. I call that my hit rate. I track my hit percentage on every single day of the week and I price on its hit rate and how low I on average have to go. to reach the number that it sells for. Anytime that I have an unbooked day, I call that my lowest documented attempt, because I attempted to get booked and I failed. So that becomes my LDA, and I reference that as my low watermark for failure. I know I have to go below that, so I more proactively get to that number a little bit quicker. So my friends, just so you know, everything we talked about today, aside from some of your questions here, is level two on my coaching ladder of nerdiness. So I've got a book coming out on pricing strategy that's also level two. It's like a definitive guide for price. and once the book's out you can get it but I just want you to know that the level of stuff we're talking about right here is still not the top of the mountain there's a long way to go to be very good at this business because it is a whole business you should learn human resources. You should learn pricing strategy. You should learn supply chain. If you want to have 100 listings, how your soap gets from point A to B to C to D is going to matter. Loss control, all that stuff. So if you are interested to know what lies deeper than the education I just gave you now, have a talk with me. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

I was going to call it community. because by now I feel like we're much more of a community than we are an event. Who's with me on that?

Yeah. So I wanted to put together something new, which having taught Airbnb short-term rentals for over eight years, it's really kind of hard to come up with a new topic. right?

Yeah. That's where the gray in my beard came from, was actually trying to come up with slides for this thing. So today, I want to talk to you guys about utilization. Utilization isn't typically a word that we would use in short-term rentals.

It's usually something they would use in more of an inventory-driven business that isn't accommodations. I hope to kind of realign the way your brain looks at your properties and how you can maximize your utilization, because utilization is how you're going to make your money. So he actually... Killer intro, by the way.

Thank you so much for that. I don't have to tell you too much of my life story because he did such a great job with that. And yes, I did live in a van for about four months before I started my first successful business.

And I did get into Airbnb by accident. So I was going to actually talk about my childhood. So I'm glad that he queued that up.

My parents were both alcoholics. They struggled with addiction. They were both Marines. Both of them in and out of jail. Not the coolest thing.

This is my house. that I grew up in. It is currently in foreclosure because my mom is losing her house. It's very sad.

I only found out because my brother called me and told me because I'm actually no contact with my mother from the whole child abuse thing. Both my brothers ended up in foster care for child abuse. That's how little of a direction we had in life.

This house is no longer in our family possession. It was worth maybe $80,000 when they bought it. She couldn't keep up with the mortgage.

because of her addiction. It's really sad. But because my brothers and I and my older sister, who was basically our mom, a godsend, we grew up without much. We grew up extremely scrappy and street smart, and we made things work.

We figured it out. I was a musician, and I pushed grocery carts at a grocery store to buy my first guitar that I still own today, and I keep it in a case, and I'll have that thing until the day I die. Knock on wood, right?

And because of that, utilization became a... superpower and utilization is using what you have. Who here has an Airbnb property?

Who here has it 100% full? Yeah, it's hard to do, right? Really hard to do. So over the last eight years of doing short-term rentals and being involved in short-term rentals, not because of real estate, but because I was a sales business guy, I always looked at the inventory as something a little bit different than a real estate person.

person did. And so because of that, my inventory has been over 90% occupied for over eight years and at over 150 properties. 92 to 94% occupancy is our average.

And if we don't get 90% occupancy on a listing one month, we're going, what's wrong? Which means in nine different cities, multiple different markets, we found a way to fill these things up. And I'm going to try to give you guys some of my tricks for utilization to get.

get that done. Utilization isn't a ones and zeros game either. What's really cool about having an Airbnb or short-term rental is you can make a ton of money one night, right?

You can make a little bit of money one night. Only if you absolutely fail will you make zero dollars, right? But even beyond getting a booking, there's ways that you can make money on your property even beyond just their nightly rate. So when we look at utilization as a company, we're looking at a, I guess what we believe to be our best case scenario.

Where can we make the most money? How can we make the most money? And if our plan doesn't work, we've got a plan B, plan C, plan D to try to get that thing full and used multiple different ways.

So, today, I'm going to teach you utilization using a few of my favorite technologies and maybe a few of my favorite concepts. Who's ready? And one thing I'm surprised about with this event is with how intimate this is, I've actually had a chance to meet some of my students who've been part of my program for a while.

If you're part of my coaching program, please stand up. Some of you may be in here. Yeah, there's one. And we've got a new guy, William, who actually just joined the program. Don't worry, you don't have to stand up, William.

I know you're shy. But for those of you who have started your Airbnb business from my free YouTube content, how many of you are here? Stand up. I want to see you guys.

All these people took free content and are making money from free content. And one thing that I find is so hard to do... Congratulations, by the way, guys. You're awesome. One thing that's super hard to do is to take some bullshit that some guy on YouTube says seriously enough to try to change your life, right?

Because here I am... on the other end of a screen, trying to tell you that my life is so cool and I've done something that you should do too. And, you know, imagine if I pushed a Lambo in front of you guys.

