AirBNB - Rental Rate and Occupancy Analysis for prior year

AirBNB - Rental Rate and Occupancy Analysis for prior year

Weehawken, NJ · Member since 2015 · 31 posts · 14 votes

Anyone had advise on how to do some historic rental rate and occupancy analysis for AirBNB or VRBO. 

Background .....
I have some 3 family buildings in the Weehawken/Hoboken NJ market and under threat of divorce my wife has spoken, 'if we buy another house it needs to be a shore house.'   But she didnt say I can't rent it out too :)

I am trying to get a feel for some shore towns and was playing around on AirBNB by looking up listings in both the shore towns and in my local Weehawken market.  Weehawken is the closest NJ town to NYC and should be ripe for NYC tourists.   What I found was that many of the listings seemed to have huge percentage of the calendars going forward unbooked.    It may be a little bit (but not much early) for summer rentals but on both Weehakwen and NJ shore but I was very surprised at the high percentage of unbooked days.  It could very well be that these units were overpriced and another set of units are getting much better occupancy.  

In the case of the shore rentals I really want to see how they did last year.   Does anyone do this kind of analysis?  https://www.airdna.co/ seems like it might but I as unsure how these guys(and sites like them) can tell if a place was rented.  I guess they can check availability and prices daily and if the place is marked as unavailable before the day expires they can assume it was rented at the last price?   Is that how this works?  Can anyone recommend a site that does a good job on providing information like this?  It seems like there are a lot of results when searching AIRBnb pricing analysis. 

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Investor · Denver, CO · Member since 2016 · 533 posts · 433 votes
9y

I've used airdna.co numerous times.  I purchase their raw data by zipcode(s) to analyze historical/competitive properties and massage it into the critical details I am looking for (need some basic excel skills).  I am not aware of one for VRBO/Homeaway so I do my own exhaustive searches to build competitive info.    

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  • Investor · Denver, CO · Member since 2016 · 533 posts · 433 votes
    9y

    I've used airdna.co numerous times.  I purchase their raw data by zipcode(s) to analyze historical/competitive properties and massage it into the critical details I am looking for (need some basic excel skills).  I am not aware of one for VRBO/Homeaway so I do my own exhaustive searches to build competitive info.    

  • Flipper · Huntington Beach, CA · Member since 2016 · 83 posts · 40 votes
    9y

    airdna.co is one, I've ran analysis on my own area though and the numbers weren't very accurate, lets just say I would be retired If I was actually earning what they say people do in my area. The most accurate way to do it will be you, create an excel of a variety of different properties, from 2beds to 4beds etc etc, list pricing and location of these places, and any unique amenities then throughout the year go through their calendars and mark down their booked days.

    You may be correct on the HIGH amount of unbooked days, if the place you're looking at is primarily just a summer retreat then it may be too early to tell what their occupancy is. But you're on the right track by not trusting their pricing as often people have their homes overpriced and don't get very many bookings because of it. Another way to get a good indication of demand is to look through their reviews as well, I would use both airbnb and homeaway/vrbo for this. If there are a lot of listings with a lot of reviews then you know the demand is pretty high in the area.

  • Real Estate Broker · Boise, ID · Member since 2017 · 101 posts · 41 votes
    9y

    Those sites are a good starting point but all they do is write a crawler which crawls VRBO, Homeaway, and other listing sites for data. The occupancy rates they come up with are certainly a decent jump off point but they are not 100% accurate. They just look at the number of blocked off days relative to total availability and assume a certain percentage of those blocked off days are holds instead of actual reservations. Let me know if that does not makes sense. 

    If you wanted to get s true idea of occupancy rates I would talk to/work with an existing property management company that have internal data of their own. That way you know you're not guessing or making assumptions. 

    All that being said, "shore homes"(oceanfront homes) do have a high occupancy when renting short term. I don't have any experience in NJ but I do have plenty of rentals on the OR Coast that do very well. 

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