Automate Your Pricing with Price Labs: A Detailed Guide to Features and Functions

Everybody should be paying attention to. Obviously, everything that we've covered so far in our 90 days together is something you should all be paying attention to. But this one is really important because this really does drive those P. Ls. It's what keeps the balances happy when you've got a real solid mark on your pricing. And I say this all the time. When I first got into hospitality proper in 2011, there was none of this. We made. We literally made it up on the spot and we left so much revenue on the. On the table when it comes to pricing and how to price your properties. And what I love about Price Labs, and we've got the amazing Aviva from Price Labs today who's going to walk us through a few things, is that number one, user experience is second to none, easy to understand, easy to follow, and plus as well, they can do a lot of the work for you. And we're going to go through the basics and we're going to go for all that. Now, before we get started, I wanted to just get a read of the room. So obviously you can't chat on the Zoom chat because I've turned it off, but in the WhatsApp group, I need you just to get onto that WhatsApp group really quickly because I'm going to ask a question, because the answer that you give depends on which route Aviva takes us on this presentation and just talk that we're going to do today. So the question is simple. Are you currently using dynamic pricing in your business? This. Give me a yes or a no on the WhatsApp group and the majority, the majority will sway us. Now, obviously Aviva can't see what the answers are on this going on my. On my guidance here. Okay, So I see 1, 2, 3 no's, and I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 yeses. Okay, so I'm going to read the room and we're going to say the majority of people at least know what dynamic pricing is and the majority of people are at least using it. And we've got a couple of Price Labs people in the room. So we've got Bert and Renata, which is amazing. If you are a Price Labs, leave us a hashtag Price labs in the WhatsApp chat. And Toby, I don't know, Aviva, if you can see Toby on the Zoom, he's actually wearing a Price Labs cap.

So you either know Danny or David.

Nodding, smiling and nodding. Both.

Nice.

Okay, so without further ado, Aviva, if you could just please, very quickly, just for the room, just explain who you are, how you became to be working at the fantastic Price Labs and how you are nearly Anurag's neighbor for sure.

So I'm Aviva from the solutions consultant team at Price Labs. I joined the team four years ago. So I was one of the people who sat in a tiny room with Anurag and Sana and some other folks here in Chicago. So I've gotten the great experience to watch the product grow and learn about all of the new features as they happen. And like I mentioned, I am in Chicago sort of as Anurag's neighbor. And what the solutions consultant team does is for some of our larger users is we help sort of guide the onboarding experience and then do some account management and then we're the people who show up to a lot of conferences, do presentations like this. So we sort of help people just get familiar and comfortable with Price Labs. So you'll see a lot of us doing the product updates, webinars, market dashboards, portfolio analytics, webinars, the 101, the 201, things like that. So we're basically the like, I guess, educators of Pricelines.

You want to say.

Yeah, well the reason why I wanted Price Labs to come into and obviously, you know, there are many solutions that are out there. The reason why I really wanted Price Labs in is that they were one of the co authors of the book Direct Blueprint. So if you don't, if you haven't read this yet, go and read it. But there's a nice chapter from the Price Labs team all about dynamic pricing, etc. Etc. And we have got, I've just asked for the hashtag price labs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. So we've got a room full of Price Labs peeps. So we're all, we're all friends here. And even if you aren't using Price Labs, that is absolutely cool. You're going to learn some cool things. And obviously we'll go for a few other things as well. So the floor is yours. This, this is literally, you know, 30, 30, 45 minutes, however long you want to go for. Walk us through a few things, give us, if you can give us any updates on what is potentially coming down the line with Price Labs. Anything that you're working on that you can share, anything that the data is pointing to, anything that you can help the group in here. Absolutely. And anything that they can take full advantage of Price Labs slash their dynamic pricing software as well and maybe Finish off with the one big error or the one big thing that you wish the Price Labs hosts did to that with their account, but they aren't doing at the moment. What's the one big mistake you see people making? That sort of thing would be lovely for this sort of zoom call. So with that being said, I'm going to go on mute. I'm going to hand the floor over to your good self and where you go.

Okay, since pretty much everybody's already using some sort of dynamic pricing engine, I won't go over what dynamic pricing is in detail. But essentially if you're you're making any sort of adjustment for seasonality, weekday weekend events and holidays, you're already doing some kind of dynamic pricing. What a service like Price Labs does is we go through and we check local trends, historical data and forward looking information to make changes on your behalf. Right? So we're going to do all of the calendar monitoring, all of the occupancy monitoring for your neighborhood and your property, keep track of events and holidays in your area and use trends that we spot for listings in your like hyper local area and for changes in your listing specifically to adjust rates and minimum stay requirements for your property. Sorry, my cat is biting me. He wants to get up here.