That's probably one of the few things I probably haven't done, is push a car in front of you. But that's what we see all day. There's so much white noise on the internet.

And we have... have no absence of information. Everybody's got an angle.

Everybody's got a secret. Everybody's got a system. And Tony Robbins said something like, if you invest money, you're much more likely to do something, right? Because your attention goes where your money goes.

So to build a business off of free content without context, that's amazing. That takes another level of commitment to change your life, right? To sift through dirt online and find stuff that may or may not be done.

valuable to digest information from a stranger like me and then go into your own life without a mentor, without putting money on the line and actually risking that change all alone. That's a lot. And so for those of you who may not have a property yet, I just want you to know there are people here who used literal free content and probably are making seven figures a year now, right?

Really cool. And when I first got started, this industry was just so young, there was nobody online for me to go, I wonder how to do this, right? I started teaching Airbnb 2017 on YouTube, and there was a few creators back then, but back then I wasn't looking for content.

Nobody was talking about it as a thing, so I didn't even think to go to YouTube to look for education. So I think one of my favorite things, which is not in this slide, is probably YouTube for you guys. Because there's not only me, but there's a lot of other creators out there, and you know them, they're here today too. A lot of us, we put our love into our content because we want to pay it forward. A lot of us grew up broke who here grew up broke.

broke. Who here grew up like not filthy rich? I'm sure everybody here grew up not filthy rich, right?

There's no Hiltons here, right? Yeah, okay, cool. And it's because we had less than we have now that I think a lot of us want to give you guys content. So anybody that you've heard, like anybody that you've heard speak today, anybody you've talked to that's given content, give them a follow on Instagram.

Follow them, check them out. Stalk them until you can trust them. If you don't trust them, you can always unfollow them later, right? Like I'll say something probably that will offend you on Instagram one day and you can unfollow me then. But...

Until then, maybe give me a shot, too. The first one is Raboo. Who here has heard of AirDNA? Drash. Absolute trash.

Now, me and AirDNA have a little bit of beef because of a campaign they tried to get us to buy their thing. They wanted me to spend like $70,000 to then also promote their thing. It was really weird. But AirDNA and Mashvisor and all the rooms, all of them stopped giving away free data. They used to give away cool free data that we could use.

to do market research, to inform our pricing strategies, and they took the charts down. AirDNA used to have a chart that looks just like this, that was the revenue projection for every single month for any market. There's other data that they gave, like occupancy percentage projected month over month, and all sorts of other stuff, like how many listings were on Vrbo or Airbnb or both. I used to tell people, go to AirDNA for their free information. We're going to use it in these ways.

Ever since then, everybody shut down all of those goodies except except Rabu has this one chart. And this is monthly revenue projection like over the course of over 12 weeks. I don't believe these numbers.

I'm going to teach you how to use this. I think that says like 7,000 and 3,000 or something on the low side. What I do is I take a chart like this and I will turn this into a fraction. And so let's say the top number was 10,000 and the bottom number was 5,000.

That means that peak season makes... twice as much money as slow season. Does it make sense?

So if you have a property in a market that makes $20,000 in peak season, you could project that your slow season would make $10,000, right? And so if you're doing market research to try to find out how much a property can make, and you find out that a listing made $18,000 one month, you could go to Raboo, look at that chart, and you can then use this 12-month chart to guesstimate what every single month could make by creating a relative swing, percentage-wise, to get a final answer. final annual.

This is one of the main things that I teach my students to do, is we will go into Airbnb and look at a listing, look at their future bookings, look at their reviews, look at their prices, weekdays, weekends, see if they change their prices. We just stock a listing, and we can make a pretty solid guess what money they're going to make over the next 45 days, and then we go back to a chart like this, and we sketch out its annual revenue. When we do this, we are far more accurate than AirDNA can ever be unless AirDNA has direct access to your information, if you have an Airbnb property. Who here knows the three ways that AirDNA collects its information? Have you heard that?

this? I know it's a secret. They don't want to talk about it. So AirDNA will guesstimate. They'll crawl through Airbnb and pull data and they'll look back at listings and pull data again and they'll make assumptions over time over like how much they think listings are making.

when dates disappear. Another one is they have channel manager partners. If you're connected into certain channel managers like Guesty, OwnerRes, some of them give your data to AirDNA.

And that's how they get some of that data. And a lot of you don't know that, that these PMSs will share data inside of your privacy agreement that you signed when you came on. Third, AirDNA has a suite of software stuff that they want you to log into, like their pricing metrics. They're trying to give you pricing suggestions.

They only did that to try to get your listing plugged into AirDNA. to AirDNA so they can see every single reservation that you have. That's how they can give you more accurate data. But the majority of the data that they've collected over the years has been like extrapolated or guesstimated data.

