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[00:00:00] Sarah: Hello, listeners. Welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:03] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:00:05] Both Annette &Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:07] Sarah: We are so excited to kick off this episode like we do every week, and that is sharing one of you, our amazing listeners, who’s using our Instagram hashtag, #STRShareSunday. We’ll share you on Instagram on Sunday, but we’ll also share you here on the podcast and to our entire email list. Annette, who are we sharing this week?

[00:00:22] Annette: This week we are sharing @trimbellecottage. Let me spell that for you real quick. T-R-I-M-B-E-L-L-E. @trimbellecottage. I just really like these hosts. They’re really sweet. Please, always tell your story in your feed because people instantly connected with you. But Luke and Kendra, they’re trout fisher people.

[00:00:45] Sarah: Fisher peeps.

[00:00:47] Annette: I love it because of a lot of their messaging, their branding is about their–

[00:00:52] Sarah: About trout.

[00:00:53] Annette: Seven-acre river front. Yeah, about trout. Hey, if you guys want to name your cottage about trout, I think you should, but just about the pristine trout fishing. Actually, Sarah and I went on a fishing trip. That was fun. So maybe we’ll come visit this trout fishing cottage. But I love that. They’re leaning into it.

[00:01:11] One thing I want to share about their Instagram and them telling their story, I love it. There is stuff that doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. They’re both teachers. This is a dream location for them to have a property, and so I just want to encourage everybody, your investment, your short-term rental, your vacation rental, it isn’t all just about the spreadsheet.

[00:01:31] It could be that legacy property for you, that dream property, and just a way to help pay for it. So if that’s what you’re doing, we love that. It’s such a cute cottage here. And it’s their home. It’s where they’re going to spend some of their time, and they want us to experience their magic, but they’re really just leaning in.

[00:01:50] There’s lots of the, I guess it’s a river, a stream. They show the stream a lot. They show the trout a lot, and I love it. It makes me want to go fishing there. So lean into your why. Lean into what that amenity is. And it’s in Wisconsin, so it’s like, let’s do this. I now want to go to Wisconsin. Well done, Trimbelle. And they’re just cute. I love it.

[00:02:13] Sarah: All right, let’s continue on our celebration of Money Making May sponsored by our friends at PriceLabs. We are proudly announcing this partnership with PriceLabs because, everyone, we have been using the software for years and years, and our revenue management is on point. Our pricing is on point, and we know yours can be too.

[00:02:35] So if you’ve yet to try dynamic pricing, if you’ve subscribed a month or two and you didn’t do anything with it, now is the time because they are giving all of our listeners 30-day free trial. They won’t even ask for your credit card. And then in this episode, we are going to give you step-by-step how to maximize this next 30 days to help you make more money.

[00:03:01] So since it’s free and they don’t even ask for a credit card, and you can use the software, you’re essentially going to potentially getting paid to try it out. And that is the cool thing about this software, is PriceLabs helps you make more money than you would without it. So it’s one of those softwares that has a immediate ROI.

[00:03:18] Annette: Yes. And Colleen, our amazing team member, is here with us. We are going to dig into what you should be doing daily, weekly, monthly.

[00:03:26] Sarah: Colleen is on the Thanks for Visiting team. She’s also in our property management co-hosting team, and she is in charge of managing our revenue, and she’s in charge of PriceLabs, and she’s been doing it for years. So in this episode we dig in with her.

[00:03:42] Annette: Years in the short-term rental, but then decades before in the hotel world. So she has just this storied career of revenue management for nightly stays. First, big hotel brands, then transitioned into short-term rentals. And so it’s really exciting to listen to someone that truly was educated in revenue management for overnight stays in the hotel world then transition that into short-term rentals.

[00:04:12] And we are here, and Colleen is linking arms with us to help you make more money. And there are going to be three things, minimum nights stay, promotions, and gap nights. You’re going to want to take notes and make more money for yourself.

[00:04:23] Sarah: Come for the tips, but then stay for–

[00:04:26] Annette: The lessons.

[00:04:27] Sarah: And Sarah and Colleen airing out their dirty laundry in a big mistake we made in Q1 of this year, and we want you to learn from our mistake, but we are very vulnerable, we’re very honest, and it can save you so much money.

[00:04:46] Sarah: Colleen Prochaska, welcome to the show.

[00:04:48] Colleen: Thank you.

[00:04:49] Sarah: All right, Colleen, let’s give a quick background into why you love revenue management. Why do you love pricing? Why are you good at what you do for our property management company?

[00:05:03] Colleen: I love revenue management because I love making money. I find it to be exciting. I like that it’s not a perfect science and that you can experiment, and your experiment’s only just making more money, and it’s just exciting to watch your revenues grow.

[00:05:19] Sarah: I love that. Because I know in our, whether it’s in Instagram, we’re chatting with someone in our comments, or it’s an email we’re answering, or we’re out at an event, for some reason, I don’t know if it’s the word like management or whatever, but people tend to set their prices, whether it’s a weekday price, a weekend price, and then they let it go. You know what I mean?

[00:05:40] It’s one set price, or they’re using Airbnb smart pricing, which Airbnb wants you to get booked. And so in my experience, they will put you at a rate that will get you booked, and that may not be taking the largest share of what someone might be able to willing to pay for that night, but rather just get you booked as quickly as possible.

[00:06:04] And so that’s not the best strategy either. So we are championing this month and all month long, use a dynamic pricing software using PriceLabs. They have so generously offered our community 30-day free trial. They won’t even ask for your credit card. So Colleen, we thought we’d have you on the show today talking about how our listeners can maximize this 30-day free trial and make some more money for their rental this month.

[00:06:35] And my hope is, Colleen, and I want you to be as honest as possible, but I do believe it’s going to relieve a lot of hosts from thinking that it’s this big task, and it’s really hard, and it’s complicated to figure out. So that’s also what I want to talk about in today’s episode with you.

[00:06:54] Colleen: That sounds great.

[00:06:55] Annette: Let’s do it because hosts get analysis paralysis, or they add on too much tech and just don’t do it. So we are all revenue managers. We want to embrace that. Let’s talk about what a host, when they’re focusing on pricing daily, weekly, monthly– we all have daily, weekly monthlys through all the tasks that we have as hosts. But specifically for pricing, let’s walk through what hosts should be doing every single day, Colleen.

[00:07:19] Colleen: In the revenue management world, ideally, a host is not doing anything every single day. So with PriceLabs, with a dynamic pricing software, you put your data in there, and you teach it what you want it to do. And then of course it aggregates data and performs things. So if you are in PriceLabs every single day, you’re probably doing a little too much. You’re probably tweaking too much. You’re probably not letting the software do what is designed to do.

[00:07:42] Annette: Score. So score for hosts.

[00:07:43] Colleen: So if you’re in PriceLabs daily, back out of it.

[00:07:45] Annette: All right. So no daily, weekly, monthly. This should have a weekly, monthly.

[00:07:51] Colleen: Yes. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, I would say. But we’ll just start with weekly. So once a week you should be logging into your PriceLabs dashboard. And this is just an opportunity for you to get a picture of how do we look with occupancy? Where are we standing?

[00:08:06] So PriceLabs actually puts everything right in front of you, and they do stoplight style, red, green, yellow. Are we coasting? Are we in good shape? Are we yellow? Like, nah, our occupancy isn’t quite at the threshold that we should be. Are we red? Mayday, mayday, we’re not booked. I love it because, right from that dashboard, you can review your prices.

[00:08:26] You can see is there something going on? Is the price out of whack? Do I have limitation on my booking that is people actually can’t book? So here I’m thinking it’s one thing, but it’s this. So it’s all coupled in this one dashboard that every single week would be what you as a host would be logging into.

[00:08:42] Annette: When we say weekly, do you choose a Monday morning, a Friday morning, a Wednesday? Should it be the same time, the same day, every week, and what is that for you?

[00:08:52] Colleen: Absolutely. With anything that has to do with money, it should be on your calendar schedule ready to go. Because if you don’t have your dedicated time that you’re doing this, you won’t do it. Not to get off on a tangent, but as far as your host world goes, this is going to be your most important work.

[00:09:08] Because as I said, it’s fun to make money, but what money is is a tool for you to reach your hosting goals, whatever they are. And what the dynamic pricing software does is it just brings you more money to your bottom line. So we talk all the time about knowing your numbers and all of these things.

[00:09:24] As far as your pricing software goes, being able to charge maximum rate, you can only– toilet paper only costs what it costs. Electricity only costs what it costs. What we’re doing is increasing our top line revenue, just giving you more meat on the bone for your bottom-line revenue.

[00:09:39] So taking the time. I do this on Sundays. That might not be conducive for all hosts. I know Sunday’s a heavy departure day, but every Sunday I log in, and I just get a picture of what our upcoming weeks look like. That works for us because we fill every weekend. So I know when I log in on a Sunday, if I see any occupancy in the seven-day window for Friday, Saturday, I know that that’s a red flag, and that I need to quickly pivot so that we don’t sit empty on a weekend. What your day of the week is should be unique to your property and your booking window, but Sundays work for me.

[00:10:13] Sarah: And when you’re sitting down on Sunday, Colleen, and looking at the dashboard that pops up the moment you log into PriceLabs, it’s right there, what are some things that you do if it’s a yellow or a red notification for that property?

[00:10:25] Colleen: Yeah. So if I’m seeing that occupancy isn’t there, the first thing I’m going to do is go to the market dashboard, the neighborhood data within PriceLabs, and I’m going to say, what’s going on in the area? Is everyone else booked? This is going to be your best place to start because I think we see we’re not booked and we’re like, ah, we need to hurry up and lower the rate. Oh my God, what’s going on?

[00:10:46] But knowing what’s going on in your market is step A. So I go straight to the dashboard. Who else is booked? What’s going on? What’s the market occupancy? Is there demand in the market? From there I can decide if I’m in line with the market, if I’m behind the market, whatever.

[00:11:02] And then that’s where I’m going to make a decision, and those decisions could be, normally we require two-night booking minimum. It might be allowing a one-night stay. It might be running a promotion on Airbnb.

[00:11:14] You can run a 20% promotion on Airbnb, which will have Airbnb email all its customers. You get a slash on your pricing. It looks really enticing. Those are different things that I might do. But certainly, before I do anything to change what our flow is, what our tried-and-true is, which in our market, our tried-and-true is that we can sell a two-night minimum on Friday and Saturday, and that we can get a much, much higher rate. So before I’m going to pivot from that, I’m going to see what’s going on in the area [Inaudible] properties.

[00:11:42] Sarah: When you go into the neighborhood, so it is essentially showing you literally my competitors down the street, what they look like. So that’s no longer this secret of whether or not they’re booked or if they’re holding it for their own personal use. PriceLabs will tell me what’s going on, and there’s no excuses there.

[00:12:01] Colleen: There’s no excuses. PriceLabs, they’ve compared– it’s your competitive set. So with all of their data, they’re able to say, this is what like properties are selling in your market. This is what their occupancy is. We can know, those properties, what their booking window even is.

[00:12:18] So all of those items are available for you to review if you need to maybe make some changes in your world. So if everybody around you has a booking window that’s X, Y, and Z, and yours is vastly different, okay, well, you probably have too many customizations or something going on on your end because the market doesn’t lie. That doesn’t take into account reviews, pricing. It just is what it is. This is what the market is selling for.

[00:12:43] Annette: I want to recap because there is juicy knowledge here. When you see the yellow or the red, the first two things are, I want to take a look at my minimum nights stay, and then a potential promotion on Airbnb. Those are the first two things that always come to mind. What is a third thing if you have to get creative?

[00:13:04] Is there a third option? If it’s like, okay, I went down to a one-night stay, I did the promo. How long do you wait for the promotion? Do you go with the promotion first? Is there a 24-48 hours that you see if that promotion works, and then reduce the minimum night stay? How do you juggle what you’re going to do there?

[00:13:22] Colleen: Within the promotion on the Airbnb side, you can actually go in and see how many people viewed, if people looked at it but didn’t click. So you can see, was that enticing enough? Before I do anything else with my rate, because, again, between PriceLabs and your own historicals, your own education, you are priced appropriately, so you’re asking a fair rate.

[00:13:42] So just always keeping that in mind, that, sure, this is a bonus that they’re getting a promotion, but you’re not out of whack in your pricing. That’s not it. So the next thing I’m going to do is reach out to either the guests coming before the guests coming– I’m going to try to fill that with somebody who’s already booked.

[00:13:56] That’s what we call in our world low-hanging fruit. They’re already coming to Columbus. And you’re already offering a 20% discount on Airbnb, so if you can just fill it with one of them, that would be step three.

[00:14:08] Annette: Okay, so gap night.

[00:14:09] Colleen: Gap night.

[00:14:10] Annette: Let’s name that. So Gap night is you’re like, wait, there’s a booking here. Can I have them extend their stay or check in early, check out late? That is, again, a no brainer. You’re already offering the promo price. I want to share this with everybody so that guests, hey, do you want to stay longer? Do you want to stay throughout the weekend? What is that promo that you’re going to offer that guest to either continue on their stay or come early?

[00:14:35] Colleen: Yeah, that can be all over the map. You can say, hey, it’s available. This is going to be specifically juicy for somebody that fills on the weekends. So we’ve got people coming in on a Friday, like, how nice is it? Hey, you want to start your weekend early on a Thursday? We have it available.

[00:14:52] That already is exciting to the person, and their mind’s already turning. If they’re like, oh, it’s a little bit out of our price range, well, now you– they’re coming. If they’re saying, oh, it’s a little bit out of our price range, okay, well, now we just need to make it happen.

[00:15:02] And you’re seeing from your own knowledge via this dashboard, you’re empty. So bearing that in mind too, that you shouldn’t get too fixated on what that percentage discount can be. So it could be 0% discount. It could just be like, hey, it’s open. On a Sunday night, I offer a 50% discount. We’re not going to sell. So that is just bottom line money at that point because it’s not an extra cleaning fee. It’s nothing. It’s just extra money. I don’t want to give a guideline and then it become like–

[00:15:32] Sarah: Someone source of– right.

[00:15:33] Colleen: Yeah.

[00:15:33] Annette: But truth I think the loudest message here that we’ve been trying to share, especially inside our membership is, if you are wanting to increase your revenue or your occupancy, you already have guests that are booked. So if they can stay longer, let’s go there. It is a message to them. Asking them if they want to stay– it really is that low-hanging fruit. So I love that we just added that in as that third option of trying to increase the occupancy and your revenue.

[00:15:59] Sarah: If anyone out there is thinking, well, I don’t know that anyone would’ve come a whole night early, remember too, it could be checking in the day of their check-in at 10:00 AM. You know what I mean? It could be them checking in at 11:00 AM. There are people out there who money is a tool for them to have a more–

[00:16:15] Annette: We just did this.

[00:16:16] Sarah: We just did this.

[00:16:17] Annette: We just did this. I was gambling at a hotel in London that we got in at 7:00 AM, and they were like, you might be able to get early check-in. We were tired. We’d flown through the night. I was like, I do not want to gamble this. We were willing to pay a whole night. We booked the night before because I wanted Sarah and I to be able to sleep.

[00:16:40] That was the beginning of our trip. It was important to us when we sat there at the last day. I called it. I was like, we need to just book the night before. We’re going to be tired, and we can’t just rough it out in the lobby or try to do a tour. This is the whole rest of our stay. And that was the day before.

[00:16:57] So also you can reach out to the guest ahead of time, but then right before their stay, reach out again. Life changes quick for that stay ahead of time or after. All right, so minimum nights stay, promo, and then outreach to current guests that already have booked reservations.

[00:17:14] Sarah: I do want to speak to anyone out there who doesn’t have the quick booking window like we do in Columbus. If you book further out and you understand your booking window, maybe it’s a month, maybe it’s two months, maybe it’s three months. There are some rentals in our vacation rental area of Hocking Hills where people book a year in advance, six months in advance.

[00:17:32] This is where I think, yes, you can leverage text messaging the same way we would leverage text messaging for gap nights, but also your email list. We talk so much about emailing and everyone in our membership is like, well, what do I talk to them about? Well, let them know of some specials that you have going on. What vacancies are you offering? Being able to fill any yellow occupancy notifications that way too.

[00:17:57] So for us here in Columbus, it’s such a quick turnaround for the metro markets, but if you’re in a vacation rental to market, you might have some more time and therefore maybe it’s more expensive. And so maybe you might send those emails, those texts out with a little bit more time for a guest to make a decision, but still leveraging that direct connection with your list.

[00:18:15] Annette: My last thing about the weekly and the promos, if someone is nervous to run a promo, what would be your advice to them, if they have not yet ran a promo for their rental?

[00:18:26] Colleen: I don’t know if everybody knows this, that when you’re running a promo and you see that 20% off, that’s not just 20 straight percentage points off the rate that’s posted. Airbnb uses an average of the rate that you charge, so it might actually not even be 20% off your rate. It could be even less than 20% off your rate.

[00:18:44] So they take your ADR, and they slash that by 20%. So that’s that. And then also you have your numbers dialed in, and you know your booking window. You know whether or not you’re going to get booked. Your other option is to sit empty.

[00:19:00] Sarah: Right. That’s not a great option.

[00:19:03] Okay, so weeklys are taken care of. That’s what we’re going to do now with weaklys. Let’s talk about monthly. Colleen, what is it that you do on a monthly basis? Now, I know you help us manage– we got around 30 different properties, but let’s give averages of when we talk about time here and what you do. Let’s just look at one property. What happens on that monthly cadence?

[00:19:27] Colleen: So at the end of every month, I’m going to be doing a recap of how we did. Now, this recap that I do is not within PriceLabs. This is my own separate spreadsheet that I use where I’m going to pull all of the top-line revenue that we earned that month, and I’m going to figure out what our occupancy was, our ADR, our RevPAR, our revenue.

[00:19:46] Then I use that data to review that with our historicals. So at a minimum, did we beat last year. That’s my goal. Of course, every month is to beat the previous year’s month. And then I also go into PriceLabs and use their market tab to make sure that we either beat or at least matched the comp set.

[00:20:07] So they have the same historicals, so all of that that you use to see if you’re in line for future pricing, you can look at that for backdated pricing too to make sure that you, at least at a minimum, got your fair share of what business was in the market.

