STR Data Applications

What You Can Do with Short Term Rental (STR) Scraped Data?

Unleashing the Power of Short-Term Rental Data: A Comprehensive Guide for Property Managers

STR scraped or sourced data is a valuable resource for anyone involved in the STR industry. It can be used to make informed decisions about everything from where to invest, underwriting loans to how to price your properties and more. We have aggregated a few ideas below to get you started. 

• Identify profitable markets or properties 

• Build a forecasting algorithm 

• Understand your target market

• Track Trends & Performance (And show vs tell owners how awesome you are!) 

• Optimize Pricing and Revenue Strategies 

• Build your own Pricing Algorithm 

• Improve Marketing Strategies 

• Make smarter decisions and more! 

Identify profitable markets or properties 

By analyzing data on occupancy rates, pricing, revenue, and other metrics, you can identify markets where STRs have high demand. This information can help you make informed decisions about where to invest in STRs when paired with the cost side of the equation. 

By comparing STR performance to the cost side of purchasing or leasing real estate you can compare CapRates or cash flow on arbitrage. It is important to also look at regulation level data which is still in the nuances of being collected at scale to be analyzed in mass. However, if there is a large amount of supply in a given market it is a good indicator a percentage are legal and diving further is a good idea. You can start diving into local municipality websites and articles to understand regulatory sentiment and rules. 

Take this a step further and you can identify properties that beat the market due to scarcity or market norms in that market. For example if you notice through analyzing the data that there are only 1% of homes over 5 Bedrooms and none allow pets or have an EV charger, that will be where you can earn the highest return. Just make sure you build in flexibility to the property for lock offs to hedge your bets.

Identifying good investment properties will be only as accurate as your forecasting algorithm, more on that below! 

Build your own Forecasting Algorithm 

Collecting all this data allows you to make predictions or forecast about the future. If you identify a target property and develop a CompSet for that target you can derive an occupancy curve and set pricing for that property to understand what an open calendar in the future might do or model new demand events. 

Having the widest view of a market through scraped data will allow you extrapolate to properties where there may not be enough historical data or sample. For example you can develop a curve to show the marginal gain of adding occupancy or bedrooms to infer what a 12 occupancy 3 Bedroom will perform at if there are only 8 occupancy 3 Bedrooms in a market, or extrapolate what a 7 Bedroom home will perform at if there are only two in a market and both have a lot of blocks. 

Curious to learn what goes into a Forecasting Algorithm? Dive deeper here! 

Understand your target market

If you are currently a STR operator or a firm looking to purchase a STR property management company scraped STR data is best to get a measure of what the Total Addressable Market (TAM) is in a given market. Or what potential expansion is there post acquisition. This method will also help if you have a certain segment of inventory you target for your portfolio if it is multi family, large luxury or homes that do over $X per year. 

By analyzing sourced data, on a subset of the target market, on guest demographics, you can get a better understanding of your target market. This information can help you tailor your marketing and pricing strategies to appeal to your target market. This method can also help you to understand if your demographic is prevalent in this market. For example if your brand resonates well with the digital nomad or Disney family traveler you will want to make sure this new market is on brand. 

Track trends & Share Performance 

By evaluating scraped or sourced data you can track data on things like occupancy rates, revenue, and guest reviews, you can identify trends in the STR industry. This information can help you stay ahead of the curve and make sure your STR business is successful. 

By using sourced data you can better understand guest demographics and trends. However, if you use scraped data you will have a wider sample size to build more comparable CompSets in order to truly track performance and gain pricing insights. 

Most importantly with scraped data you can show your owners how they are performing against the entire market, not just those reporting into a sharing tool. This important show versus telling will allow owners to discredit marketing mailers from other managers. Why would your manager fire you for a letter they got telling them they could do 30% better with a new manager if you are already showing them they are beating the market by 30%? 

If you are a journalist, news publication or Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) you will care more about large trends using scraped data to give you the widest view to cut your reporting. 

Optimize your pricing

By analyzing data on occupancy rates, revenue, and other metrics, you can optimize your pricing for maximum profitability. This information can help you avoid overpricing or underpricing your STRs. Understanding how you are performing against the market and your CompSet will help you understand how you should be adjusting price and marketing going forward. 

Build out your own Pricing Algorithms

If through analyzing the data you notice there are patterns or trends that the large pricing algorithm companies are missing you could use the data to build your own pricing algorithms. Each market has their own norms and if you have a large enough pressense in your market it may make sense to develop your own. Technology makes it easier and easier to analyze large data sets and build models on the fly. With AI now a days you can even ask it to develop and test models for you! 

Curious to learn more about what goes into developing Pricing Algorithms? Dive deeper here! 

Improve your marketing

By analyzing sourced data on guest demographics, you can improve your marketing efforts by targeting your ads to your target market or identify a segment you may be missing. This information can help you reach more potential guests or build out new programs to target demographics you may not attract enough of and increase your bookings.

By evaluating scraped bookings you can widen your view to see if there are market norms that are differing from your performance to inform new ideas to add to your strategy. For example are certain types of homes attracting a different booking pattern that you should change your pricing or marketing strategy for that subset? Or if you notice longer stay lengths being booked that you are not capturing you can spin up specific marketing around mid or longer term stays, buy four get the fifth night free or snowbird campaigns. 

Make better decisions

By analyzing data on a variety of metrics, you can make better decisions about your STR business. This information can help you improve your bottom line and grow your business. Such examples could be if you are looking to expand into a new market or purchase a STR manager how are they tracking against the market, are you buying off an inflated non normal repeating year or is there no more additional TAM to go after? 

If you are involved in the STR industry, then you should consider using STR scraped data. It is a valuable resource that can help you make informed decisions and improve your business offering the widest view of the market which gives you more flexibility in pivoting the data a number of ways. 

Have questions about use cases, approaches or data? Lets us know, we are here to help you build the best STR products or make the best STR decisions for your business.