And to have data that you can't be sure about is what we would call unhygienic data, data hygiene. And so I like charts like this because even if they're wrong about like certain listings, this kind of broad market data here, it's too wide for you to make make a mistake on an individual listing, I can take this chart and the very basic relative data that it gives me and I can make some guesstimations on that. But if I'm going to look at an individual listing and try to determine its profitability or its revenue, I will never trust any software ever because they don't know where they got their data.

I would rather call the host and go, hey, can I give you a hundred bucks and can I look at your reservation information? Because I really want to know if you're profitable or not. I'd rather just call a host direct and try to get the res information because that's the only clean data you can get. right from the horse's mouth.

So Rabu, if you want a chart like this, you can use it for market research to extrapolate out what somebody makes all year. But also until we get a free occupancy chart, which is I'm asking, I'm asking a Rabu to make it for us. Until we get that, you can also guess that any month that has low revenue would also have lower occupancy, right? They have a correlation. So when you do pricing strategy for your market, if you have months that are low occupancy.

Those are the months that you need to deviate from your regular pricing strategy to try to get booked before your competitors. That's one of my primary rules of my pricing strategy is in slow season, get booked first. Who here is connected to Price Labs or Wheelhouse or anything?

So I want you all to imagine you're on the same block or in the same city, right? And Price Labs is feeding you all the same information. Let's say there's 30 of you. And in slow season, only 5 of you will get bookings, right? 25 of you won't get booked.

But Price Labs is giving you guys all the same recommendations. They're optimizing all of you against each other. How do you know which five of you are going to get booked, right? At this point, I would deviate from what Price Labs is telling me because I don't want to risk being the one of the 25 that's not booked.

So in those points of low demand, if you can really nail down when there's low occupancy, you'll know how many mouths won't get fed. You can deviate from what Price Labs tells you to do months in advance and get booked first before anybody else wakes up and... and realizes that they're in slow season. So a chart like this, you can use that. Now, Price Labs is going to kill me.

Sorry, Price Labs. I like Wheelhouse. It's one of my favorites.

The reason why, this has a steep learning curve. Wheelhouse is harder to learn, but Wheelhouse is so granular. The one thing that the owner of, or the CEO of Wheelhouse and me have in common is we are both on the spectrum and his ass is on the spectrum.

And if you've ever heard an interview, you can tell that guy is, he's there, but he's sharp. And- And one time I told him about adjacency. Who here knows adjacency from my YouTube channel? Who's heard that phrase before? You guys need to learn your pricing strategy, guys.

I saw no hands. Was that really like one hand? Okay, adjacency is any day next to a reservation.

Who here has a reservation? Right? Who here has had a reservation check out on a Sunday and that Sunday does not get booked? The reason why that didn't get booked is because that day is adjacent and it never shows up in search. Know why?

Because any search for that Sunday has to check in on Sunday. You can't have a Friday, Saturday, Sunday booking because Friday, Saturday is always already booked, right? An adjacency is the hardest date to book on your calendar, right? And when I explained how I changed my prices for adjacency to Wheelhouse, within a month, they had a completely new widget built in to automatically adjust prices for adjacencies.

Because he's like, that was hot. We're going to put that in there. So I like Wheelhouse because they're open-minded to feedback from hosts like us and look for use cases. And so I'll use Wheelhouse to automate things like adjacencies, seasonality.

They give you the ability to choose how much control you want them to have and how much you want to put in your own parameters because everybody knows their own market. If you guys are relying only on a... software like Wheelhouse or Price Labs, you're making a mistake. Because they're meant more to automate the obvious stuff.

But anytime that you have an empty calendar with like three weeks out, if you've got empty inventory within three weeks, just assume that your pricing software failed, and you need to be getting in there. and making some changes yourself. I like Wheelhouse because it automates more things that I do, but Pricelabs probably is easier to work with.

This has a learning curve, but at a high level, I really like Wheelhouse. Who here has ever loaded the Airbnb platform before? Come on, guys. Who here is awake?

We just had lunch, right? I guess I'm going to give you guys that. We just had lunch, right? Okay, cool.

I could tell you who had lunch, you know, some of you, like two of you would raise your hand. All of you have loaded an Airbnb, like, search page before, and all of you know that at the top right of a... listing, there's a heart. Click, click. Super cute, right?

Airbnb changed that feature to also have a shared wish list feature, which I think is going to be really telling. I don't have data for you on it yet, but we're going to use it in cool ways. But I use wish lists to... to stalk my competitors.

Whenever you search on Airbnb, it'll say over 1,000 listings available, and it will push you all the listings it wants to sell you, because it is an algorithm, right? But your listing has very relevant competitors that you're competing against. Some are four-bedroom houses, some are two-bedroom houses, some are studios. Not all of those are your competition, right?

So what I do is when I'm doing market research and when I'm doing pricing sets, I will take all of my relevant competition and I'll put them into a wish list so I can follow them around and see what they're doing. Also if I want to see if a certain type of property performs well on Airbnb I will take as you see at the bottom of the bottom row some of you may not see this because it may not be big enough but there are two wish lists for Venice right now. One is near the beach and one is with a water view.