I have just inherited a cat today. I am, oh man, I must admit, I'm not a cat person at all. And I am already dreading the day the cat tries and walks in the in the office here.

So they have no respect for personal boundaries and he is like a 20 pound like giant fluffy beast and will occasionally launch himself at my face.

So.

Make a blooper drill if anything.

So all right, so I'm going to share my screen with you and feel free to stop me if I go too fast or if anybody has any questions. And we'll just do a quick sort of like overview of what Price Labs is and a lot of the features that we have and then I'll go through some sort of like hidden details and things you can use Price Labs for. So when you first log into Price Labs, you'll see a lovely welcome screen. If you haven't added any properties, if you have, this is your dashboard and this sort of gives you an overview of like general performance and well being of each individual listing and how you're managing them. On Price Labs you have listing names like individual listing detail on the left, group assignments and tags here, minimum base and maximum prices here, and then your occupancy information here. Price Labs and the most dynamic pricing services all of your adjustments are usually made on a base price. The minimum and the maximum act simply as stopping points between which your base.

Price is allowed to move.

Lots of different systems gives you options for minimum, base and maximum price adjustments, be it date specific or seasonal. And then here we also give you recommendations to changes. So if we're as we track your listing occupancy and market occupancy, we take note of how your occupancy compares to market occupancy over here on the right. And if we think your base price needs a little bit of adjusting, we will sort of give you a nudge and you can click on this nudge to accept it. If you click Learn more, it takes.

You to our base price help section, which I'll go over in a minute.

These 15, 30 and 90 day occupant numbers are your occupancy percentages compared to market occupancy. So the color sort of denotes how close to or far off from market occupancy you are in that given day range. And these are adjustable based on your lead time. So you can change these. Like if you're in a market with super short lead time right now, which I know a lot of markets are, you can make this maybe 7, 15 and 30, or if you're one of those like special markets that are seeing a heavy snowbird activity already for next winter, you can make these a little bit longer. This information over here on the right is simply about sync times and whether or not the listing is on or off. If you have any issues, you'll always.

See like little notifications over here. So we are going to use this list.

Just to give you an idea of how price labs operates because this is the one. It's relatively new, I haven't fully set it up yet. So you can still see recommended base prices and as opposed to base prices that I've entered. So when you first import your listing, what we'll do is we'll take a look at your prices for the next year from wherever you've imported your listing. So any manual changes you've made, any seasonal adjustments will average out every day's rate, make a slight adjustment for listing occupancy at the time of import and use that as your suggested base price. If you want to confirm it, you can enter the number here, set your minimum and maximum, or you can click our help me choose a base price link which will look at market base prices. So I'm using this, this listing particularly because this is in a super remote area in Wisconsin, where. And there aren't too, too many listings. But it's a great example of how Price Labs worldwide data can be used. Right. We scrape all of our own Data from Airbnb, VRBO and booking.com so we have every single listing around the world. So no matter where you are, you can use Price Labs.

We can find listings close to yours.

So this listing is on a lake.

In the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin. I think it's a really cool little town.

And maybe my listing is like a three bedroom with a den. So I want to get rid of these five bedrooms and maybe, I think.

350 is a little bit high. So let's drop it down a touch. Maybe make it 299 or maybe I'm a new listing and what button is gone?

Well, I would enter 299. Usually there's an accept button at the bottom.

But we'll use this one instead.

And that'll sort of recalculate all of the rates based on this new base price. I know Mark wanted me to kind of save this for the end, but since it's here, one feature I think that people don't use enough on Price Labs is this neighborhood data and hotel data section. So with all of that data that we're gathering from the ot, we sort of make in really heavy markets. We try to get to a group of about 350 listings. We're not going to get there here in Wild Rose, but we gather as many listings as we can going out to think 50km, possibly 35, 50 is.

The market dashboards.

Within one or two bedroom categories. So we're looking for listings that are similar to yours, that are very close to yours to gather pricing and occupancy trends. So, so you can see my starting base price was about $200. That's the price that I had entered in my property management system. This first chart here is your future prices chart. So this shows you every day's rate in the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile for that little comp set that we've created for you with your prices currently on Price labs in the black line and the rates that we last saw on your property management system in the gray dotted line here. So I previously pushed rates with that new base price that I or that estimated base price of 178. I've bumped my base price up to 299 based on the recommendation from Price Labs and you can see how, how like far below the market I was with my previous base price here compared to my current base price here. Not like high up on the market by any means. You can see I fluctuate kind of between the 25th and the 75th percentile based on the date. But you can see how it's kind of underselling myself before with that lower base price. And then below that we have market occupancy information which has been super duper helpful this year to see how this year is comparing to last year and how I'm compared to my neighbors. Looks like Wild Rose is not doing too bad.

