Do you have a solid process in place to benchmark vacation rental metrics against your rental market? Are you lacking context for your listings’ performance? How are you stacking up against historic performance and that of your fellow property managers? Without a doubt, the more complex the property management industry becomes, the more critical it is to stay on top of the health of your listings and your overall operation.
Setting new inventory up optimally and maintaining performance in a dynamic market is key to property management success – particularly in short-term lets where maximizing the potential of availability is so key. One way to do that is by benchmarking and tracking vital revenue management performance indicator metrics with the Transparent plug-and-play Benchmark Estimator business intelligence dashboard. So, start benchmarking new opportunities and identifying priorities and areas for improvement across your portfolio – read on for your first steps in:
- What our Benchmark Estimates BI can do for you
- Key achievements & benefits
- Target audience
- What is BI and why is it important
- How Transparent BI works
- How you can get started
What our Benchmark Estimates BI can do for you
Our benchmark estimate analysis is used to provide markers from which you can compare your performance against the market. Start by assessing your own inventory’s function in the short-term rental metrics of occupancy, ADR, booking window, and length of stay. In addition, by ‘plugging in’ your identified competitive sets, you can make comparisons and adjustments in a more refined way. This essentially allows you to compare your individual properties or segments against the market through averages in the aforementioned measurements, and identify listings or segments that aren’t performing optimally, but also the ways in which they are falling short of average, and to prioritize actions to improve.
For instance, your sales team just onboarded a new 3-bedroom house in a specific zip code.
What occupancy should you be aiming for? What average daily rate should you start out with considering that property in that area? Maybe a couple of your existing listings aren’t hitting that occupancy benchmark and could use some last minute discounts? With this dashboard, you will gain insight into how to answer all of these questions and shift your objectives and performance through ideas like a special offer, reducing last-minute rates, etc.
Filters and displays to benchmark vacation rental metrics
The main display showcases the market listing count, market average bedroom count, and average capacity. Additionally are the same metrics, but for your listings. These are accompanied by a set of filters that you can use to narrow down the selection you want to compare. You can filter:
- Active listing
- Platform type
- Zipcode, country, city
- Type, subtype
- Number of bedrooms, bathrooms
- Minimum ADR
- PM domain name
- Date aggregation
- Date filter
- Minimum stay
- Certain amenities
- Conversion rate
Subsequently, you’ll find four graphs that dynamically update based on your filters to display easy visualisations of evolution and disparity in KPI metrics. Each is in charge of showcasing your month-over-month average metric performance in comparison to that of the market.
To sum up, let’s have a quick review of what each of the graphs represents:
- Average occupancy – the average percentage of availability filled in your selection during a specified period
- Average daily rates – the average daily price guests are paying for the specified selection and time period
- Reservation window analysis – the average number of days (or rolling time) in advance that guests book rentals for a specified selection and booking period
- Length of stay – the average number of days guests are booking for in the specified selection and time period
Competitive Set Research & Rate Shop analysis dashboards
Furthermore, Transparent Intelligence has created over 10 other plug-and-play dashboards, including a Competitive Set Research, and Rate Shop analysis dashboard. You can collect values from these two other dashboards, and apply them to the benchmark estimator.
Our Competitive Set Research BI dashboard identifies properties that are your true competition. In sum, the dashboard allows you to identify similar property groups through specific filters and you are provided with a list of Unified IDs. As a result, you can implement the IDs into other dashboards to diversify the insights you discover.
For instance, with one competitive set of Unified IDs that you create with the Competitive Set dashboard, you can plug in those Unified IDs in the Benchmark Estimates dashboard. As a result, you will have consolidated data in front of you for how you compare against those competitors.
Key achievements & benefits– benchmark vacation rental metrics
Benchmarking opens the doors to proactive management and the development of standardized processes that measure performance. What you’ll be able to do with our metrics is:
- Identify performance gaps in order to fix areas for improvement
- Take on a mindset of continuous improvement through tracking and reporting of rental metrics
- Compare your numbers with the market average– higher numbers are a good unique selling point
- Leverage the power of strategizing with historic short-term rental data in your market
- Use your resulting superior performance to win new business
Target audience
Property managers plus anyone responsible for your portfolio set-up and revenue management will specifically benefit from this tool for its valuable metrics which support business decisions based on real-time data.
Benchmarking metrics are a constructive starting point for anyone engaged in managing revenue streams in short-term rental performance. In fact, our tool is for anyone wishing to understand the context of their short-term rental performance better and that of their markets.
What is BI and why is it important?
BI structures your own PMS data and contextualises it with market data from our 45M scanned OTA listings. Chiefly the templates (and bespoke, analyst queries) ask questions of this data lake to answer the main business questions and growth blockers experienced by PMs. Consequently, today’s PMs have the answers to manage their revenue more effectively. Not only this but improve inventory acquisition and retention and make their operations more efficient through data insight – through one actionable platform.
HOW Transparent BI works
In brief, we connect directly with your PMS via API to retrieve and structure the data into an actionable dashboard. In fact our own data is pulled from major OTAs (Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo & TripAdvisor), large PM sites and enriched with anonymised partner data. As a result, we build a data lake and competitive set comparisons for any market worldwide.
Users are then able to plug and play any of our templates to find answers to their most pressing strategic questions – which are my underperforming properties? How do I communicate effectively with my owners? Our data analysts are also on hand to assist you in building custom queries on the data lake to answer further questions you might have.
Benchmark vacation rental metrics: How you can get started
Note that our platform allows for:
- Essential filtering capabilities selecting areas, amenities, subtypes and more
- X-ray of your professional short-term rental metrics at the glance
- Organize your own data with contextual market data and assess investment opportunity
- Vastly customisable presets that can be tailored to your needs
- Gain and retain stock & clients by monitoring & optimizing short-term rental metrics
- Totally exportable information in one click for external analysis
- And more!
Explore the 12 other plug-and-play dashboards Transparent Intelligence has created, including Competitive Set Research, and Rate Shop analysis. Further, if you want to explore the value added to your business and benchmark vacation rental metrics,– you can book a free trial.