[00:20:23] Annette: Colleen, you got to slow down. That is big time revenue management talk. No, I see you’re like comps and dashboard. Slow it down for us. What should a host, when they’re looking at those comps, is it a dollar more? Are they looking for percentage? Are they looking for dollar amount? How are you judging? Is it a percentage or a dollar amount that you’re trying to look at the competitor?

[00:20:43] Colleen: I look at revenue dollar amount. I look at that because you get to revenue a couple ways. You can get to revenue with super high occupancy and mediocre average rate, or you can get to revenue with lower occupancy, super high rate. So I’m looking at RevPAR. I’m looking at revenue. From there, that’s if you want or not.

[00:21:01] So the way that it was explained to me 300 years ago in the hotel world is you have a pie. So within this pie, 100% of your fair share is that pie. If you received a pie, but a bite was taken out of it, okay, well, did you get your full share of that pie? No, you didn’t. So 100% of a pie, that means that you got 100% of your fair share in that market.

[00:21:22] If you got a pie and a bite of somebody else’s pie, okay, well, now you beat that market. But if you’re given a pie and at Grant Pizza and you took a slice on your way home, and one–

[00:21:33] Annette: I did not get my fair share.

[00:21:35] Colleen: I didn’t get my whole pizza, so there’s a problem there. So that’s what I’m looking at. And again, that number– this is what I love about revenue management, because as Sarah said, whether you’re in Columbus with a short booking window, you’re in a vacation market, it doesn’t matter. The concept is the same. So you can apply this concept to anything, which is that if my occupancy for the month was 48% and I log into PriceLabs and the market’s occupancy was 52%, I did not get my whole pie. Period.

[00:22:03] Annette: Let’s stop there. You log in, red, yellow, green here. It’s like, wait, I’m lower than the market share, what are next steps there when you’re like, wait, I am underperforming in the market? What’s the mindset there? Because you have those three hot tips for the weekly, the green, yellow, red. What do you do when it’s in arrears, the month is closed out, and you see, I didn’t get my full share of the pie? What are those next steps when you see you’re underperforming the market?

[00:22:30] Colleen: Good question. That shouldn’t be a shock to you if you’re doing your weeklys. That shouldn’t be surprising. With that said, we’re not beating ourselves up. We’re not, oh, everything’s over. No, that’s not the case. If you are getting the pie every single time, that’s a separate issue.

[00:22:47] We’re not going to do that. What we are going to do is we’re going to hone in on–within PriceLabs, you can drill down to the day that you drop the ball. You can go to the scene of the fumble and figure out where it happened. So you can do that. The other thing that you can do is just zoom out, look at your goals for the year.

[00:23:05] What is your revenue goal for the year? And everyone makes occupancy goals, and this and this and that. All of those are fun, and they’re great, whatever. At the end of the day, check to the bank, you write that in dollars, not in occupancy percent or whatever. So I like to use revenue as my overarching goal.

[00:23:20] So what I’m going to do then is I’m going to say, okay, well, I didn’t hit this number the way that I was supposed to, so I need to make up for that in some other way in the month in these upcoming months. And I always say this, there’s a lot of time spent on things that you can’t change. That month is dead in the water. Nothing we can do.

[00:23:39] The best use of your time is studying your competitive set, making sure that you’re priced appropriately, educating yourself on the market, and capturing that top revenue when you can. So there’s more money to be made on high demand times than this scrappy revenue here and there. You can charge sometimes double your price on a busy night. What does that money do versus– does that make sense what I saying?

[00:24:05] Sarah: Yeah. And what I’m taking away from this, Colleen, I never really thought about it this before, it’s like, yes, you need to always care about your revenue management, how you’re managing the money that’s coming in, but it sounds to me like, if you have an off season, a shoulder season, a low season, I’m just going to use an example, for us in Columbus, Ohio, it’s January through March.

[00:24:24] It’s really brutal here. Instead of trying to make a few extra 100 bucks that month, or 50 bucks, or another stay or two, let’s set some really realistic goals there. Let’s make sure we hit them and we’re being realistic, and those goals are specific to that timeframe, but let’s be all hands on deck for making as much money as we can during our high season.

[00:24:45] Colleen: Yes.

[00:24:45] Sarah: I feel like sometimes people co-host on their high season because they’re expecting money to come in, but that is, it sounds like, that’s the time of the year where you’re probably leaving the most money on the table because you’re just in your operations doing the thing and trusting that you’re going to make as much money as possible when, no, you could be potentially adding an extra 25%, 50% to that average daily rate if you were really focusing on revenue during that high season. Is that what you’re saying?

[00:25:15] Colleen: Absolutely. What I hear a lot from hosts is, we get $2,000 a night at our vacation rental in every August. That’s the red flag. Not that they’re slow in January because it’s a beachfront property. They don’t get any bookings, whatever it is. If you have made $2,000 a night on your beach rental every August for the past three years, that’s a problem.

[00:25:38] You should be making probably so much more. I think people with the high season– we all are guilty of this. It is exciting to get bookings. It is exciting to look booked. It is exciting to see these high rates come in, but you are limiting yourself with how much money you actually could be making and what these high rates are.

[00:25:58] Like Annette Grant would say, a high rate to who? To who? What does that mean? I said to her today, oh, we have tons of people doing that. And I knew she was going to say this, well, what’s tons?

[00:26:08] Annette: What we were sharing before this episode, the property Sarah and I specifically own together, let’s share with the listeners the goal for that property right now.

[00:26:18] Colleen: So this property is one that we’re trying to push rate on. For the audience here, but last year we did a midterm rental strategy, January through March, because we’re in January. We’re slow. This year, we did not. So right off the bat, I know that my responsibility to my owners is, okay, well, I have to at least make what we would’ve made as a midterm rental last year.

[00:26:40] So that was the goal for Q1. Well, right after that, it’s like we’re guns blazing as far as my– I would like to grow the rate year over year by 8% at that property. And I’ve committed that to the owners, so that’s what I’ll be doing. Now, when I look at April, we just recapped. I’m going to look at this month, and I’m going to say, okay, well, did I have an 8% growth?

[00:27:04] Well, if I didn’t, now I know I still have June, July, whatever it is. We’ve got concerts. We have football games. That’s where I’m going to have to make up that money, and it is possible to be made up that way. But I can’t do anything about what I did in April, and not spending the time to know where I am, then I won’t know how I need to pivot if I even need to. Make sense?

[00:27:25] Sarah: And you’re actually expecting occupancy to be a little lower because you are going to push the rate. But at the end of the month, we’re going to make more money.

[00:27:34] Colleen: Is occupancy important? Of course, but revenue is what is important. So you get to revenue either in high occupancy, as I said, or high rate. I am a work smarter girly, and that is a high rate. So that’s what I’m going to do.

[00:27:51] Sarah: We are promoting PriceLabs this month, proudly, because we use it weekly and monthly in our business, and quarterly and yearly.

[00:28:00] Annette: Daily, if we needed to.

[00:28:02] Sarah: Daily, if you wanted to.

[00:28:03] Colleen: If we needed to.

[00:28:04] Sarah: But don’t need to, which is great for a host, especially since a majority of our listeners do a lot of the operations themselves. We are busy. Our listeners are busy, so that’s actually a great thing. But we are promoting PriceLabs this month. They are giving you 30-day free trial. They’re not even going to ask for your credit card. So everything we just talked about, you can get onboarded into PriceLabs. What did Aviva say today? How quickly does it take to onboard? I think an hour or two?

[00:28:29] Annette: It’s freaky fast, like Jimmy Johns subs.

[00:28:32] Sarah: Like Jimmy Johns subs. No, and I’m not–

[00:28:35] Annette: No, I think she said under an hour.

[00:28:36] Sarah: Yeah. And also what she said– Aviva is a team member on PriceLabs. We just did an Instagram live, if you want to check out that live. It was actually really good. I learned a few things, but the one thing she said that actually surprised me, and Colleen, I would love to know your thoughts on this, is she’s like, listen, PriceLabs, when you guys go and do your 30-day free trial and you upload your property, whether it’s giving them your Airbnb link, your Vrbo link, or your channel manager link–

[00:29:02] Annette: Both of them.

[00:29:03] Sarah: Both Airbnb and Vrbo, and you get on board in that hour or two, PriceLabs already comes ready to optimize your pricing. You will have to choose a base price. So that’s the median price. That’s on average price. And that price is a living, breathing price. You can adjust the base price, and that will help PriceLabs then with the strategy.

[00:29:25] But what I’m getting at here is there are a lot of customizations. There’s a lot of little toggles that you can turn on or whatever, and she’s like, don’t do all those customizations unless you need to. PriceLabs is already built to help you. It’s already built with all the cool customizations. The only reason you would need to tweak it, she’s like, maybe hour gap night is offered three days out while your booking window is seven days, so that’s not going to be helpful. So you need to turn the toggle on and customize it and tell PriceLabs, well, my booking window is a little bit longer, so offer that gap night a little bit further out. So what’s your opinion on that, Colleen? Is PriceLabs a daunting software to learn in your opinion, or was it pretty easy to at least get started and optimize your pricing right off the bat?

[00:30:09] Colleen: Yeah. We’re just talking about pricing properties here. So you’re going to try some things out. You can click around. You can always undo something. So getting in there and spending time just familiarizing yourself with how it works, yes. And as far as setting your bright base price, yes, you have to do that.