I took that data set and found that stuff with a water view made 35% more money than stuff that was just near the beach. To have a a photo of the water in that part of the world led on a widespread listings that I use wishlist to do, I could determine how much more money all those listings made compared to the other ones. So I did this for a student in Dubai.

We took a wishlist per building. We hyper zoomed in on Airbnb and found every high rise and made a wishlist per high rise. And then we tracked occupancy when they're booked per building to find which buildings were performing the best. It'll visualize something like this.

One of my students... we did this in Tampa. I made a wish list of all the stuff that was kind of near the water of a certain size and it'll show you just like this what the prices are for whatever date range. If you want to do research for midterm rentals, you make a wish list like this and you then search for any month. It will tell you what the monthly prices for all the wish lists are.

If you search for a specific date range and the listing isn't available, it'll put a cross out on that little bubble. So you'll see a series of crossed out listings and then a series of ones with these hearts. and their prices.

So if you search for like the 15th of July, you could see if this wishlist set is half empty, mostly empty, like all the way booked, it can help you drive your like demand based decisions without paying for wheelhouse or price slams. Isn't this fucking cool? Right? You can, yeah, that's right.

You can make thousands of dollars more per year by stocking your competitors with a wishlist. You can determine if a hot tub is actually worth investing in any market by having a hot tub. hot tub data set and a not hot tub data set and track the revenues for those. You can find out if pickleball courts are actually a fad or if they're making money for real by having pickleball data set and a non-pickleball data set. You can find out if adding that extra bedroom matters.

You can find out if having really cool design matters. Anything you can think of, you can make a wish list of these houses have a unicorn and these houses don't, right? Anything you can think of, you can then compare them side by side.

You can see what their posted rates are in trends. And also if... If you wanted to see if a certain neighborhood was booked, this is how I discovered Alpharetta, which I think Hanon lives in Alpharetta, right?

I took multiple data sets of different cities in Georgia for one of my students, and we did this to see which city was the most booked at the one-week, three-week, and six-week points based on a list of 100 units. And then I found that in Alpharetta, everything, well, we didn't just search Alpharetta, but everything in that area was booking first. So on the whole data set, if we search two months in advance... the Alpharetta stuff was booking before the rest of the stuff. So it had a longer lead time.

So then I started doing research in Alpharetta and found out that it was a slapping place to have an Airbnb. Because I was able to see that a certain part of the map was booking before everything else, thanks to a wish list. I use this so many ways.

I could give you a two-hour coaching session right now just on the wish list. But I have to move on. I hope that was helpful. Google. Who here has ever opened Google?

Don't let me down, guys. Come on. That's better. All right. Yeah, we've all used Google so much, right?

Google has hotels, has vacation rentals, and just like wish lists, Google will show you all the price points for all the hotels in a certain area, and they have widgets. You can, like... screen out four or five stars, stuff like this.

But even cooler, see if there's a sponsored part on there. People will have an ad spend on Google when they're trying to move their inventory. Look at the prices that are in the sponsored section for any range of dates. The way that you can use Google is when you're trying to decide if your rate should be higher or lower for a special event, like say 4th of July. Like, I don't know if anybody's going to come to our area for 4th of July.

Go to hotels and see what they are doing in deviation to the... their normal prices, right? Because if you see hotels are jacked up 3x, that means that everybody agrees that 4th of July should be pretty good this year. But if you see that hotels aren't really deviating, they're the ones with the most data, right?

Hotels are the incumbent and they've got data and they share a certain type of consumer with us, right? Which are guests, transients. So if the biggest data set that you can find on Google tells you to raise or lower your prices, you better damn listen, right? This is also super free.

Way cool, right? So I like Google a lot. I've only been using it recently, but man, I'll tell you what.

If we're trying to find a neighborhood, and we, like, for example, here's another thing you could do. If you find that there's a certain section of a neighborhood that's doing good on Airbnb, and you go over here, and you see that there's no hotels, you can ask yourself, what's going on? This happened in Fishtown, Philadelphia.

The reason why all the listings were making so much money on Airbnb is because there were no hotels, because Fishtown was sketchy. They actually have a documentary on Kensington, right? Now, how it's, like, the most drug-infested.

part of the country. Cops won't even go there. So Kensington Fishtown is a strip of Philadelphia that no one would have ever built a hotel.

But what happened is the population density skyrocketed as Philadelphia became more dense. There was no room to build a hotel because they'd have to buy multiple houses and knock them all down. So hotels can't build in time so when Philadelphia had this hipster neighborhood, Fishtown, Northern Liberties, there were no hotels around so any Airbnb in the area did not have to compete against hotels. So if I find a a market that doesn't have hotels but the Airbnbs are doing good, I'll probably set up some studios.

Because studios are hyper-price-efficient properties, but they compete with hotels the most. And in the absence of hotels, I'll do a bunch of cheap properties. I'll just print.

I'll print on that. So this is another way to take cross-data from Airbnb and cross-data from Google and jam them together. But on the means of utilization, the goal of using Google for utilization is to know...

whether hotels feel confident in their prices so that way you can make pricing decisions that lead to you getting bookings. Who's following me? Yeah? Cool, thanks, guys. I've got a whole 22 minutes left.

I've got to slow down. I'll probably have to tell you guys a joke or something. So the HostCo, they're not here, I don't think, but they're cool. And he's awesome, by the way. And this hit me at one point, and I'm going to tell you a few stories about this type of utilization.

You can make money... after someone's in your house. Super cool. We sell late checkout, early check-in, super common.

I think a lot of people do that. That's probably the easiest thing to start doing. You can also sell snacks, goodie baskets.

One of the very first things that I did, and we actually changed this. I'm going to tell you a story of how we changed this. We used to sell movie night boxes where we would buy movies like Mulan or by Dune, like pay-per-views.

We'd advertise that we have them in our studio apartments and people would come and stay or one bedrooms. And then we'd have this box. It was.

was like full of like um sour patch kids popcorn coca-colas but then we had the white and red cups and the the popcorn boxes so they could have a movie night with their kids and just pop popcorn and make it look like it's a theater they crushed in covid by the way totally crushed in covid but those things were 30 bucks we charged 30 for some popcorn and some candies and some soda but the way that that worked is we said hey you can watch this movie that's normally pay-per-view for 25 bucks or whatever you can watch it for free and then they'd be there to watch the movie and then they're like oh there's this stuff we'll buy that we saved money on the movie, we'll just buy the movie night box. So it generated this weird form of reciprocity. And we had them locked away, like, because we were worried that people would steal the stuff, and that was the mistake that I made.

We had less utilization by locking the stuff behind an acrylic lockbox where we gave them the code. You know what's really cool? If you have an honor system with a QR code to your cash app and to your Venmo, and say the movie night box is 25 bucks and it's a basket of stuff, They will send you the 25 bucks.

We don't have, we haven't had any issues with theft when we are retailing stuff like that. And once we stopped using the acrylic lock boxes, sales went up, like five, six fold or something like that. Because the communicating with us to get the code, it wasn't worth it. We're about the movie. about to start, right?

And so product placement and convenience the ease to purchase is really important. And HostCo, the reason why I haven't even affiliated with these guys yet, I sent them a message this morning, I'm like, hey, can I get an affiliate code real quick? Because I realized I was just putting putting them on here for free because they're that good. I'm not the best influencer. I really don't do affiliate deals like I should.

But if you look at these, they have like a network of different auxiliary services that you can pay for. Some of them are massage therapists, some are like firewood, hangover kits, stuff like that. And so once someone is in your home, market to market, you might be able to sell them different things. Like I was just in Italy and people in Italy are trying to sell you like bottles of Limoncello to take home.

They're just like straight, take home this like. They have it like gift wrapped in a really cool way. The price tag on it is not what they should charge.

They're taking a king's ransom. Because sometimes you're traveling and you're supposed to bring a souvenir for a friend. And you forget to buy the souvenir until you're about to go to the airport. So they've got these like souvenir things that you can just pick up and go. So you don't look like a shitty unthoughtful friend.

I have friends with properties in places like, like kind of the Smokies would be a good example. New Mexico is another good example. Like New Mexico has this whole hatch chili thing, right?

And they sell these coffee cups that look like super cool. You can sell those types of things in your home. Like, hey, forgot to buy a souvenir? Take this one on the way out for XYZ price.

If you're in a souvenir-driven area, that's a super low-hanging fruit. Stuff like that. But docking in with a host co allows you to sell, like, whatever else they provide, right? You could do some of these on your own. There's a guy here that does coaching in Dubai.

And we were talking about, like, the spread of, like, revenue versus rent. And it just whacked me in the face when I was talking to him. People in Dubai make very little money per hour.

You could literally put a person through... massage therapy school, right? Take them through training, buy a massage therapy bed, buy the oils, pay them six bucks an hour, which is probably super great, maybe eight bucks an hour in Dubai, and flip it and charge $35 an hour for massage.

And you in-house your own massage therapy services. So now imagine you have these four bedroom villas in Dubai, right? And there's 16 people and they all want to get massages because it's only 35 bucks an hour.

And next thing you know, you have 16 different 90-minute massages that you book off and you make a spread of 25. an hour per. Imagine doing that every reservation. Even if your listing broke even on revenue as a standalone Airbnb, if you can make $100 a day per car by having a driver in a black car because you can wage arbitrage the driver or making $300 a day from massage therapy services or whatnot, I would take $400 a day any day of the week. And I would let my listing lose a little bit of money if my retail was so good, right? So sometimes we will lose money on a day, right?

Let's say... your listing is a $3,000 a month mortgage, you would have to collect $100 a night on average. Well, let's say in slow season, you only collect $2,600. Oops. But let's say you can recuperate that with some auxiliary sales.