We're pacing ahead of last year by a decent amount for the upcoming month.

So the gray solid line is last year as of today for occupancy.

So we can get rid of last year final.

So on July 10th last year Wild.

Rose was.

49% occupied. This year it's 50% occupied. So we're just about even going forward a little bit. Last year as of July 10, July 18 was also 49% occupied. But this year we're 67% occupied. And you can see what last year's final occupancy was as well. So it looks like this August is already pacing well ahead of last year.

For this little section of this concept.

But I think these two charts are probably some of the most underutilized charts as far as like what I see people do day to day on price labs. Like when I do a call with somebody, I'll usually say show me what you do every day just to try and figure out like if we're doing an account management call. How do you use price labs to figure out what we can add to your sort of day to day price labs work where you can either find more information or we can streamline some of your steps or automate some of the changes that you're making. And I think a lot of people will go through and like adjust base prices or set date specific overrides for discounts but without first checking to see what's going on in their neighborhood data and what like not just their listing looks like going forward, but what their comp set looks like going forward. A few other useful tools here we have a minimum stay setting chart which just shows you what your minstays are for the next year and why. So like you can this one just has a flat two day, but if we had different like seasonal or date.

Specific overrides those would show here the.

Overview chart just lists the number of listings by bedroom category and their 25th.

50Th, 75th and 90th percentile rates.

Then the other tool that's super handy is this map. So this shows you where we're pulling in that group of comps. We have a bunch of listings on tiny lakes in Wisconsin. And if I wanted to see a.

Little bit more detail, what some of my competitors are doing, I can hover.

Over any of these bubbles, see what their average rate is for the year, what their mint state is, how many people they sleep, and click on these bubbles to visit the Airbnb listing page, see what they look like, what they offer, what their finishes look like, And.

Then I can come back here and type their name in this little tool.

So I can Add up to 10 listings here.

I'm just going to pick them randomly now.

And then click Get Calendar. And this will show me the next year's worth of rates and occupied days from the Airbnb listing. And we can't switch you over to vrbo. That's by request only, so just send a message to support. We can do that for you. But it looks like we have a bunch of people still using flat pricing.

So I'm the only one using dynamic.

Rates in this area.

Looks like my occupancy is just about even with everybody's.

But I could stand to bump up my rates a little bit more because it looks like there's only one other.

Person who's seeing rates in the 200s.

Everybody else is in that 4 to $500 range. So if I go through to take the time to, like, actually look at the finishes, the amenities, walkability, location on the map, you can build a pretty specific comp set in this section without having to subscribe to the Market Dashboard. Market dashboards are so cool. I think they're a really great tool, but they're not for everybody, right? Not everybody's going to go over the market dashboards and need to build those really specific comp sets. I think they're great for people with, like, multiple listings who need to view compiled data in the portfolio analytics and the neighborhood data. But the Compare Competitor Calendar tool, the Future Prices chart, and the Future Occupancy chart can kind of do the same thing for you. Does anybody have any questions about this.

Feature before I go on?

There are some great questions coming in. It's a great time now to take them. We've done a couple of these zoom calls over the course of 90 days, and I've never had so many questions.

Before, so be prepared.

Okay, so first and foremost, question came in, but you've been answering the questions as they've come in without even knowing it. So well done on that first question really is can I set a percentage difference for the same property on different platforms with price slips, e.g. airbnb to VRBO, etc. Etc.

Yep. We have a feature called the pricing offset. When you're syncing to Airbnb and vrbo, you can. It's best to do that at the.

Account level, which I can jump over to super fast.

So it's here on your customizations page. My account level is super messy because this is a test account. Most people see one to three connections here, not like 12.

So you can see where's my bow here.

I actually have it on my pricing offset. So every verbo connection, like if I map it to my Airbnb listing with the same base price, same minimum, same customizations, everything will calculate the same daily rates, but then we'll add 8%. So you have an option under here in the advanced section can be a percentage based change or a fixed dollar change. So if you just want it to be like a flat $10 per day, you do that.

Or you can do a percentage based.

On what you pay Airbnb and vrbo.

Fantastic. So hopefully everybody got that. And again, if you, if you've missed it, the recording will be up in the group afterwards. This is a great question from Karen. Okay, how can I find out what comparables in my area and similar vacation location in my area and similar vacation locations as minimum nights they're requiring for the holiday time? This year I've had trouble finding comparables for my Mountain View short term rental in Clayton, Georgia with seven bedrooms. How can I trust the recommendations if they are not in the same area or there are a little difference, such as on a lake. Now, great question. Do you need Karen to unmute just to add a bit of context to the question or do you understand the sort of the gist of it?

No, I pretty much get the gist of it. And we can't show you exactly what each listing is required, but we can in a market dashboard show you what the popular stay lengths are for a particular date. So if you're looking at like festivals or, or holidays. See if we look at a summer.

Holiday here, this is a pretty seasonal market. I built a comp, I guess.

Wait, so market dashboards, they're another tool that Price Labs has and it's a different subscription fee, so you don't need to have a subscription to the dynamic pricing to access it. We give you just a crazy amount of Market data and trends in the market dashboards. When you're entering a new area, if you're looking to invest in a new area or you're trying to find comps for a new property, this is a super useful tool. So I'm going to load this comp set just because I've already built it, just two to three bedrooms that are walkable to the ocean. So it's pretty simple. And if I wanted to see what this type of property was booking for for Labor Day, there's a chart that.

You can head to.

And I can do like a full.

Overview on market dashboards too, at some.

Point because there's a lot here. We have like historical trends by month, occupancy, future looking, pricing and occupancy trends, just like you have in the neighborhood data, seasonal information or day of the week information. But here in this length of stay by stay date, we can look for particular holidays or festival days or anything like that. So if we're looking for Labor Day, I can see that the bulk of the reservations we've seen for properties of this type being made for Labor Day weekend are five to six days long, three to four days long. So it's sort of done by color. We're not seeing any one or two days. So let's get rid of those. We don't want to do longer term stays.

Let's get rid of those.

So now it's a little bit cleaner to read. So we've seen eight three to four day stays that include the date of September 3rd. So they could go from the fifth, from the third to the 11th, or like the first to the seventh, however many days, the first to the eighth. And then we've got two that are five to six days and four that are seven to 14 days. It looks like three to four day stays are the most common here.

That's great. That's the market dashboard. So sticking with the market dashboard, Erica has asked other size parameters for the market dashboard, meaning Houston, Texas is a huge market. Is there an area size limit?

There is an area size limit. The biggest market dashboard we offer is 10,000 listings.

Where's this one? I can change Chicago to 10,000. We can see how big we can.

Get.

And then give it five minutes and it'll update itself.

While that's coming in, there's a question from Liam saying, what's the ad pickup option?

Oh, pickup is the percentage of current occupancy that's occurred in whatever time period. So this is 30 days on your neighborhood data. It's going to be seven days. So you can see that July 14th has 79% occupancy. 26.6 of that has occurred in the past 30 days. So this is great for spotting like and a lot of markets we're seeing super short lead time. So if you had back to go.

Back here for a second to the neighborhood data, just to show you the.

Difference between neighborhood data and market dashboards.

Just because it's a different time frame.

So you can see like where the bulk of the reservations that are being made in the next sort of week or 30 days are coming in. So even though we're looking here at the past seven days, it looks like we're seeing a lot of pickup for the weekend after Labor Day, which is.

Cool for this market here.

But we also already have high occupancy.

Like for these August weekends.

So you can kind of spot like where a lot of bookings are coming in.

I think there's a festival this weekend.

Because you can spot the little peak of occupancy or the peak of pickup below the peak of occupancy.

So here's another good question that's come in and this will obviously affect mentally a lot of people. So when you raise your base price, so whether you do the recommended one on price labs or if you do your own manual one, is there a temporary hit on Airbnb that gets you less views or does it not hurt.

You that I don't know. Airbnb I know does consider pricing. They do love to see a discount, but they also look at your 30 day average rate. So I would what if sue, but I don't know for sure. I know when you're using a dynamic pricing engine like this, you should automatically be benefiting from like already reduced pricing. Because the way we, at least the way we do ours is we gradually reduce your prices the closer each day gets to today. Right. We have either our close and discount or our far out premium built in. So no matter where a rate is sitting, unless it's in this, like, no. Even, even if it's at 30 days, right. We're still making really tiny incremental changes to your rates based on lead time. Just the sort of aggressiveness of that lead time based change changes with how.

Close and or far out a date is.

So when you're looking at a day that's 30 days from now, we're making discounts for occupancy. And then when the date gets to be within 15 days from now, we're making discounts for how close in it is. So those automatic discounts should already benefit you. If you raise your base price by like 10% within 48 hours, that average is already going to start to come down a little bit. Right. Because we're now discounting that increased rate.

Okay, fantastic. I think that's all the questions for now. So if you move on to the.

