Airbnb added 19% more listings this year. Your calendar is going to feel it.
Airbnb reported its third quarter last week: 113 million nights and experiences booked, with active listings up 19 percent year over year.
Read those two numbers together, because separately they tell you opposite stories. Demand is healthy. Supply is growing faster than demand. That is the whole industry summary for 2023 and it is the thing to plan around.
What "supply grew faster" means on a Tuesday in February
It does not mean your revenue collapses. It means the average listing's occupancy drifts down while the total pie grows, and the difference between a good listing and an average one gets wider.
In a supply-constrained market, a mediocre listing gets booked because there is nothing else. In a supply-rich market, a mediocre listing sits. Nashville has been adding listings steadily for a decade. You are not competing with the market average; you are competing with the eight homes a guest sees on the same screen as yours, on the all-in total those listings show at checkout rather than the nightly rate.
So the question stops being "is my rate right" and becomes "why would someone pick mine."
The three levers that still work
Review velocity. Not just your rating — how recently and how often you get reviewed. A 4.9 with a review from last week outranks a 4.9 with a review from March in most guests' heads and, as far as anyone can tell, in the algorithm's too. The way you get review velocity is bookings, which is circular, which is why the way out of a slow patch is usually a temporary price move rather than a temporary price hold.
Response speed. Every platform weighs it and every guest feels it. A guest asking about early check-in at 9pm on a Thursday is a guest deciding between your place and one other place. Whoever answers first usually wins.
Photo one. The first image is most of the decision. If your hero shot is a bedroom, change it. It should be the room that makes the place feel like a place — usually the main living space with real daylight.
The guest communication piece, honestly
Guest messaging is the part of this business where small operators lose the most ground, and it is not because they are bad at it. It is because it is a 24-hour job and they have another one.
Here is how we handle it. Every home we manage runs an automated message sequence — booking confirmation, pre-arrival with directions and door code timing, a check-in-day message, a mid-stay check, a checkout note, a review request. Those go out on schedule whether I am awake or not, and they answer most of what a guest was about to ask before they ask it.
Behind the automation there are people. Our team covers guest messages around the clock, so a 2am "the code isn't working" gets a human, not a canned reply. Anything that needs a decision — a refund question, a maintenance call, an early-departure request — comes to me.
The reason that structure matters is that automation alone reads as automation, and guests punish it in reviews. Humans alone do not scale and burn out. You need both, and you need the handoff between them to be clean. That structure is most of what we are actually selling.
If you are self-managing, the single highest-return thing you can build this month is that pre-arrival sequence. Write five messages, schedule them, and watch how much your inbound message volume drops.
What I would not do
I would not respond to a growing supply market by cutting your rate as a permanent strategy. Price is the fastest lever and the easiest one to over-use. A rate cut that fills the calendar at a lower average is not a win; it is more work for the same money, with more wear on the house.
I would also not chase every amenity trend. A hot tub is a real revenue driver in some Nashville submarkets and a maintenance liability in others. Do not add one because a YouTube video told you to. Look at what the actual top performers in your specific neighborhood and bedroom count have, and match that, then stop.
Where this goes
More listings, better tools, more professional operators, and guests who have gotten very good at comparison shopping. That is the direction of travel and it does not reverse. The one thing pushing back on it is the cost of money: a 30-year fixed in the sevens slows the investor purchases that create new supply.
The owners who do fine are the ones who treat this like an operating business — the weekly pricing pass, fast turnovers, fast replies, a review average they defend — rather than a passive asset. The ones who struggle are the ones who set it up in 2021, when everything booked, and have not touched it since.
If your occupancy has slipped this year and you cannot tell whether it is your price, your photos, or your response time, I will look at it. Send me the listing link and I will give you a straight read. Get started here.