How Holiday House Manager Achieved a 22% Revenue Lift with PriceLabs

“We never would have got our highest month, obviously, if we didn’t have PriceLabs in place.”

Nick Malzacher runs Holiday House Manager alongside his family, a boutique property management company that has grown from a single holiday house on Victoria’s surf coast into a 75-property portfolio across Melbourne CBD and its surrounding suburbs.

For a business built on hospitality instincts, the hardest part of scaling wasn’t finding new owners to work with. It was pricing 75 very different properties, every single day, without losing the personal touch that had built the business in the first place.

With PriceLabs, that’s exactly what changed. The team has used the platform’s customization and market data to grow from roughly 10–15 properties to 75, while also turning dynamic pricing into one of their strongest selling points with prospective owners.

A Family Business Built on Hospitality

Holiday House Manager is a family operation. Nick runs it together with Rebecca and Bruno, and the business traces back to his mother’s own holiday home in Anglesea, on Victoria’s surf coast.

From there, the family picked up a neighbor’s property, then another. Eventually, the business pivoted away from the surf coast entirely and moved into Melbourne, where it has spent the past two years building out a portfolio that now spans villas, apartments, houses, and townhouses across the CBD and inner suburbs.

The team doesn’t specialize in any one type of property. Instead, they manage a genuinely mixed portfolio, which makes consistent, accurate pricing across every listing especially important.

Before PriceLabs: Manual Pricing and Missed Demand

In the early days, managing 10–15 properties, the team set every price themselves. That worked, to a point, but it meant they were often blind to what was actually happening in their market.

Major events routinely caught them off guard. On more than one occasion, a convention or event they hadn’t tracked turned into one of their busiest weekends of the year, with no way to have priced for it in advance.

The team tried two other pricing tools before finding PriceLabs. Both fell short of the level of customization the team needed to run a fast-growing, mixed portfolio.

“It still doesn’t have the amount of customization that PriceLabs supports.”

How PriceLabs Helped

Hands-On Onboarding and Customizations

When the team started their free trial, they were paired with a PriceLabs solutions consultant for a 30-minute, one-on-one session. Years later, they still rely on the customizations set up in that first call.

The consultant helped them configure last-minute pricing, dropping rates further as a booking date approaches to fill dates that would otherwise sit empty, and set up rules to fill “orphan nights,” the one- or two-day gaps that open up between longer stays and would otherwise go unbooked.

“Being able to have PriceLabs actually fill in those gaps in the calendar has been really helpful.”

Market Dashboards for Healthy, Data-Backed Rates

The team uses Market Dashboard to track season-on-season performance. That comparison, paired with local market data, helps them set a base rate and a healthy minimum for every property, one that protects margin without leaving the calendar empty.

Revenue Estimator Pro as a Client Acquisition Tool

Beyond day-to-day pricing, the team has turned Revenue Estimator Pro into part of their sales pitch. When onboarding a prospective owner, they use it to show real, area-specific earnings potential, for example, what a one-bedroom in St Kilda or a three-bedroom in Prahran typically earns.

That data-backed estimate, combined with the ability to show how dynamic pricing responds to seasonality, events, and school holidays, has become a differentiator when competing for new management clients.

“It’s a unique selling point to tell them this is accurate to what it is.”

The Results

Since adopting PriceLabs, Holiday House Manager has seen measurable gains across the portfolio:

• Portfolio revenue increased 22% in the first six months on the initial set of properties onboarded to PriceLabs.
• During Melbourne’s Formula One weekend in March, the team was able to earn roughly a 4x return, well above the 2x they had typically applied by hand for major events, making it the business’s highest-earning month to date.
• The portfolio has grown from roughly 10–15 properties to 75 over the past two years.

“It was telling us that we were able to achieve essentially 4x the return... and it just essentially looked at the data of what other houses were getting. It got so much more than we ever thought were possible.”

Advice for Other Operators

Nick’s advice to other property managers considering PriceLabs starts with simply testing it against what they’re earning today.

• Start with the 30-day trial and compare your results against the occupancy the neighborhood data suggests is possible.
• Use the customizations, especially last-minute pricing and orphan night rules, to fill the gaps between longer bookings and lift occupancy across the year.
• Apply far-out pricing customizations so longer stays booked well in advance carry a higher rate, one that eases as the date approaches, encouraging guests to book sooner.
• Set up weekend adjustments so pricing reflects the natural swings in weekday versus weekend demand.

“You’ll find that you’ll have so much of an uplift in occupancy rates throughout the full duration of a year that you’ll see a significant increase in prices.”