Next part of what you'd like to show us next, let's touch on hotel data because that'll be useful for people who have like rooms and shared spaces, studios, one bedrooms. So we do separate out hotel data from neighborhood data. We show you here the best available rate for the closest hotels. From booking.com There are not too many hotels in Wild Rose, Wisconsin, but it.

Looks like they are not. Maybe have they're fully booked, possibly or.

Closed, which is entirely possible. But you can see them here.

You want to go buy a hotel? The Watamarin.

There we go. Yeah. So they must be just booked for the summer because we've got availability starting in November. But I imagine there's like big hunting activity here and some good winter sports.

So there's a lot of snowshoeing and snowboarding here.

So you can see hotel data here. If you're in a more metropolitan area, you're going to get a bunch of hotels. I think the limit on hotels is like the closest hundred, so you'll see a whole lot. I can show you one of my more urban listings after this to give you an example. But for most people, neighborhood data, super useful. I would love it if more people.

Are familiar with their neighborhood data.

Next, I wanted to talk about customizations. So for the most part, price labs will handle almost any pricing adjustment automatically. These switches are here in case you need to change something. The one thing we don't handle automatically are your stay restrictions. But we do have a lovely wizard that will look at how bookings are being made at that comp set of 300 ish listings and give you recommendations. So short term list or short term bin stays are 1 to 14 days. Midterm is 14 days and longer. You can see what we're recommending here. Add or remove selections as you see fit, change things if you want to.

And then hit apply and customize.

And this will give you sort of like a rolling, more cascading minimum stay requirement rather than that flat two nights I had before. So you can see I start with a farther out two day, bring it down to one day during the week and two days over the weekend within 90 days and then drop it down to a flat 90 days inside of 90 days. And we do that to sort of bulk up your calendar a little bit, fill it in with longer bookings farther out and then use that shorter men's day to fill in the holes as those dates get closer in. And then the orphan gap filler will, will sort of fill in those last minute holes. Moving on to customizations, these are the things where I wish fewer people would turn these switches on unless they really need to. A lot of times what I see is people turn on the switches for the defaults, but then don't touch them. So that's not necessary. If you leave the switches off, we will just handle everything for you. But say my booking window is much longer than 15 days and I want to increase my last minute discount to cover like 45 days because maybe I see a lot of bookings outside of 60 days. So I can add a heavier discount over a longer period of time or even the same discount over a longer period of time to account for that difference in booking window. So we, I mean we test these default settings with a wide range of customers so we find that they work with a wide range of people. But the switches are here in case they don't work for you. Same goes with orphan day prices. This is a discount that's applied to one or two open days between longer bookings for any bookings. But like say you have a five day minimum and you want your orphan day adjustment to apply on.

That'S a dollar value.

You want your orphan day discount to apply on longer gaps, so you do it between one and four nights instead of just one and two nights. So this way the system sort of adjusts based on the need of your property day of the week. Pricing adjustments are market dependent. But like your Tuesdays are always going to be lower price than your Saturdays. This is just here like if you want your Tuesdays to be more lower.

Price than they already are and then.

Occupancy based adjustments, they're on by default for everybody. So even though the switch is off, like I said, it's still working in the background. But what we do is we look at the average occupancy over the day range at the individual property level and make these adjustments based on how your occupancy changes with every sync or save and refresh. So if you have a longer booking window, you can sort of continue this occupancy trend. You can fill out the columns, add additional date ranges, or if you wanted to add on to our default far out premium, you can do something like that or force every listing to hit their minimum price on day zero, which is today in Price Labs you can add a column. It's easiest to do it in Excel honestly where you just download it, add a column with a heavy discount and.

Re upload it instead of retyping everything here.

But you can do some pretty cool things with the occupancy based adjustments profile to automate pricing strategies that aren't currently in place on Price Labs or that you're finding you're doing a lot of things manually.

So I was going to say here's a cool question and it's about base rate and tweaking. So is there a recommended Price Labs? How often should I tweak my base rate thing?

So we give you new base price recommendations every 10 to 14 days based on your rolling, how you're rolling. 30 day occupancy compares to market 30 day occupancy. You don't have to change your base price that frequently. If your base price is working for you, maybe monthly or quarterly. You really don't have to change it that that often on Price Labs because we're already making adjustments for like seasonality and lead time. So don't change it every day because then the system doesn't have the ability to sort of like track what your base price is and how it compares to other things and how it needs to be adjusted. But also don't leave it for two years. Make it make changes to your base price based on what's happening in the market and any changes you've made to your property. But like monthly or quarterly is good. If you wanted to do it every two weeks you could because that's when the system will make its recommendations. But if you're listing is getting like a steady pace of booking and you're hitting your occupancy goals, there's, there's not a.