I think that's a really strong play. The main part that I spoke to earlier that I want to circle back to is contribution margin. This concept that you will make a certain amount of money per month on your listing if you run it right.

And if you're too concerned about what you make per day, you might turn away a booking because you don't want that much money per day. But at the end of the month, you'll look back and you'll have five empty days in your calendar that you could have got full, right? So a lot of you think that you make all of your best money on your first bookings. Who here has like really big bookings on their calendar and then like the rest of the calendar can get empty?

Who's been there? Do you understand that those first few bookings are all 100% expense? Your mortgage, your electricity, your internet.

You might go, yeah, my mortgage is $100 per day. But no, you have 30 of those. So if you have a $2,000 reservation, you're still losing a thousand bucks, right? You make your money on these small reservations. Because if you only got the big ones and you got 12 booked days a month on the big ones, you might break even.

And then from there you have to drop your price. And if you got 15 more days at a smaller price, that is a hundred percent profit. And I know a lot of you with small properties don't want to let your little property go for 70 or a hundred dollars a night, but that 70 or a hundred dollars a night at the end of the month is your profit instead of getting zero for night.

That concept is called contribution margin. I want you to fall in love with contribution margin. It's the way that planes have done it too. If a plane takes off with five seats or a hundred seats, it's taken off anyway, right? They hired the pilot, they paid for the gas, they had to pay whatever for the, to be on the tarmac.

They could sell almost no seats and they still have to fly. They are stuck. You could have no bookings and you still have to pay your mortgage.

You're stuck. Contribution margin, you make all of your money on the last 5 to 12 days of your calendar. I want you to fall in love with getting 100% booked at all costs because that's where all of your money is. Okay?

I have a QR code for you guys to get a list of. all the softwares that I was just talking about, and I've got a couple more in there that I didn't think I'd have time to talk about because I did want to give you guys time for Q&A. So what's the play on large luxury listings with not wanting to drop your price too low?

for party risks and things like that. What market? San Diego.

You will have one listing at like $1,500, $2,000 a night, and you're going to try like the hell to get that one booked, but then inside of 45 days on all the days that you failed, you will make six different listings per bedroom, and you'll start to rent those out only on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, right? They'll be available by the night only for a few days. With Hyperluxury, I do not like having a private room. rooms bump up to my big reservations so i may not even let wednesdays be available i don't want people checking out on thursday in a private room but sunday monday tuesday i'll rent it out by the room so that way uh because the reason guys is san diego has a lot of traffic for a lot of different group sizes your luxury house can sleep 14 or 16 you'll get a king's ransom on those but last minute inside of 30 days there's not a group of 14 planning a trip inside of 30 days right but there's tons of ones and twos planning hyper last minute trips and they will pay by the room. They won't, like a group of two, like a couple, won't pay $400 a night for your luxury home last minute when they can go get a hotel for $170.

But six different couples will pay $125 a night per room. And now your listing can make $600 to $900 a night still in that hyper luxury situation. But a lot of times more realistically for more of your homes, you guys can make $250 to $400 a night for a five-bedroom house on Sunday, Mondays, and Tuesdays where they would have been empty anyway. And the... those don't have to compete with the big, sexy weekend bookings.

And because Airbnb allows you to sync those listings together, it's called nesting, you can nest those together. Now Airbnb won't discount the fact that those dates didn't get booked on your main listing. You get a 50% occupancy on the whole home and 50% occupancy on private rooms.

Mash them together and Airbnb will act like you've been 100% booked because it controls all of that inventory. So it won't knock you on the algorithm for being half full because they know that you still got full with a different version of a product for the same listing. Bang. That sounds like a tip of a lifetime.

That was awesome. Take that to the bank. Hey, Sean. Gabe here again.

Quick question. You've been talking, all your slides are all on Airbnb specifically, but you do have your properties. places too, Vrbo, Booking. How do you, one of my issues with like say Price Labs or whatever is or looking at Airbnb is your occupancy is all messed up if it only shows you know let's say 15-20% occupancy. occupancy on Airbnb, but you know you have bookings on Verbo, Expedia, all these other places.

How do you kind of reconcile all that? So this may sound like contradictory advice, but I'll try to bring it home so it doesn't sound weird. Like I said for the last guy, Airbnb won't dock you for being only 50% occupied by merging those calendars. Airbnb does track your grand occupancy as part of your algorithmic like measurement, but Airbnb is also less focused on your occupancy. considering they care more about back-end feedback than they used to.

Airbnb has always called their algorithm an interest algorithm, and there will always be metrics. They want to see views, they want to see wishlist ads, and stuff like that. But Airbnb is doing what I call right-fitting more.

