The BEST Pricing Tool for Airbnb (2024)

(00:00) what’s up guys in today’s video I’m going to be showing you what is in my opinion the best pricing tool in 2024 for dynamically adjusting the prices on your short-term rental property I’m going to show you behind the scenes of how I like to set things up and show you through some of the coolest features that I really love using of this pricing tool so if you’re looking for a really really great pricing tool for dynamically adjusting the pric on your short to rental property and something
(00:25) that integrates with whether it’s Airbnb vbo booking.com so you can really optimize your pricing strategy then look no further this video we’re going to be diving into price Labs my favorite one out there now there’s a few major pricing tools out there be it price Labs wheelhouse Beyond pricing and I personally use price labs and like them the best for a variety of different reasons um mainly what it boils down to for me is that I just find price Labs actually has the the settings and featur features and functionality to allow me
(01:02) to get the best possible results now a quick disclaimer on pricing tools a lot of them Market themselves as being a set it and forget it pricing solution where you can basically just sync this thing up to your short-term rental property and suddenly it’s going to optimize everything without any of your input and now your pricing is going to be optimized and it my experience is far from that I haven’t seen anyone actually be able to do that with any pricing tool effectively and actually optimize their
(01:27) pricing now if you are currently just setting and forgetting your pricing then maybe using a pricing tool will be better than that but just because using a tool is better than doing absolutely nothing doesn’t mean that that’s actually the best way to optimize it in order to optimize your pricing using one of these tools you need to know how to actually use it and manipulate the the software and add the right settings in so that it can truly bring in the highest revenue possible for you and so the reason that I like price Labs so
(01:56) much is because it gives you so much ability to make adjustments that logically makes sense in order to really you know optimize your pricing strategy overall and do it in a logical and intuitive way that actually leads to better performance and better results so with all that being said let’s Jump Right In And I want to show you behind the scenes of price labs and what I personally really like about it now for one thing I’m in one single listing right now but you can M you can integrate multiple different listings
(02:22) and have multiple listings on your account um and you can have account level or property level settings which is really really handy for anyone that has a portfolio properties whether it’s properties that you manage or properties that you own um if they’re in the same area and they’re similar properties then you’re probably going to want want to have a pretty similar pricing strategy for the different properties at least at a high level so it makes it very efficient that you can set account level
(02:47) uh settings as opposed to just property level settings so I like that quite a bit so for example things like seasonality you can adjust that on a on a portfolio level rather than on a property level because if your properties are on the the same area then the seasonality is going to be relatively s the same or similar um and then this is basically going to bring us into there’s a couple cool features I want to show you guys inside of price Labs now the main setting that I think is super super important to get right in
(03:15) any pricing tool especially price Labs is your base price because basically what a pricing tool does I’ll back up here in case any of you guys are like what the heck is a pricing tool basically what it does is it dynamically updates your pricing and your uh and your nightly rates dep ending on a whole bunch of different factors like inflow of Tourism outflow of Tourism like demand in the area um things like seasonal fluctuations uh demand for different days of the week events that might be happening uh Hotel occupancy
(03:42) rat sometimes even there’s all these different factors that you can take into account and it dynamically updates your pricing meaning that it updates it as frequently as every few hours or you know every few days depending on how you have it set up basically the base price is going to give your pricing tool the more qualitative data that it needs to know what base price to adjust up or down off of based on these different factors essentially if you have a 4bedroom two-b property then this pricing tool knows how to price a
(04:12) four-bedroom two-b property but it doesn’t necessarily know how to price your four bedroom two B property compared to others because the tool itself the software can’t take into account any of the qualitative features about your property like how nice it is how well designed it is uh the you know the square footage of it compared to other similar properties that kind of stuff so the base price basically gives your little bit of input on what nightly rate you should adjust up or down off of how the tool do uh you also can set a
(04:39) minimum and a maximum I recommend just setting a minimum and just letting the tool go as high as it wants for pricing um the base price is by far going to be the most important price now what I think is really really cool about price Labs is that it’s very easy to tell how well you’re doing um it’s very easy to know where the property is actually being priced at relative to other properties in the area so you can really accurately set your uh your pricing so what I like doing is coming into the neighborhood data here and you can see