Like you can change it by like 2% or something.

Yeah.

Does this help where say for example you go for a real good run of bookings and you get real good five star reviews and you sort of come back after 30 days and you know you can come on then and hit hit base, reset etc. And it'll obviously. Does it look at your listing more favorably that what that way if you just had a real good run of bookings etc is sort of looking for as well?

Yeah. So it will do that if you've had a real good run of bookings and then you increase your base price. We also keep in mind where you are in your year. Also, you don't want to increase your base price going into your low season, Things like that. It sort of, yeah, depends. You have to keep in mind how your listing is doing, performance rise and what you're sort of looking to accomplish. You don't always just need to go for adjusting the base price. That is something that I do see a lot is like in response to occupancy issues or like low occupancy listings, people will sometimes just like drastically reduce their base prices. But it could also be a minimum stay thing. Right. Like you could have a five night minimum stay, but what we're seeing in the market is only three day stays. You could go in and see like use a market dashboard to see what's going on in your area before making changes like that.

Yeah. Well, this is, this brings me back nicely to a question that we had where it's if comparing a few other listings in a rural setting, would this cause a race to the rock bottom? Maybe it's a bit pessimistic to ask this question. So how do you sort of like get yourself out of that mindset say, you know, to not have the race to the bottom.

Yeah, that does. That is happening in a few places where we're seeing like low occupancy trends for this year. So a lot of people are just dropping their rates. I would say take a look at how your listing compares to those other listings that are dropping their rates a lot of times like and I actually just did a call with somebody who's kind of in this situation but where like he was seeing pretty good occupancy and he was seeing people in his market drop rates super aggressively. But he was holding out at high rates and seeing steady occupancy above market occupancy. Because you know, his listing was well appointed, he had good reviews, he was a responsive host. So I think keep in mind like not only how your actual physical building compares to, to other listings who are, who are, you know, drastically dropping their prices, but how also you compare as a host. Right. Are these other hosts going to be as responsive as you are? Are they going to like leave a nice basket with snacks and wine when people check in or have nicer linens and towels. And does some of these other listings need to really need a new kitchen or a bathroom? Right. These are all things that can be considered when setting and adjusting your base price because you know these listings better than we do. Right. This is a compute that's like doing things based on percentages and Math, we don't have the heart that you have or the computer doesn't have the heart that you have. You know your market and you know your comps and you know your listing.

Better than anybody else.

It's just like everything at the moment, it gets you 80% of the waiver. You still need to do that 20% of just thinking with your mind. Just thinking. Okay, well, I know, I know this, I know this, etc. This will help you get 80% of the way they're using the extra 20. So with a customer customization questions that's coming, I think it's good to ask this now. Karen asked. She's got a house. Liza, I'm going to mute you. There's a TV on in the background. And as much as I like to hear the news on a, on a Monday evening, I'm muting you.

Right.

Can I split my house into two listings and sync both to price labs? So for example, one listing for seven bedrooms for dates over 30 days and then one listing for four bedrooms where she locks half the house off and last minute bookings under 30 days. Is, is this a possibility for those bigger properties?

Yep, for sure.

Brilliant.

And then you can put them in a group and manage them for events and holidays at the group level and set customizations there so that you're sort of making one change that affects both listings. And then as dates get open or closed from your PMS or your ota, price labs will have already sent the information for those days.

So here's another question then. How much has Airbnb rooms impacted price labs behind the scenes? Is it being a big thing or is it just being. Oh, that's just another thing that Airbnb are doing. How, how has it impacted if any price labs?

Airbnb changes everything so frequently. It hasn't really impacted us too much.

Okay, cool. So it's still same same, it's just different word.

We look at daily calendars. So regardless of how things are classified or organized, it's still got a calendar that we can look at.

Brilliant. And someone has actually just literally asked now a follow on question is, is there a way? Also is there a weight the influence of booking price rather than Airbnb? Does that question make sense? Is there a way the influence of booking price rather than Airbnb?

Is there a weight Mark, you may.

Need to unmute for a second to add a bit of context.

Yeah.

Where is he? If you can.

Yeah.

Hi there.

Sorry, I've just, I've recently joined, so I'm I don't. But I don't think you've covered this. Is there a way to weight the influence of Booking.com over Airbnb? What I find in our area are there's quite a few like amateur hosts who are just doing it for the kind of a little bit of side side income and they are that they're consistently. They're only listed on Airbnb and they. The rates that they're able to charge are usually quite low. Whereas on booking that seems to be more kind of professional led. And you've also got the influence of the bigger hotels that know what they're doing when it comes to revenue and dynamic pricing. Is there a way to. For the influence that from the three big channels from price Labs to have more of a waiting from booking as opposed to Airbnb bringing down your prices.