They want to make sure that that first 24 listings are actually the right fit for the consumer, so they care about conversion metrics now more than they've ever cared. And Airbnb knows that some of the best inventory on the market is also on Vrbo, right? And if Airbnb was so...

so proud that they wanted to dock you because you got 75% of your bookings on Verbo, they would lose their opportunity to swing the bat the 25% of the time that gets them their glorious fee that they collect, right? So you will be distributed multi-channel. And if you are quality, when you get bookings on Airbnb, Airbnb still has that data set to say, guests love this listing. And they will still go off the data that they have.

Yeah, sure. You won't get the same kind of boost as if your listing was a hundred percent on Airbnb, completely full five-star reviews, but Airbnb is not going to spite its. like nose whatever that phrase is about noses and faces i forgot the phrase we have one back here and it's kyle with price labs now sean i just wanted to say thank you very much i think you are one of the sorry i'm back here can you stand please Gotcha, you're behind the light.

Yeah, I think you're one of the better revenue management minds that's on these circuits. And I just want to say thank you, regardless of the Wheelhouse Price Labs thing. The stuff that you just presented in this room is fantastic. Thank you, sir. And by the way, I think Price Labs actually added the adjacency thing maybe like two months after Wheelhouse did, so it's not a feature that they don't have.

He's too humble to tell you that. Quick question. Do you do both MTR and STR?

And if you do, are you always creating kind of duplicate listings and like managing those calendars? Any tips specifically for using a hybrid strategy? Good question, because my advice will have changed over the last year on this.

Our listings usually are just one listing, right? And what we'll do is in slow season, we'll go midterm a lot of times to de-risk the portfolio and fill up with midterms. that's a different consumer type than your short-terms. And because Airbnb is doing more right-fitting like I talked about, if you don't have long-term stays on your listing, Airbnb is not showing you first when you have an opportunity for a long-term stay. So it's actually better for you to now, I believe, this is still theoretical because this is too new of a thought, it's now likely better to have a completely different listing with a minimum length of stay, like 20-day or something like that.

Airbnb no longer shows you. you in reviews, this is something I want you guys all to go do on a desktop, go look at any listing and look at the reviews, every single review has stayed with kids, stayed with a pet, stayed one night, stayed a few nights, stayed about a week, stayed over a week. They used to say stayed over a month, and I haven't seen that in a long time, I think they just go stayed over a week.

So their version of long term I think is a week. So if you want to take advantage of the potential right fitting adjustment for Airbnb, Airbnb is going to look at your base settings and try to make a determination of where they think you are best. And if you have a minimum length of stay that's over seven days, they're going to assume that you are a long-term listing because that's the only option. They will serve you up because their algorithm, kind of like a social media, will serve you up a certain amount of action to see if you're a good fit for what you've claimed. And if it goes well, they're going to continue to push you.

So if you want to get monthly listings, you probably should create a new listing with a minimum length of stay that makes sure that you don't get shown in short-term ones, but then also keep your regular short-term listing if you're going for both. If you're not going for both at one point, then you and you snooze the short one, is what I would do. I'm coming to you. Can you speak about the, first of all, thank you for everything you've done.

Can you speak about the split, splitting your listing? Can you touch on that? What would you like to know more about specifically? So, to watch it, how to watch it over a period of time.

So I'm going to try to, I guess I'm going to try to answer to the best I can. So, the way that I do my split strategy is I've got my main listing available into the future forever, forever, forever, right? Then each private room listing that I make is blocked by default. Calendar dates unavailable by default.

Then I let my big listing get its bookings, and any time that I have two weekends booked in a row, within 90 days, I will then open up those dates in my private rooms, but I'll raise those... those rates to something a bit more premium because I'm still competing with a potential midweek stay that I know that I'm not going to get, but it's still possible, right? And so my private rooms will compete only when it's only weekdays available or only when it's within 30 days, right?

Because now your big listing has to come down on price. So if you go to Airbnb on the app and go to your calendar and then go to booking settings, which is the second tab and scroll all the way to the bottom, there's going to be a link Airbnb calendars thing on the mobile app. It's then going to ask you which listing is. bigger and which listings are inside.

And that's how you link them. You can do it right from the mobile app. Was that good?

Good. Okay, cool. Rock on.

Thanks a lot, Sean. That was incredible. So one thing about that, I mean, booking by room, what do you do about those shared spaces? Let's say kitchen, living room and all.

How do you kind of, you know, have your guests... Work it out. Yeah, so this gets tricky now because Airbnb says that you can't have cameras in your home. A lot of my students are struggling with this piece, and we've come up with a couple different solutions that can work. If you want to risk it, you can say...

say that the kitchen is not available as a shared space. You can define what spaces are shared. And as long as someone's not allowed access into the kitchen, technically, you can put a camera in there.

A lot of people who already do shared spaces want to have a camera in the kitchen to make sure people are doing their dishes. And you can tell people unofficially, hey, you can use the kitchen, but there's a camera in there because you're not supposed to be there. And if you don't do your dishes, well, no, right? You kind of, you can do it off the books. My most recent solution for guest behavior as far as kitchen stuff goes, because this is usually the biggest problem, is you buy different colored plates and cups, and you keep them in each room.