[00:30:28] But they even walk– it’s called help me set my base price. So it couldn’t be more spoon-fed to you as far as that goes. What I love about what she said with all the customizations is I think you have in your mind what the price of your property is, or you have in your mind what the length of stay is going to be, and people set up PriceLabs, and they put up in all these customizations because they know their property.

[00:30:51] And it’s something about online technology because you wouldn’t get a brand new car and then rework the whole engine. You would just assume that the person who sold you the car made the engine. But with PriceLabs, it seems like everyone wants to get in there, they want to do this, they want to do this, they want to do this.

[00:31:04] Well, no, you have to let PriceLabs learn your property. They know the market. Let it mellow. And then it will produce for you what it needs to. And yes, again, if you are so convinced that all of this data is wrong, you then change the price. It’s just like that.

[00:31:22] Annette: I want to give it to everybody straight too. You’re going to make a mistake pricing your property. We have all accidentally forgot to change a price or clicked a button that put something on autopilot. I’m sure there are so many listeners that when they first got started, didn’t have their cleaning fee, and somebody stayed, and we paid for the cleaning.

[00:31:41] Jus know right now you are going to make a mistake, and it is okay. It’s part of the process. There’s so much noise out there of making all this money and never making a mistake in automation. It’s like, just allow yourself you’re going to mess up. Fail faster, make those mistakes.

[00:31:57] Don’t beat yourself up. If it was Taylor Swift came to town and you didn’t know, and you didn’t switch it, Kentucky Derby, the cleaning, people get so upset about that, and then obsessed about it. Let it go. If hopefully you’re in this for the long haul, you’re going to be able to make that up. I think I just want to allow everybody– we could have multiple episodes on pricey mistakes that we’ve made. Actually, do you want to share a most recent mistake?

[00:32:21] Sarah: You knew she was going to bring it up, Colleen.

[00:32:22] Annette: Let’s just do it.

[00:32:23] Sarah: We gave her one–

[00:32:24] Annette: No, because let’s keep it real.

[00:32:25] Sarah: Vulnerable moment, and she just runs with that.

[00:32:29] Colleen: Yes, she does, and I did know that actually.

[00:32:32] Annette: Listen, before we hopped on there, you just released a promo. It worked today. Gap nights are like cooking and booking. The gap nights working. A gap night today, a promo today. It’s all working, but we got to talk about some other things that happened too.

[00:32:48] Sarah: No, we’re joking, and actually, we made the mistake. We’re not joking about that. But we are happy to air our failures because it’s something that we did that we knew better then. We knew we shouldn’t do it. We did it anyway. And the cool thing about that is, as humans, it’s like a reinforcement. Sometimes we need that reinforcement of like, you knew that. You did it anyway, and it’s showing you–

[00:33:13] Annette: Don’t eat the pizza at 1:00 AM.

[00:33:14] Sarah: Right. You know what it’s going to do to your tummy.

[00:33:16] Annette: But you’re, but I’m going to, I want to.

[00:33:19] Sarah: So Colleen, what did we do?

[00:33:21] Colleen: So we are slow in our market, January, February, for sure, and we know, and you’ve heard us say this 300 million times, lowering your rate in a market does not increase demand. So when we say that, we’re saying that if there’s nobody coming to town, you can drop your rate to $5. There’s nobody coming.

[00:33:39] All you did was just sell your room for $5 to the one person that’s coming that would’ve paid $100. So that strategy does not work. We know this. We have this tattooed on us. But in January, and we will thank PriceLabs dashboard for this too, you log on, and it’s just red, red, red, red, and it does not look good.

[00:33:57] It feels terrible. So we did lower our rates in January to try to fill because I tried everything else, and it wasn’t working. So I’m like, maybe I’m wrong about this whole thing. So we did lower the rate, and our January went from what’s normally expected. That’s what’s crazy.

[00:34:14] Our January went from what we expected it to be to abysmal, and that is because the few reservations that we would’ve gotten anyway, we just got for no money. So we could have reported to our owners January was flat, but instead we were like, January’s down in revenue like 15%, and that is a hard conversation to have.

[00:34:34] Annette: Mm-hmm. It’s so hard to still tell people because I know– we just got the question today earlier on. Pretty much every time we talk about pricing it’s like, what do I do in the slow season? So that is the first thing to do, is drop the rate. So again, I think we need to go back and tell that story of like, is this the time that we’re focusing on how can we make more money in those busy seasons?

[00:34:56] So let’s flip it really quick because we also chatted about this. We do have some busier times coming up, and we’re already within PriceLabs, going, oh, that’s not $500 a night. That needs to be bumped to 575. So let’s just share that really quickly of how you can take that energy and shift it. Because how do we tell people don’t do it though?

