As we conclude our series on driving success in an uncertain rental market, we're focusing on the most critical aspect of all—boosting your profits. In the previous sessions, we covered strategies for growing your inventory of rental units and retaining happy homeowners, both essential for a thriving rental business.
Today, we're diving into effective strategies for maximizing profits, even when the market is challenging. Let's explore how you can stay ahead of the competition by leveraging data and dynamic strategies.
Why Benchmarking Is Crucial
The first step to increasing your profits is to consistently benchmark your performance. By monitoring your property's metrics and staying alert to changes in your market, you can adjust your strategy dynamically to maximize margins. With the Key Data Dashboard, you can easily benchmark your properties or zoom in on specific unit types for a more granular analysis. If you keep an eye on performance and can quickly spot changes in your market, you can keep a dynamic strategy to increase margins wherever possible.
Maximizing Local Events
Examining the impact of local events is a wonderful way to see the impact that proper benchmarking can have on your business. Noticing even short spikes in bookings can help you make a difference in monthly or quarterly goals.
Let’s look at an example that property managers in the cities of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour will know all too well. On average, during Taylor Swift's U.S. concerts last year there was a +12% increase in occupancy within the cities visited. Now this is already a great number that any property manager would be happy with. However, knowing your market can allow you to spot these trends early. So if you are not keeping a running log of each artists’ tour dates in your city, noticing the change in booking trends can inform you that there might be a local event happening that you should look into.
Being able to quickly adapt your marketing, pricing, and overall strategy to changing trends can be the difference between a 12% occupancy increase and a 12% occupancy increase with a 14% nightly rate increase and change to a minimum night stay. In other words, spotting small changes and quickly reacting can make a good weekend a massive opportunity.
You can benchmark your properties right in your Key Data Dashboard or drill down to unit types for a closer look. Need help getting started? Contact us.
Making The Most Of Your Demand
Finding missed demand is another way to leverage more revenue from your existing units. DemandIQ is a tool within Key Data that shows you which searches are most popular on your website before guests book. This information can be used to see what guests prioritize. Are they searching exclusively for properties that have access to a hot tub? This is valuable information to communicate the best times for owner holds, encourage upgrades to existing homeowners, and evaluate the value of amenities in properties.
A helpful part of this tool is that you can identify which searches had zero results. That means you have the ability to understand what your guests want, that you don’t currently offer. This information can be used in your search for new inventory. Use the insights from DemandIQ to inform your decisions on which properties to target as you work to acquire new inventory. Don’t forget to let prospective homeowners know you already have guests searching for their property type.
By utilizing your data, you can not only boost profits, but you can also use it to increase communication and target new properties for your inventory.
Using Data to Drive Success Across Your Business
The more data-driven your decisions, the more you'll see positive results across your business. Whether it's optimizing rates, adjusting inventory, or fine-tuning marketing strategies, data is the key to making informed decisions that drive growth and profitability.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of these topics further, please reach out! Contact us to schedule a call with a Key Data team member.
Thank you for joining us in this series to drive business growth in complicated rental markets—we hope it sparked new ideas and strategies to keep your business growing.