So when somebody utilizes your silverware and your dishes, they only can utilize the ones that are their color for their room. And so if they abandon their stuff and they're not being like a good neighbor, you'll find out by the plate cup color. That's what we do for that. I'm sure that there's more to this, so hold on. Shared spaces, what else can I give you guys with shared spaces?

You'll have to clean them almost every day, right? Now this is something that is really hard to teach in a short period of time. I did a day-long boot camp.

hiring housekeepers. Very few people actually came to that boot camp because they didn't think that they needed it. But one of the very few people that came started saving $8,000 a month on his housekeeping bill, right?

Imagine that, 8,000 more revenue because you're hiring housekeepers. different way. You get off of turnover, BNB or whatever. You stop using these people that are charging you $400 a clean, just egregious money.

What you do is you learn to hire like a real company, like a real business. You can then go and recruit people. And one of my favorite YouTube channels for human resources is Armin Trost, like the word frost, but with a T.

Armin Trost is a professor out of Europe that teaches human resources. And one of the main things I learned from him was that that there's two types of applicants when you hire people. There's active and passive. An active applicant is one that's dropping off applications.

They don't have a job, and usually for a reason, right? Hiring through applications is one of the most gruesome, ugly, expensive things a company can do. Passive applicants is where the money is.

So what do you do? You go walk into Dunn Brothers Coffee, or you go walk into Starbucks. They've got really good benefits.

They're hard to poach from. But you walk into In-N-Out Burger. You walk into your grocery store. Make note of who's happy at their job.

right? And then you go back and see them again later. If they're happy again a second day, you go up to them and say, hey, you've always got a good attitude.

Life must be good, huh? How would you like to make more money than you're making now, right? And you say, I own a company here nearby. It's not a job you have experience for, but I care more about your attitude.

I'll hire you. I'll train you all the way. I'll give you a raise from your 12 that you're making to 18 an hour. And now this kid who's making 12 bucks flipping burgers is making 18 cleaning for you, right? So if you have houses and you have two cleaners that are that are making 18 an hour, now your $350 housekeeping is now $150.

That $200 you saved on that one cleaning can justify the fact that you're going to send them in on a couple days a week to do the internal cleaning through the private rooms. You're still going to have a hyper-small cleaning fee for the private rooms, but it's going to be more expensive to send housekeepers in than usually you collect for a cleaning fee, but you're offsetting that because you save $200 or more per clean on the big jobs. So this is cost balancing.

In order to hire housekeepers by the hour, you... you've got to give them enough work, like 20 hours a week. And if you have houses and you give them two housekeepings a week at four hours each, that's not enough for them to stick around, right? But if you do private rooms or have apartments as well, you can give them enough hours to get their loyalty.

So if you have houses and you want to hire like housekeepers like I teach, then you want to pick up like a few apartments or start doing a split strategy just to give them more daily stuff. And so those housekeepers will come in every day and they'll spruce up the living room and spruce up the kitchen. And now they have consistent work. And again, like... like I said, just to restate it, you've saved $200 a week per clean on your big job.

You can disperse that back through the rest of the week. Time for one more. Hey, Sean. I was curious if you could possibly elaborate a little bit on your method for pricing for adjacency.

Rule number one, if you have an adjacent day inside of 90 days, drop it 20%. Probably something like that, right? depending on your average length of stay and how frequently you get weekday bookings, that number will either be more or less aggressive. Who here is in a market where your average length of stay is over four days?

It's kind of... rare. In those cases, you're going to drop that thing like 35%. Who here has like a lot of two-day stays? Okay, in that market, you're going to drop it like 12%, right?

If you go back and look at your calendars and see that every single Monday has never sold, the moment you have a Monday adjacency, that bitch is half off. Pardon my French. And so you're going to dial this in based on the likelihood that it's going to get booked otherwise.

I call that my hit rate. I track my hit percentage on every single day of the week and I price on its hit rate and how low I on average have to go. to reach the number that it sells for. Anytime that I have an unbooked day, I call that my lowest documented attempt, because I attempted to get booked and I failed. So that becomes my LDA, and I reference that as my low watermark for failure.

I know I have to go below that, so I more proactively get to that number a little bit quicker. So my friends, just so you know, everything we talked about today, aside from some of your questions here, is level two on my coaching ladder of nerdiness. So I've got a book coming out on pricing strategy that's also level two.

It's like a definitive guide for price. and once the book's out you can get it but I just want you to know that the level of stuff we're talking about right here is still not the top of the mountain there's a long way to go to be very good at this business because it is a whole business you should learn human resources. You should learn pricing strategy.

You should learn supply chain. If you want to have 100 listings, how your soap gets from point A to B to C to D is going to matter. Loss control, all that stuff.

So if you are interested to know what lies deeper than the education I just gave you now, have a talk with me. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Transcript for:Insights on Short-Term Rental Success

Transcript for:
Insights on Short-Term Rental Success