Eight million listings, and a widening pricing gap
"We use dynamic pricing" is the least informative sentence in this industry. Every manager says it. Most of them mean they installed a tool, connected the calendar, and have not opened it since.
So instead of telling you we do pricing work, here is the actual loop. This is what happens to your home every week.
Why weekly, and why now
Airbnb's Q2 2024 results put the platform at more than 8 million active listings, and called the week of July 4 the highest-revenue week the company has ever had in North America (Airbnb, August 6, 2024).
Read that as an owner, not as a shareholder. Both halves matter. Demand is enormous and still concentrating into a handful of peak windows — and supply keeps growing underneath it, the same shape Airbnb's listing count was already showing a year ago. When supply grows and demand concentrates, the gap between a well-priced home and a badly priced home gets wider every year. The peaks pay more than they used to. The troughs punish you more than they used to.
You cannot capture that with a rate you set in January. I wrote last year about why the interval is a week rather than a day or a month, and a widening gap is the reason that answer has not changed.
The loop
1. Pull the pace report. For each home, how many nights are on the books for the next 30, 60, and 90 days, and how does that compare to the same distance out last year? Pace, not occupancy. Occupancy tells you what already happened. Pace tells you what is about to.
2. Look at the comp set, not the market. "Nashville is at 54% occupancy" is useless for your specific home. What matters is the eight to twelve homes a guest is actually choosing between when they look at yours: same bedroom count, same neighborhood, same parking situation, same general finish level. If four of them dropped their weekend rate this week, your weekend rate is now a decision, whether you make it or not.
3. Find the orphan nights. A Tuesday and Wednesday stuck between two bookings with a three-night minimum on them will not sell. Ever. Those gaps get their minimum dropped to one or two nights and their rate adjusted so somebody actually takes them. This single habit is worth more per year on most calendars than any headline rate change.
4. Check the event board. Games, festivals, conferences, big concert weekends, graduations. Anything with 20,000 people arriving needs a rate that reflects it, and it needs that rate set months before the weekend, not the week of. This is also where minimum stays go up — a three-night minimum over a festival weekend is worth more than three separately priced nights. That is the same logic behind the four separate decisions we made around July 4 week this summer.
5. Set the floor. Every home has a number below which a booking is not worth taking, once you count the cleaning, the supplies, the wear, and the guest quality that comes with a bargain rate. We set that floor per home and per season, and we hold it. Occupancy for its own sake is a vanity metric.
6. Write down what changed. If we moved something, there is a reason, and the reason is recorded. That is how you tell in March whether the thing you did in October worked.
That is the whole loop. It takes ten to twenty minutes per home and it happens every week, roughly fifty times a year, on every home in the portfolio. There is no version of this where a tool does it alone. The tool is a calculator. Somebody still has to decide.
What this looks like on your statement
Owners sometimes ask why they should pay a percentage of nightly revenue for pricing work. Fair question, so here is the honest frame.
The fee lines up the incentives. We take a percentage of what your home actually earns in nightly revenue — 18% for one or two properties, 17% at three or four, 16% at five or six, and the whole schedule sits on one page. Cleaning goes to the cleaner. Maintenance and supplies pass through at what they cost, with nothing added on top. If your revenue goes down, our revenue goes down with it, in the same direction, in the same month. A flat fee does not do that. A fee that quietly grows through add-on charges actively works against it.
I would rather be paid to make your number bigger than be paid regardless.
Three things you can do yourself this week
If you are self-managing and you take nothing else from this post:
Open your calendar for the next 60 days and find every one- and two-night gap. Drop the minimum stay on them right now.
Compare your weekend rate to four comparable homes in your neighborhood. Not the whole city. Four homes a guest would actually choose between.
Put a recurring 20-minute block on your calendar, same day every week, to do it again.
Number three is the hard one, and it is the only one that compounds.
If you would rather not spend fifty Mondays a year on it, that is exactly the job we do. Get a revenue estimate from Boost Rentals and I will show you what your comp set is doing right now and where your current rates sit inside it. Whether or not you hire me, you will know more than you did this morning.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals