How Dynamic Pricing Can Boost Your STR Business
Vacation Rental Pricing: The Bottom Line
Almost nothing matters more than price in our world, and the same can be said for the short-term rental market as well. More often than not, potential guests will take price greatly into consideration when making their vacation rental choices, and it’s important as a short-term rental owner to keep up-to-date on the latest changes in the market prices to stay ahead of the competition. That’s where dynamic pricing comes in.
You may have heard of dynamic pricing before, as it is gaining popularity in many sectors of the travel industry and beyond. When you price your short-term rental dynamically, your booking price is always responding to changing market conditions, such as surges in supply and demand or changes in competitor pricing.
Rather than just setting it and forgetting it, dynamic pricing allows you to capture more revenue in a few ways. In this blog, we’ll explain how dynamic pricing can help boost your short-term rental business by giving you the opportunity to maximize revenue and boost occupancy, stay competitive within your market, avoid overbooking, and use technology to your advantage.
Maximize Revenue and Boost Occupancy
Because dynamic pricing is always responding to the ever-evolving short-term rental market, it gives you an advantage over your competitors who may not be using it. With a dynamic pricing strategy, you’ll be able to book more stays, boosting both your occupancy and revenue, because you’re appealing to guests whose main concern is price.
Rather than allowing a vacation rental to go empty for a few nights and lose out on potential profit, dynamic pricing helps owners to fill in the gaps in their calendar by attracting more guests overall. You’ll also be more likely to attract last-minute bookings when you use dynamic pricing. All around, dynamic pricing is a good strategy for improving your short-term rental revenue and occupancy rates, and you could be leaving money on the table by not using it.
Stay Competitive in Your Market
If your vacation rental is located in an area with lots of competition, using dynamic pricing will help you to stay competitive with comparable properties. Not only does dynamic pricing take into account the surges of supply and demand, it also looks into what local and comparable competitors are charging for their nightly rates. With these factors being considered when selecting the best price, your rental is never behind or too far ahead of the competition, and maintaining that balance is much easier when you have dynamic pricing technology on your side.
Staying ahead of the competition is important to ensuring your success as a short-term rental owner, and utilizing a dynamic pricing strategy can aid you in that endeavor. Rather than struggling to do all of the tedious heavy lifting yourself and laboriously researching prices each and every day, there’s a variety of dynamic pricing tools available today that make it much simpler.
Avoid Overbooking
Overbooking is a common problem that happens in high-demand short-term rental markets. It occurs when too many visitors book on a certain date or book too close together to ensure that cleanings and inspections of the property can happen in-between guests. This can either happen due to an error in the calendar’s system or just because there is high demand in certain areas.
Dynamic pricing can help you with responding to this change within the market. With dynamic pricing technology, you are able to set a higher price when you see periods of higher demand, therefore discouraging overbooking and other issues that can lead to guest cancellations and dissatisfaction. When you improve your pricing, you also improve your customer service.
Use Technology to Your Advantage
Dynamic pricing is not something that you can keep up with yourself–you will need some kind of technology in order to be able to analyze such a large amount of information. And more and more in the short-term rental world, having the latest technology has become of the utmost importance in order to stay ahead of the competition. Using a dynamic pricing strategy allows you to utilize that technology to your vacation rental’s advantage, leading to overall larger returns on your investments.
Looking into dynamic pricing technology might be worth your while, or, think about hiring a property management company that already uses this helpful technology. Handling all of the analytics yourself can be a bit of a nightmare, but with a property management company that can help you understand it and use it to your advantage, you’ll be raking in more revenue than ever before.
Technology-Driven Pricing from LocalVR
If the idea of a short-term rental management company using dynamic pricing technology and real-time analytics to price your rental is something that interests you, think about taking a look into Going Local. With LocalVR, not only will you have access to round the clock support and local experts to take care of your vacation rental needs, you’ll also have access to an amazing pricing strategy that will help you boost your revenue and occupancy rates.
To learn more about how our program can help owners like you to price their rental at the perfect market rate rate, every day of the year, take a look at our Program page for more information about what we offer.