[00:35:16] What is that advice when they’re wanting to just drop, drop, drop, drop? Is it just reframe it, step away from the computer, and then think about the busy season? How can we give them a takeaway of what to do in that instance?

[00:35:30] Colleen: Yeah, the takeaway is to make yourself a checklist of what you can do, and it is not lower the rate, so you have to take that off your rate. You cannot lower the rate. That’s not the answer. So the checklist is, learn your competitors. If there’s one thing that I can say, if I were in a saturated, busy market and I’m like, oh, bookings are down, da da da, I would know the competitors in my market like the back of my hand.

[00:35:53] I would know what their amenities are. I would know what their reviews are. I would know what their guests are saying about them. So that is a great use of that hour that you’d spend lowering the rate. It would be looking at your goals. What are your revenue goals?

[00:36:06] Okay, well, what am I projecting for my busy months? And those rate increases, they add up quick. So in my busy month, if I’m projecting X, Y, and Z, because I always make that month, okay, well, if I want to make this percentage increase, let’s get granular with it. What does that mean for an ADR for that month? So that’s where I’d be making adjustments.

[00:36:29] Or if your goals are email marketing, maybe your slow season, or maybe you should be doing some preventative maintenance on your property. The one thing you’re not going to do is lower your rate and just expect anything to happen. Because again, we could have told our owners that we had an as expected month, and they would’ve been like, yeah, January’s a bummer. But we weren’t able to report that, and it’s like, why would you ever want to report a loss in a month where you would’ve just made– it’s just leaving money on the table. That was a brutal one.

[00:36:58] Sarah: It was tough, but Colleen, you and I both committed to maximizing April through December this year for those owners and being hypervigilant on taking more than beating our competitors, and we’re going to do it. That way, at the end of the year, yes, we made our job a lot harder for ourselves, but it’s not impossible to still be really great co-hosts for them and rock it out, and do what we promised them.

[00:37:26] And that’s the thing too, is like, we know better, and we still made a mistake, everyone, because you get panicked, especially when it’s not your property and you have a lot of responsibility, but it’s to learn from it and back away from your computer and stop lowering your rate. Learn from us. I feel like we need a bumper sticker that’s like, away from–

[00:37:46] Annette: Don’t lower your rate.

[00:37:47] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:37:47] Colleen: Yeah, don’t lower your rate. Don’t ever lower your rate.

[00:37:49] Sarah: When you see red– right. 

[00:37:51] Annette: And that might be a message that’s just somewhere in your office, Sarah on your computer. 

[00:37:59] Sarah: Let’s wrap up this episode. Again, head on to the show notes. We have a link for you from PriceLabs. Get 30 days free trial. They won’t even ask for your credit card. You can try out their marketplace dashboard. You can dive into your neighborhood stats. You can do all the things within PriceLabs for free for three days. Literally, they’re like, come and try our software and make more money.

[00:38:17] Annette: Right.

[00:38:18] Sarah: They’re essentially paying you to try it out.

[00:38:20] Annette: And get excited about this. I think that sometimes we get scared instead of getting excited. Get so freaking excited about learning something new and learning a way to make more money.

[00:38:33] Sarah: Yeah, actually, when you schedule your weekly and monthly, title the date with yourself, Make More Money, and you’re not going to miss that appointment.

[00:38:42] And if you’ve got, what, Colleen, less than five properties, would you have them schedule their weekly at 30 minutes or an hour?

[00:38:49] Colleen: 30 minutes for less than five properties is perfect.

[00:38:52] Sarah: Great. Boom. This is doable, everyone. So if you need any encouragement and accountability, you know where to find us on Instagram, @thanksforvisiting_. You can email us, hi@thanksforvisiting.com. Even better, not that we don’t want to talk to you, we actually would love to talk to you. You can also reach out to PriceLabs’s customer support.

[00:39:13] It is not one of those customer support systems where you email the abyss and hopefully hear back in 24 to 48 hours via email? No. In their chat, their whole team shares a responsibility of being the customer service. They have webinars that hardly anyone attends.

[00:39:30] So when you attend, you get like one-on-one support. They are actively wanting their users to use the software. They want you to stick around and use it. So they are making sure that you are getting really great support and making sure that it is demystified and that you don’t feel overwhelmed.

[00:39:46] So we’re happy to be there and answer any questions, but truly, the team at PriceLabs– and you can meet them all month long with us, and they’re really great human beings. So there’s that too. All right, Colleen, anything else before we sign off? 

[00:38:55] Colleen: Nothing from me.  

[00:38:56] Sarah: All right. Well, with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:39:57] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we’re–

[00:39:59] Both Annette &Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:40:00] Sarah: Talk to you next time.