Updated : Oct 30, 2024
In the last edition of our blog series of PriceLabs employees using the PriceLabs platform for their property management and revenue management strategies, we have spoken with a former property manager from Charleston, Rebecca Madigan, aka Becca.
Tips from an expert property manager, Becca
Becca recommends logging into the software once a week to check prices and the property’s performance.
Features Becca swears by:
Seasonal profiles
Custom Seasonal Profiles can help you set up seasonality in your pricing
Market Dashboard
PriceLabs Market Dashboard gives you pacing reports and insights into market trends, including lead times, desired amenities, and what fees and discounts are in place for listings in your area.
Neighborhood Data
Neighborhood Data provides insights that help you understand their average nightly price, compare comp-sets, and more.
Occupancy Based Adjustments
Occupancy Based Adjustment (OBA) is a customization to analyze the horizontal occupancy of your listing and make appropriate rate adjustments.
Portfolio Occupancy-Based Adjustments
If you have groups of listings in the same location or building, you can use Portfolio Occupancy-Based Adjustments to change prices based on their combined occupancy.
Comp sets in Market Dashboards
You can use your comp sets or any of our pre-loaded comp sets to filter the data shown in the rest of the dashboard.
About Rebecca Madigan
Becca is a Solution Consultant Manager at PriceLabs. She provides onboarding and training on how dynamic pricing and revenue management works in PriceLabs and shares insights with larger accounts based primarily in the USA.
Before joining PriceLabs, she was the Director of Vacation Rentals at Dunes Properties of Charleston. She onboarded new clients and managed their properties. She was also the primary point of contact for onboarding PriceLabs into their vacation rental tech stack.
She used the PriceLabs tool for 2 years as a part of the Dunes team before joining the PriceLabs team. Now, she uses the software to finalize vacation rental investment strategies for her 3-bedroom apartment in Charleston.
PriceLabs saved time in pricing in a highly seasonal market
Ilse of Palms is a seasonal, traditional beach market. Becca was responsible for a wide range of properties in her portfolio. The price fluctuations for each of the properties for each season would be vast, and they had to alter prices manually before PriceLabs. This, along with other operational tasks, was tedious.
This is where the PriceLabs’ custom seasonal profiles proved helpful for Becca. She could create seasonal profiles for each market and let PriceLabs work the magic. Becca believes this feature also gave them the control to implement their market knowledge.
She had about 14-16 seasonal profiles set up. Her strategy was setting up maximum and minimum prices and letting PriceLabs work around this restriction.
The owners, who were used to traditional pricing methods, were a little skeptical about a ‘robot’ handling their prices, but custom seasonal profiles helped ease them and let them know they still had control over their pricing. And they didn’t have to manually research and update the prices, saving them a lot of time.
PriceLabs helped increase ADR by 50%
Properties managed by Dunes Properties of Charleston, USA were doing well. A large property by the beach made $25,000 weekly even without dynamic pricing powering them.
However, they did not realize that they were underpricing their properties. One of the properties went from $18,000 to $20,000 after using PriceLabs Dynamic Pricing. Becca says PriceLabs paid off the subscription for nearly 10 years.
During COVID, properties got booked at ‘normal’ or pre-COVID rates, even with a 30% discount.
As a property manager, she used Market Dashboard and KeyData data to create pitches to onboard new clients. She would create financial projections and analyze the listings’ potential.
She intends to host her 3-bedroom apartment in Charleston, USA. She uses PriceLabs Market Dashboard to research her ROI. She says that it is helpful to understand how to manage and handle renovations of her property. She creates a comp-set of similar properties in her locality or market and analyzes the top-performing listings. She analyzes their vacation rental strategy and informs their investment and renovation strategies.
Property managers can utilize PriceLabs’ Market Dashboard and Neighborhood Data to gain valuable insights into the market and property pricing. They can use this data to make informed decisions on where to invest their money and evaluate the effectiveness of their past investments. Property managers can also use this information to support their strategies and demonstrate the properties’ performance to the owners.
PriceLabs reduced the time spent on price review
At Dunes, February was the time for a price review for all their properties. Most of the pricing-related decisions were primarily guesswork. If a property performed well the previous year, they’d increase its price by 15% as their strategy.
They also weren’t proactively changing pricing for their properties. They were reacting to the changes happening in the market.
With PriceLabs, they dynamically updated their pricing as and when there was a change in the market’s demand and seasonality.
How PriceLabs helped Becca
- PriceLabs streamlined its pricing strategy in a seasonal market, saving significant time.
- PriceLabs helped increase ADR by 50%
- PriceLabs helped in data-driven market research
- PriceLabs reduced the time spent on price review
Features that Becca swears by
- Seasonal profiles
- Market Dashboard
- Neighborhood Data
- Occupancy-based adjustments/Portfolio occupancy-based adjustments
- Comp sets in Market Dashboards
PriceLabs Dynamic Pricing leverages real-time data to provide pricing recommendations. Analyzing historical and current booking data, market supply and demand, seasonal and day-of-week trends, special events and holiday predictions, and days left to book a property.
Pricelabs Portfolio Analytics includes a real-time reporting system that tracks your property’s important financial metrics, providing quick insights into its performance. With deeper analysis at the listing level, you can use our data to make informed decisions when setting your pricing strategy.
Want to know more about how PriceLabs can help you in your property rental business? Plan a call with us.