(05:10) here that basically you get different graphs that show you the 25th to 50th percentile of the market the 50th to 75th percentile of the market and the 75th to 90th percentile of the market and that tells you where you’re priced relative to the rest of the market and so what I find really cool is that when you adjust your base price you’ll notice that you’ll come either up or down depending on you do with your base price and see where you fall relative to the rest of the market now you can see that
(05:35) for me right now at this current period here where we’re in like low season I’m actually priced down below the 25th to 50th percentile of the market meaning I’m priced more competitively I’m priced lower than most other properties in the area and that’s actually by Design that’s actually very intentional what I found is that in this particular Market that this property is located in the majority of the other property owners in that area in the winter time they just kind of set their pricing high and then forget about
(06:04) it they don’t really do a good job of optimizing I can tell you for sure that no one is actually booking or very few people are actually booking properties at the $600 to $800 a night range on weekdays in the middle of the winter maybe a really luxury high-end property which this one is not but very few properties are actually getting booked for that and so what I really want to be doing is pricing myself below the rest of the market because the rest of the market right now is priced artificially high you can see for example that a lot
(06:34) of the data here is showing a consistent you know pricing right through low season even into High season so you can see that these are basically lazy hosts that leave their pricing at High season pricing all year long and don’t actually have a dynamically updated pricing schedule and so I want to be priced lower than them in the in the low season because they’re not actually getting booked they’re just setting their their prices overly optimistically and not getting bookings but then in the uh in
(07:00) the High season when places are actually getting booked I want to be up towards the higher end of the pricing so you can see especially on some of these big event weekends and things I’m booked or I’m I’m priced up into the 90th percentile so you can see that’s really helpful just to know exactly where you land I find it’s kind of ambiguous and kind of vague to be able to actually see that with other tools so I really really like uh like being able to see that you can see also just occupancy trends for
(07:23) uh for the market coming up into future Seasons so you can gauge how well or poorly you’re doing relative to the rest of the market and adjust your strategy based on that um you can also set up a specific comp set so what’s really cool about that is that you can actually set up and look at specific other comparable properties that you’ve found in the market that are comparable to yours and see exactly what they’re priced at for different nights of the year and you can see whether they’re actually booked or
(07:49) not so I find that super super helpful because you can basically uh I believe it’s write down here you go and you can set up a competitor calendar so for example if I want to select this other listing then I can now see a table that shows all these other listings in it um it’s going to automatically uh create that for me and then I can actually pull up the listing see if it’s actually comparable to mine and I Can See For example that it’s priced at $500 solid right through here but it’s not actually
(08:15) getting booked at that I can see that where they priced at 461 or 492 or 481 they actually got booked and so it’s really cool because you can then see not only what your competitors are priced at but what they’re actually getting booked at and when they’re just sitting vacant because a lot of the time I see hosts that are trying to price competitively uh or comparably to the other host in the market but the problem is it’s kind of the blind leading the blind because you’re looking at properties that aren’t
(08:40) actually getting booked and you’re trying to price yourself the same way that these other properties that aren’t getting booked and so what’s really cool here is you can see the properties that are actually getting booked and see what they’re actually getting booked for and then make sure that you’re in line with that so I find that really really helpful to be able to just gauge how well I I I’m priced relative to the competition and the cool thing is is again you can Custom Tailor this list to
(09:01) be very very similar properties to yours in a similar area so that you know you’re you’re really pricing and comparing Apple’s apples with real similar properties that’s a really really cool feature that I personally really like hey guys if you are an existing or aspiring Airbnb host investor or co-host who’s looking to level up your game and take your hosting to the next level make a whole lot more money on Airbnb and frankly just have a whole lot more fun then we’ve got something brand new for you that you’re
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(10:21) it is going to be incredibly worth while you are not going to want to miss this so again just check out the link in the description down below it’s going to be right at the top there make sure you join the wait list and I’ll see you in there um and then yeah another big favorite featur is is future prices tool here I really like that you can also look at hotel data and you can include different other hotels and see what they’re priced at and compare yourself to those so I think that’s cool for me
(10:44) personally with this listing this is a larger listing uh that’s a five-bedroom property so it’s not really good comparable to uh to a hotel but I can see where if you did have a uh a more Hotel equivalent property a smaller property it would actually really really cool and really useful to be able to do that hotel data comparable as well so that’s some kind of the visibility now in here in the calendar tab it’s pretty simple uh what’s really nice is you can see the amount of demand whether it’s
(11:11) low demand normal demand good high demand for these different nights of the year um and then you can see what you’re priced at you can see what your minimum night stay is and then you can also just look at the actual calculations that are going into your price you can actually see what’s happening here so for example you can see that I’ve got my base price of 365 and then the market factors because of seasonality because we’re in low season uh price Labs is dropping it down 24% there’s a low demand for that
(11:37) specific night so there’s another 5% uh decrease there and then uh you can also see that the price customizations that I’ve added have added another 29% last minute discount because we’re very close to this state I’m going to show you how to do that in a minute in the different ways that I use that tool um occupancy based adjustment is another 5% decrease and that’s what gets us to the 178 that were uh that were listed that uh but you can see that there’s a uh a seasonal minimum uh minimum price on that night
(12:05) of 180 where I don’t want to actually list it for any lower than 180 so it keeps it at the final price of 180 so and you can see I’ll show you as well the reason that it’s a 180 minimum price for this season is because I have different minimums for different seasons of the year so that’s really cool as well is that obviously in seasonal markets you want to have a slightly different pricing strategy like I told you in uh in the neighborhood data here uh I want to be priced lower than most of the market market during low season
(12:30) but in High season I want to be priced at the upper tier of the market and so uh price LA just allows me to do that really really easily with something that they call um uh seasonal profiles custom seasonal profiles so you can see that this is basically what we’ve gone over so far is just kind of some of the outof the-box functionality of price Labs U without any customizations now you can see along the Le hand side here I’ve set up a whole bunch of different customizations and what you’re going to
(12:54) want to do as far as customization is going to depend on the property on your overall goals on your pricing strategy but you can see here that I made quite a few so one of the biggest things I’ve done is I’ve gone into more customization and I’ve gone to seasonal profiles so you can set up a a custom seasonal profile and you can see that for low season I’ve got a I’ve got a different um a different minimum price and a different base price um and this is all set up at the account level so
(13:19) you could see even further in here I’ve actually set up different base prices for the different uh different seasons of the year so that that way my property is priced like I said higher in the high seon season and lower end on the low season so that is really really cool and helpful now another thing that you can do so if we kind of go through here there’s minimum stay settings that you can apply um and so you can see I’ve got a minimum stay profile for High season which is different from low season and
(13:45) what’s really cool about this is that you can Auto you can basically automatically determine and and adjust and change what your minimum stay requirement is for your property and you can have that fluctuate depending on different factors so I always like to remind people once you get really good at pricing strategy you start to realize that there’s a few different factors that influence your uh your overall book ability of your property price is the one main lever that you can pull but if you want to really optimize your Revenue
(14:14) you have to learn how to pull on other levers other than just pricing because if you’re constantly just lowering pricing then ultimately you’re not going to be able to really maximize your Revenue so what you want to start to play around with one of the most powerful levels that you can use is your minimum night stay if you have a longer minimum night stay then the upside of that is you’re going to be able to get more Revenue by filling more of those nights goes without saying but when you do that you also limit the pool of
(14:40) demand that you’re capturing on for your property because obviously if you set a three night or four night minimum stay anyone looking to stay for just two nights is not able to book your property so there’s a tradeoff there and so having a static minimum night stay just right across the board having it be a three night minimum let’s say is really not optimal it is going to be it’s going to have its upsides but it’s also going to have its downsides and so what you really want is the best of both worlds
(15:06) and one of the things I love about price Labs is it allows you to have the best of both worlds so you can see here that I’ve got a default fixed weekday 3 night minimum and weekend three night minimum so right off the bat what’s really cool is you can actually designate certain days as weekend days whether it’s Friday Saturday Sunday or just Saturday Sunday and certain days as weekday and then you can set different minimum stay profiles for those different days so that for example if someone is checking in on
(15:31) Thursday they can’t book just the Thursday and Friday and then leave you high and dry on a Saturday which would be a very in demand day they have to book for three nights so that kind of thing is really really cool what you can also do is have different um different minim night stay thresholds for far out in advance uh compared to near term in the future so what I’ve got set up here is that we actually drop down to a two night minimum when we get to 60 days out and there isn’t a booking in there so
(15:58) that if I’m looking for bookings further out into the future I’m optimizing for those higher dollar value longer term stays more than three nights and then as we get closer to I really want to just make sure the calendar gets filled up make sure I’m capturing as much of the demand as possible and we drop it down to a t minimum and then weekdays and weekends more than 150 nights out I actually up it even further to a four night minimum stay so that the further out in the future that we’re getting
(16:23) booked the more stringent I am with who can book and basically making it so that I have to take really high value bookings if they’re being booked that far out into the future so that’s really cool now the orphan gaps are another really cool one I’m sure you’ve all run into this if you’ve been on Airbnb or short-term rental for a while now is that you’ll get bookings on either side of a weird Gap that’s going to be hard to fill and that in fact your pricing or your minimum night stay requirement
(16:47) might actually prevent you from even being able to fill that orphan Gap is what it’s called and so if you use price Labs it can basically just automatically realize that there’s a weird Gap in your calendar and adjust your minimum night stay to be able to accommodate a guest during that time you can also set a lowest overall minimum out so that no matter what happens you never take for example a one night stay so you can see here that I’ve got orphan gaps that will decrease down to two or three nights but
(17:15) I’ve also just got a lowest minum stay allowed so that no matter what even if I have an orphan Gap I’m never going to allow a one night stay because as I’ve talked to it numerous times on this channel um the majority of your issues as a host come from one night’s day so it’s just a good way to prevent that so that’s really really helpful I love using price labs for adjusting minum night stays cuz it’s a really really powerful lever to be able to pull on in order to maximize your pricing um now
(17:40) smart presets there’s a bunch of cool things you can do here so you can see that I’ve got a gradual 35% discount um over the last 35 days leading up to a booking so basically if we have an opening in the calendar 35 days out it’s going to get a 1% decrease in price when we’re 3040s out we’re now going to get a 2% decrease in price and you you can see that it basically builds up so that when you have a vacancy tomorrow it’s now discounted 35% from where it would normally otherwise be priced at so
(18:07) that’s a really cool feature as well that just allows you to not need to constantly come in and check your price and update it as you’re getting closer and closer to that Gap in the calendar now you would set this up very differently if you had a property that was catering towards a lot of last minute bookings smaller properties for example you might not want to give this kind of a discount or you might give a much smaller discount if anything at all whereas my property this one’s a larger one most of the time people are planning
(18:32) in advance to come here so the majority of my bookings come more than 30 days out into the future and so I like adding this discount so we can capture some of those last minute bookings that normally we don’t really get a lot of demand for um and you can also customize orphan Day pricing and uh specifically uh adjust your pricing to give a discount for those orphan gaps in the calendar um you can customize your far out pricing to give a premium on that you can do auin adjustments custom seasonal profiles
(18:57) which as I mentioned I’ve got set up demand Factor sensitivity which is basically just going to take into account the demand factor and increase or decrease your uh your pricing by more than more dramatically than it otherwise would or less dramatically than it otherwise would um for those days so by default Hoster or or Price Labs is basically going to update your pricing and increase your pricing quite dramatically for for example a weekend that has a lot of demand like a long weekend in the summertime but if you
(19:28) want to spef spe ify it so that it goes even more aggressively or that it goes less aggressively on that than you can specify it here so again it just gives you a lot of different customizability which I find is super super helpful a lot of the other pricing tools out there they try to take control with the software more so than giving the control back to the actual user and I find that the best way to use any kind of tool any kind of pricing tool is to actually be educated is to actually understand pricing because if you don’t then it’s
(19:57) probably going to do more harm than good and so because of that it’s really important if you are educated you do know what you’re doing you understand how to use it properly then you want to have as much control as possible you don’t want to just blindly let the software do its thing because often times it’s not really going to do a very good job so I love that price Labs just allows you the customization that you need to really control your pricing and really optimize it uh because the strategy is going to differ slightly
(20:21) depending on which Market you’re in what type of property you have what your goals are so you want to just have a tool that allows you to do all that again there’s a whole bunch of other customization so you can you can see here there’s all kinds of different stuff you can do you can go into advanced customization which I don’t tend to do but there’s all kinds of different stuff you can do anything like up to like soothing prices to round it to a near number or something like that so there’s all kinds of really really
(20:44) cool settings that allow you to have complete control of your property and that’s without even going into the market dashboard feature I want to take a second here and get away from the pricing tool itself and show you guys the market dashboard really quickly here because U the market dashboard I person personally love so you can basically specify an area you create a little kind of radius around an area and then you get all kinds of really great really cool and very useful Data Insights into that area so again this can help you to
(21:12) just better kind of refine your pricing strategy but it can also really really help you to make important decisions on your listing on your property overall what you should do what you shouldn’t do so one example I won’t dive too much into this if you want to learn more about this tool and for me to do a more deep dive into this tool um then let me know in the comment section down below or give me a thumbs up on this video to let me know that you like it and you want to see more of this kind of thing
(21:35) if you do we can dive into it more in detail but just to give you a quick glimpse of what you can do one of the things I really really love using this for is down here you can basically see different amenities so for example people come to me all the time and they ask me well James should I get a hot tub or should I get uh you know a a an EV charger should I get a sauna for my property and a lot of people try to answer that question by just kind of taking a guess and what I love about this kind of Market dashboard that you
(22:05) can get is it gives you more granular insights than what you can get from other data sources like airdna uh to where you can basically come in here you can look at a list of amenities you can go find the amenity that you’re looking to add so let’s say for example that we’re thinking about uh we’re thinking about maybe adding like a pool to the property we can look here select pool we can add it here to the uh to the the fter chart and we can see that there’s there’s a certain percentage 3.8% of
(22:33) listings that have pools and 3.4% of bookings are for properties with pools so what this tells us we can also see just like the desirability this is where it basically summarizes that so you can see that this this uh this amenity isn’t overly desirable there’s a pretty proportional amount of listings that have it compared to the proportion that that actually book it um and so you can see that it’s probably not going to give you a return on investment because you’re not suddenly going to get a whole
(22:57) bunch more book bookings just because you have that pool whereas things like a hot tub have a disproportionate amount more people booking the property than properties that actually have them so that might have been a little bit of a convoluted way to say but basically it’s saying that hey you know only 10 of the properties in the market have them but of the of the listings in the market that are actually booked the majority of them have a hot tub even though there’s not a lot that have hot tubs most of the
(23:22) bookings are going towards properties with hot tubs so then you can basically go and actually rationalize um financially speaking whether there’s going to be return on your investment for getting a hot tub different things like that that’s super cool I love that that’s just like an auxiliary feature that you can get with price Labs it gives you kind of more Market analytics and there’s a whole bunch more to it so that’s my thoughts and also a longer video I wanted to go a little more in depth on price LS and why I really like
(23:47) them so much why I I use them myself as a pricing tool if you have questions thoughts comments anything you want to know just let me know in the comment section down below if this video was helpful for you then let me know by just hitting that like button if you like price Labs if you think this is cool if you learn something from this video or if you just want to help the channel out overall help me out overall make sure you hit the like button on this video um and also if you just want to stay up to date with the two new videos WE Post
(24:11) every single week here on the channel make sure you hit the Subscribe button like I said I post two new videos every single week here so you’ll want to just hit the Subscribe button so you can stay up to date with those with all that said thank you so much for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next one [Music] all