If you've been following any of my content, you'll know how much I push hosts to create their own unique pricing strategy.
Why? Because it's the single biggest contributing factor to increasing your earnings.
Yes, you can 5X your listing's exposure by going multi-channel...
And even drastically increase your booking conversions (convert more people from looking to booking)...
But if you can price your property correctly, to even achieve one additional night at $192 per week.
JUST ONE!
You'll make an additional $10,000 per year...
So that's what we're going to talk about today...
The exact pricing formula you can use TODAY to start seeing drastic improvements in your earnings.
Raise your nightly rates by $50 on the Friday and Saturday night and still get booked out every weekend?
That's an additional $5,200 per year...
Find out that you can charge $1,000 per night over peak dates instead of $500?
Do that for 15 nights in the year...
There's an ADDITIONAL $7,500 per year...
Just by following these simple pricing guidelines, you can potentially earn an additional $22,700 each and every single year.
So I'm sure by now, you get the idea...
But the questions is...
HOW do you know what rates to set for each night?
The formula outlined below will give you a very simplistic overview of exactly what rates you can set your prices at, moving forward...
How To Price Your Airbnb To Fill Up Your Weekdays
Let's start off by focusing on the highest yielding exercise of filling up your weekdays, especially during those tricky low-season times...
Yes, you will have to start by dropping your prices Sunday through Thursday if they're not getting booked. But before you tell me I'm dreaming...
Remember, we'll be increasing prices on Friday and Saturday nights, plus peak-dates.
And this process is highly iterative...
Meaning yes, we might have to drop them to start getting bookings in the beginning...
But as time goes on and your occupancy starts to increase, we'll slowly start to bring your prices back up and find that pricing "sweet-spot".
This is probably one of the hardest things for a host to do...
We’ve put our heart and soul into our listing and we end up with some level of emotional bond with it so that discounting the rates makes you feel like it is less valuable.
That is a totally valid response to have, generally because you’ve tied the concept of the nightly rate to the value of the property.
The first step is to divorce yourself from that by seeing the bigger picture...
The bigger picture is the total revenue your property brings in every month.
If you’re struggling to do this yourself, I encourage you to do the following exercise...
Have a look at the last month of the off peak season’s total revenue.
Example:
You might look at "February" and see that you earned $7,600 for the month.
Now take a look at how many weekend nights (Friday and Saturday) are booked and at what average rate.
Example:
Maybe you had 8/8 weekend nights booked at an average rate of $700
Have a look at what weekday (Sunday to Thursday) rates were booked and at what rate.
Example:
Let's say you booked out 2/5 weekday nights (8 nights in total) at an average of $250 per night.
I'll use the table below as the example, then at the end of this article, leave one blank so you can fill this out for yourself.
(Total Revenue = Average Nightly Rate * Nights Booked)
Step #1
Calculate Your Earnings
Moving forward, the next step is to calculate how many nights were not booked and the associated unsuccessful rates they were advertised at.
Be sure to use the actual nightly rate you had advertised.
From there, work out the total revenue you missed out on based on your advertised prices.
Let's continue using the example above, where we missed out on 12 weekday nights and 0 weekend nights.
Let's also assume, the weekday nights were advertised at the same $250 nightly rate.
This helps you gain an insight into which nights you need to discount to start filling them up.
Step #2
Calculate Your MISSED Earnings
The next step is to calculate how many nights we can actually get booked, and at what rate.
It's unrealistic to assume that we'll achieve 100% occupancy all year round, so let's instead base it off a conservative estimate of 80% occupancy.
Now it's time to discount 80% of those nights NOT booked.
For a simplicity sake, let's say we discount the remaining weekday rates by 50%, so we can get at least 80% of them booked (10 nights).
Step #3
Adjust Your Pricing To Make An Additional $1,250 per month
As you can see in the table above, we took those 12 nights NOT booked...
Reduced the rates by 50%, charging $125 for the remaining nights instead of $250...
And got 80% of them booked at the new rate...
Equating to an additional $1,250 of earnings in the month.
Now you might be thinking to yourself...
"There's no way I'm going to drop all my prices down by 50%! I'd miss out on all the nights I could have gotten booked at my full rate!"
And you'd be entirely correct. In fact I'm going to contradict myself now, and say you should actually increase the nightly rates when the date is "far-out".
Then only start reducing your prices as the date starts to near and you haven't achieved your desired occupancy.
This approach is known as the "Pricing Curve"
See how we're actually increasing the nightly rates for rates that are far out. And only discounting our rates when the date is nearing and we still have low occupancy.
Here's a real life example of the discounting strategy you could employ in your own business:
"SO MANY NUMBERS!"
If you're anything like me, your brain is just about ready to explode right now. As good as the theory is...
You're probably asking yourself how you can actually take this and implement it into your business, in a scalable way that doesn't include daily intervention (or any brain explosions).
Well if you're looking to learn more about how to maximize your Airbnb's earnings, click the link below to join me for my next free training event, where I'll go into detail on how we've helped hosts increase their earnings by up to 112%:
Best, Jordan Hrovat
Co-Founder - BeyondBNB.io