Not currently on the user side. There is something we can do a little bit on the back end to tweak your rates. If you wanted to be more focused on like hotel data, specifically from booking.com, but for short term rental data. We haven't like given you the ability to do the switch like we have.

Between Airbnb and VRBox.

Yeah.

Because we've got one property is a 12 bed apart hotel and the other one's an eight bed BNB. So it's more of a hotel style.

Yeah, totally. We can do that for your account. You send a message to support and just ask to have your hotel data weighted heavier. Or you can send me an email and I'll work with you and the data team.

That's great.

Thank you very much.

For sure.

Amazing.

Thank you.

Love this.

Okay, so is there anything else you specifically wanted to show? Because I guarantee there's going to be a few more questions to finish off with and I know we've gone 45 minutes and I want to be. What's the word accepted of your time. I know it's not.

Yeah, no, I set aside extra time every time I do a webinar like this. I always set aside extra time. So it's fine. Couple of features that I should touch on the demand factor. Aggressiveness is very handy. It's probably one of the things that I think people should look into if they're setting a lot of date specific overrides for events and holidays. What this does is just sort of like tone up and down our response to demands. So everybody's that recommended by default. I can't give you a percentage change because it's based on whether it's A holiday event, how far out it is, what season it is, all of those things. But you can see we have different sort of response levels. So if I switch it to conservative, you can see how sort of like less spiky my high demand weekends become on my future prices chart. And then another thing I think is very useful that people don't tend to use even if you have like just two or three listings, is our multi calendar. Because if you once you get pretty familiar with price labs and you've got like your day to day system down, moving from the single listing calendar to the multi calendar will save you a bunch of time. So you can see here how like this weekend in particular got far less spiky. My holidays got less spiky. So demand factor aggressiveness is super handy.

And then the multi calendar which is.

Here, this will let you make listing level changes for multiple listings at once. So if you wanted to add a date specific override to two listings, there's a lovely little checkbox that you can tick like here. Add a date specific override, you can save and refresh in bulk sync now. And then anything you can do at the individual listing calendar you can do here.

So here we have your base price.

Help, neighborhood data, hotel data, a link to the individual pricing calendar, date specific overrides.

Super handy tool. That's it for my thing.

So here's two things and this is going to come in a lot. So number one, somebody said I really messed up on my price labs. I don't know what I've been doing. Is there a way I could just reset it all and start again?

Yes, probably the easiest place to figure out, I would just turn everything off and you can do that from the customizations page. So here we list every listing customization and date specific override. So you can go through and just like note where to turn stuff off and where to remove things. So yeah, I would just like go through and edit and turn off all the switches.

And here's another thing, people are looking at this like, wow, this is amazing. This all looks great, but I look at a graph and my eyes just glaze over. Is there any recommended people that you recommend price labs who can just get in and do this for people? Or do you offer a service which is done for you? Like what do you do when people come to. Because I guarantee this is in the price labs chat a lot. Is it? Can I just hire someone to do this for me? Like what's, how do you go down that sort of price labs?

We do have Like a pool of revenue management consultants that we work with. So like based on your portfolio size and your needs, we can recommend a few people. We do also offer trainings on everything. So we do live webinars every day in multiple languages for like Price Labs Basics. So how to set your base price, how to set your min stays, where to find out, where to even set like what your minstay should be going through the neighborhood data. And then once a week we do the advanced settings webinar where we go through all of the customizations, how to figure out if you need to make changes. And then once a month we do our product updates, portfolio analytics and market dashboards webinars where we go through every single detail of those features. And we do them individually because there are a lot of details, right? Like we want to be able to go through everything and have everybody's questions answered. And we do it every month so that we don't miss anybody. And if you miss it, we record it frequently if I remember to hit the record button. And then we post it on YouTube. So even if you do miss the webinar, you can head over to YouTube and like go see the last market dashboard webinar. And then on YouTube we also have like quick tips and tricks like little 60 minute video, 60 second videos. So like quickly how to figure this out or where this is kind of you.

There is a lot of people in the chat saying the customer support with Price Labs is amazing. The training is fantastic. So kudos to team Price Labs for that.

Our support team is like the most.

Magical support team I have to say. Everybody's so fantastic.

Yeah, absolutely brilliant. Right, this is your final chance. Now we've got a few more minutes left. If you have got any questions, please pop it in now.

I can also touch on the portfolio analytics which I never got to.

Let's do that for the last two minutes and if there's a really good question that comes in, I will, I will ask that.

So the portfolio analytics is our like internal reporting feature. When you connect your listing, we'll pull in the past four years of reservation history if your listing has it and then show you historical booking metrics here, the KPIs and historical report section and then forward looking metrics in the pacing chart section. So here like if you wanted to look up what you booked at for the past four Christmases, you can find that here.

And then you'll know what to set.

Your date specific override, minimum price for or if you wanted to see how.

Your lead time has changed from 2019 to today. That information is all here.

This is also another tool that I think a lot of people don't use. So we have your basic KPIs at the top that show you the past 30 day performance compared to the previous 30 days. And then down here we have just.

All sorts of booking information for the past.

I guess we're up to five years.

Now, so we're including 2024.

Nobody wants to let go of 2019 so we just keep adding more.

Then here you like you have your.

Average length of stay and your average booking window.

You can do it weekly to see how it changes as you move through the year.

This chart is also super handy. So if you're managing like if you're co hosting a bunch of properties and you've got one owner who's putting a bunch of blocks on everything, you can come and spot your occupancy versus paid.

Occupancy and then compare to what market occupancy is. And then yell at them for taking up too many weekends.

Or when they yell at you because.

Revenue is low, you can say all the weekends were booked or stolen.

So. And it's all exportable. So you can run a report on one property or a group of property, we'll compile it for you and you can export it. Same with market dashboards.

Nice.

Very nice. Okay, so here's a question. Is there a overall general theory training on dynamic pricing strategies in the back end of Price Labs?

There's not one training we do. We break it up into multiple trainings because it's a lot. Right. We go through setup through the advanced customizations. If you've already set all your listings up. So if you, if you, if people are like established Price Labs users and they have questions about like when to use the seasonal profile or for how to make their date specific overrides into recurring date specific overrides? Join the 201 or I think we changed the name officially to the Advanced.

Settings one, but it's here under Trainings.

Advanced Price Labs features. This is a great one to come to for like if you've already done the basics right, you already know what your base price is and you've got that set, you've got your minimum price set, you've got your holidays pretty much down. But you want to know how to accomplish specific tasks in Price Labs. This is a really good webinar to come to if you want to know about all of the changes that were made in the past month and ask questions about those. The product updates webinar is a really good one to go to.

And Richie is usually there, so he'll answer questions, which is helpful. That was the wrong button.

But we do, we do break things up. If you're having a whole lot of trouble and, like, you're just lost and you don't know where to go, reach out to support. Because we have support 24 hours a day during the week, 24 hours a day during the weekend. But our response times are slightly longer.

Because we don't have quite the staff.

That we do during the week. But during the week our response time.

Is like under two hours.

It's fantastic.

And then our chat is almost instant.

Nice.

Here's a final question from me. With AI and ChatGPT becoming even more prevalent, is there anything coming with Price Labs in the future where you can ask a little bot and it'll be able to tell you what you need instantly? Is that in the plan, in the making, or can you not reveal that as of yet?

We haven't, to my knowledge, created a Price Labs AI bot. We tried at one point with our, like, support system and it couldn't answer the questions correctly. Like, we have an internal one and it constantly suggests the wrong articles, in my opinion. We do use AI on our listing generator. Listing Description Generator, which, if you haven't seen it, is really cool.

If you go to hello, FriendsLabs, and then I think it's under Resources Airbnb Description Generator.

You can plug in your Airbnb URL and just give us, you know, a couple of different things and then we'll generate you a new listing description.

There you go.

And then we have. We just released our new World STR Index. So you can see, without subscribing to market dashboards, what's going on in particular areas.

And you can get that with a no opt in or anything like that.

Yep. Nothing. It's just free on our website, so.

Hello.pricelabs co str, no. What's that?

Str index.

Sorry, it's been a long day.

It's all under Resources.

Resources and World sti. Let's go check that out. All right, that has been amazing. Any more questions, please drop it in the support chat of pricelabs Co have even been fantastic. Any question that we've thrown at you has been absolutely brilliant.

Boss.

Handled so well. Well done. Thank you so much for that. All right, so this is the final. Before we finish, is there any final, final thing that you want to say? Anything. Anything. You can leave us with, or. Or are we all good?

What can I leave you with?

I don't know. We're constantly making changes to Price Labs, so we're going to be releasing a couple of super cool things this fall, which I'm really excited about.

So your calendars are going to change a lot. Little bit, but it'll be for the better.

And, yeah, if there's anything else anybody needs, feel free to reach out to us at Support Price Labs co if our whole team responds from that address, like, literally everybody in the company. So, like, feel free to call me out if you need anything. People do, and even our.

Our co founders still respond to our support address. So we're.

I feel like we're really responsive. Yeah.

Thank you so much for this.