How Stacking Small Wins Can Boost Your STR Revenue by 30% or More

What if a series of small smart moves could drive the revenue for your short term rental or your boutique hotel as much as 10, 20 or even 30%? In this episode, we're going to explore stacking wins. How compounding optimizations across key areas of your property, like pricing, like marketing, like guest experience, can have a massive payoff. These compounding effects are of course, more important. The more properties you have, the larger your portfolio grows, the bigger the payoff. So what does stacking wins actually mean? Well, we know if we optimize our pricing that it's a win. We earn more with our property versus our competition. But pricing isn't the only piece, the only component to running our property. There are a lot of components. The first one is all about optimizing your listing. And our team, from all the properties that we manage, we can tell that there's a massive difference from a property that's optimized and one that is not. But what does optimized actually mean? Well, it means that you spent a lot of time and you put a lot of care into taking the photos for your property, but also choosing how they're displayed. Remember, we want to stand out, but we also want to tell a story with our property. If someone's looking to book your property, let's just say it's somewhere on the beach. And yes, they see a lot of other properties with beach photos, but then they open yours up and you've got a bit of a story walking them through exactly why they're going to have an amazing time at that property. Remember, the photos need to talk about this story, but then also our listing description. And we want to of course, make sure that the whole listing is a hundred percent complete. We don't want to leave anything untouched and we want it to all flow together really, really well. Having really high converting titles is especially important. Now, depending on platforms your properties are on, the rules around your title are different, but it's essentially a place to sell your property again. So you want to make sure that you first understand the listing site that it's on, and then you're maximizing the conversion for that specific listing. Remember that you can monitor all of these conversion metrics, right? Any listing platform that you're on has this data available. And so these are things that you actually need to check out. If you're doing all these things properly versus another property in your market, with everything else being equal, then you're very likely able to improve your revenue, maybe between 3 and 10%. Now, of course, these are just averages Data that we've seen across the dozens of markets with our partners. The second piece is multichannel distribution. And again, we see that this can create a really big bump in your revenue. It's really, really important, not just for extra exposure, but for more stability for your property. We know that these listing sites, booking.com or Airbnb, whatever it happens to be, they change their rules, they change their algorithms, they change their policies. And unfortunately, you don't have any control over that. And so if your property's set up a certain way and they change something on your end, it could really lower your visibility. It could have a negative impact on your property. So the more channels you're on, the more stable your property will be. One of the other challenges with focusing specifically on one platform is that that platform becomes the dominant player in all of your reservations. What I mean by that, if you're just on booking.com and all your reservations are coming through there, well, then you get more reviews and you get more exposure on that platform. And so if you try to add in other platforms afterwards, always, always highly suggested, but you might have a more difficult time growing the exposure on that other channel because you're getting booked up first on another platform. And so if that's the case, well, then we need to get in there and we need to play around with channel markups until we're able to build really good exposure on all of these different listing sites and really just truly maximizing our revenue. The third optimization that is crucial is dynamic pricing. We know that our prices should not be the same every day. They should change with demand. They should change with day of the week, they should change with seasonality. They should change based on property type. They should change based on time between the date, right? So if it's last minute, maybe you have some discounts on there. If it's far out, maybe you have a premium. It should change based on your occupancy. Especially for you boutique hotel owners, we want to look at things like portfolio occupancy, for example. The way to fine tune your pricing is by looking at competitor data, right? We have to look at these comp sets. We have to know what our competition's doing, and we have to test our prices. And if we're doing all this right, this one's hard to say, but dynamic pricing can really add a lot to your property. That's number three, dynamic pricing. And if you're out there and you're thinking, yeah, this all sounds great, Tim, but that is a lot to figure out. A Whole bunch of different listing sites, a whole bunch of different policies, a whole bunch of dynamic pricing settings, having to test data and look compset data. Well, we would love to partner with you. This is exactly what we do and it's what we have been doing for over 10 years. We've worked with tens of thousands of guests around the world. We're in multiple countries, we're in dozens of cities. We'll help you take the workload off and we'll help you maximize your revenue. We will stack the wins for you. And we'd love to chat. Our partners regularly see increases from 10 to 30% and we only charge 10%. We are a discounted management model, which means or essentially doing all the work for free. You can head to striches.com there's a partner with us button up there. We'd love to chat with you. The fourth optimization is quite hard to put an actual revenue figure on, but we know that it's imperative for any successful property. And that comes down to our guest experience. If we don't have good guest experiences, in other words, if we don't have good communication, if we don't have quick communication, then that shows up in the form of bad reviews. And bad reviews have a really, really negative impact on your overall revenue. So while for the purposes of this episode, we're allocating just a small percentage, about 5% to this particular area, I would say that this is one of those areas that could actually make or break your property. We have tools now to measure the difference between a property performing at a really high rate and one performing at just an average rate, and the difference in revenue for same size properties, same area, same amenities, all these things can literally be twice as much. And so you've got to make sure that your communication is really good and it's really fast. And that'll not only help you earn better reviews, but it'll help you save any bad reviews if something unexpected came up. Just one bad review undoes all your hard work with as much as 10 to 15 perfect reviews. So make sure that you're available 247 and that you have a really fast response time. This is going to help you win more reservations and it's going to help your review scores. Of course, there's other pieces to this whole guest experience, but one of them is actually just getting the reviews right. And so we know that the more reviews you have, the more, the more likely you are to be visible on these platforms and the more money you'll make. So when you Stack all these things together, they really do have compounding effects on your revenue. Listing optimization, multichannel distribution, dynamic pricing, and an exceptional guest experience. These four things really can be the difference between 10 or 40% or more on your property's revenue. When we break down all the properties in a market, we can break them down into what we call percentiles. So maybe you're operating at the 50th percentile. This would mean you have an average property, everything else being equal. Right. Two bedroom, a one bedroom, a hotel room in this certain area. If you're at the 50th percentile, you're average. Right. And we have our 75th percentile and then we have our 90th percentile. And the reality is, is that most people can jump up these percentiles, but they're leaving some of these optimizations out or they're not checking on them regularly enough. Maybe they set up their listings two years ago and they haven't gone back to update the photos or update the listing description. Maybe there's a period there where they're dropping the ball with guest communication. So these things are all essential, but if you do them all, you have a lot of opportunity to earn more and to jump up in that percentile. And one of the beautiful things about this industry is that the better we do now, the better we set ourselves up for the future. Meaning we have more reviews and we have better reviews, which means any sort of like negative review in the future is going to have less impact. Right? We're still going to have our visibility, it's going to have less impact on our overall score. So we talk about these things all the time. And I know there's a lot of little pieces that go into it, but we haven't really like wrapped it all together. And so that's what stack and wins is. Make sure that you're doing all these things and if you're not, well, then reach out to someone that can help you do that again. We would love to chat with you. You can reach us@coorsley.com and lastly, this stacking wins isn't about some sort of gimmicks or something like that. These are real world things that you can and should be doing with your property. Whether you do it yourself or you bring in help, the results are real. I hope you found some value in that. Just wrapping it all together there. And I hope those numbers encourage you the reality that you can earn literally 40% or more with your same property if you're just adjusting some of these things, and you're paying really close attention to all these optimizations. Stacking wins. It's not about hacks. It's about just getting in there and doing the work and making sure that all of these optimizations are in place and that they're getting checked regularly. Whether you do it yourself or you bring in help, the results are real. You'll get more bookings, you'll have better guest experiences, and you'll set yourself up much stronger and better for the future.