Increase Your Airbnb Occupancy Rate With These Four Tools | Tim Hubbard

One of the most important metrics for your short term rental or your potential short term rental, I should say, is occupancy. We're going to talk about four and a half places to find that today. Half? That sounds kind of weird, right? Well, let's dig in and I'll explain that. See you on the other side. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. There are so many topics to talk about and I've got a new one for you every week. The reality is we could probably talk a lot more than every week. There really is. There's just so many bits and pieces. But this is, in my opinion, one of the fastest ways to leave the rat race through real estate. A super important metric with our short term rentals, though, however, is occupancy. And if we get a property that doesn't stay occupied, it's not going to work out well. So this week we're talking about where you can go to find that data. So I want to give you four and a half places to find occupancy data. I know the half sounds weird. I'm going to explain that. So the first one you've undoubtedly heard about if you've listened to this podcast for a while, or if you've been in the short term rental world for a while, and that is airdna Co, probably my main go to, or the one I might say I trust the most. But the other ones also have really good data too. And now they're all pulling from the same sources, Right? Essentially, these companies like airdna are scraping the web. So they're pulling data from all the Airbnb listings, VRBO and HomeAway. In Airdna's case, some of them have data from some listing sites that others may not have. So you want to check your specific area to see what data they have. So that's probably the granddaddy. I mean, they give data to cbre, for example, which is the world's biggest real estate company. So I would check them out. Of course, these websites do have a cost, but if you're investing your hard earned money, thousands of dollars, potentially hundreds of thousands or millions, it is worth buying a report to save you all the time and to compile the data a lot easier to make sure you have the best, most clear picture of what your potential occupancy should be. So the next one is Mashvisor, also been around for quite a while. Cool thing with mashvisor is, is that they will give you the long term rental analytics too, which, you know, I always suggest running these properties as long term rentals too. And I think if you find a short term rental that fits that model can be a great short term rental and a great long term rental, then that is a green light and that's very likely going to be a great safe investment. So mashvisor is another good one. Of course they have their costs. A third one you can check. I haven't used this one personally yet, but I have heard a lot about it and I know it's been around for a while. And that is alltherooms.com so another one, same sort of setup, right? They're scraping data from the web from available listings. And now what you want to do with all these sites is compile all the data. If you're looking and you want to, you want to get specific, right? You want to, if you're looking at a four bedroom in a certain city, then you don't want to be looking up occupancy rates for a studio or a single bedroom. Those are going to be or could be quite different, right? So you want to make sure you're comparing apples to apples and ideally you compare them across all these sites to make sure you're not overlooking anything. So the fourth place, and this is one that people maybe aren't as familiar with, but our pricing tools, our dynamic pricing tools like Price Labs Co or Wheelhouse, they have market reports as well to provide you information in a certain zip code. So check those out too. Hopefully if you have a short term rental already, you're already ready using a pricing software. It saves so much time and I guarantee it's doing it better than you could unless you're spending a ton, a ton of time on it. They've got great algorithms in there and they compare their data again, just like the other websites from data that they've scraped from Airbnb and HomeAway and these other listing sites. They need that data in order to be able to price your property effectively. That's what they're doing, right? They're changing your price every day and without comparative market data, they wouldn't be able to do that. So they have this data available. Check with your pricing tool, MineSpriceLabs co. And I know with 100% certainty they have market reports that has good data in there as well. So that's four places you can go check for paid research. Now paid. I think it's definitely worth it. You can do it by zip code. So if you're looking in a neighborhood in a city, you don't have to do it for each individual property. And you may find that this zip code is just not working for you. Maybe the occupancies are just not high enough or maybe there's too much seasonality and there's like six months during the year where no one's renting these things. That's all information you can check on these market reports. Now, what is this half? Four and a half places to go to. The half I would say is Airbnb itself or VRBO or HomeAway or wherever you have. Your listing site is comparing actual properties off the listing sites so you can check calendars in the area and see how well booked they are. You can also see how many reviews of properties had. And if both of those things are have high numbers, so tons of reviews and a big blocked calendar, well then you could probably assume that this property is staying pretty well booked. Now, one thing you're not going to be able to determine on there is how many days the owner is actually blocking that property. If it's a vacation rental, maybe they're staying there themselves and that's the reason for the calendar being blocked. So the data that you might be able to find yourself from Airbnb and the actual listing sites is going to be good. It's going to be helpful and I highly suggest checking it out. It's one more source, but it's not going to be as cut and dry and clear as using some of these software tools that were designed just for that. So ideally you can get reports from all of these different sources and compare them. Take an average. Now, again, you want to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. So if you're looking at a two bedroom pull up two bedrooms, you may find though when you're looking up a two bedroom that let's just say the occupancy around 70%. But you notice there's a lack of three bedrooms in this zip code that you're searching and the occupancies for the last two years have been 90%. Well then maybe you want to change your search around. So the more you check out these reports, the more in tune with the zip code you're going to be and the more opportunity you'll be able to uncover. So we want to check out some other metrics though, right? We need to know, we talked in last week's episode actually about break even points. And so we want to be able to calculate that as well. And we can forecast the occupancy. We're going to multiply that by the average daily rate to see what the annual revenue is. Now that annual revenue, you want to subtract all of your potential expenses. From there, divide that by the number of weeks occupancy and that's going to give you your break even point in terms of weeks. Now, it's probably a little confusing for some of you. Hopefully it made sense. But basically by multiplying our occupancy, the potential occupancy and the average daily rate, we can get a potential total for the year and we'll want to subtract our expenses from that to see what's left over. The more net income we have left over, the better. Right. So we want to compare different types of properties. We want to definitely check seasonality. You might find that a city you thought was a good investment is actually way more seasonal than you thought. And also just one more note, there's a lot of lists being published on best places to buy short term rentals. If they're just using the occupancy, that's not enough. Right after we know the occupancy, we have to compare the purchase prices. Because if the occupancy is super high, but the purchase price is also super high, then it might not be a good investment. So I recommend you choose three zip codes, maybe in three cities, you keep your eye on them and you compare apples to apples. So a three bedroom in one place compared to a three bedroom and another, that's going to help you tune in and decide which one has a little better value. So we can go on and on about metrics. It is really the most important piece before we buy a property. The numbers tell us what to do, but occupancy is one of the most important ones. And those are four and a half places where you can check for occupancy.

Online in just a few minutes. So check them out if you haven't already. And I hope you're doing well out there and you've got your eyes on some properties, you're growing your portfolio. I am excited about the short term rental world. I'm super bullish. These things are not going away, right? I mean, people were just living, we're just living differently. But not all properties are going to make sense. So check out this metric if you guys haven't yet. We'd really appreciate if you'd leave us a review. Helps other people find us. And until next time, have a lovely day and I'll see you in a week. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well, you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules, and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.