Is a Professional Airbnb Listing Worth It?
As more investors and homeowners get into the short-term rental industry, it’s more apparent that there’s a lot of opportunities to be had in the market. In turn, guests now have a broader option on listings and some exceptional hosts offer the best experiences driving more listings to their space than others. If you’re curious about why some properties outperform the rest, then you might be looking at professionally managed Airbnbs. In this article, we'll find out if letting the professionals manage your Airbnb, truly is the right thing to do.
The stats on optimised vs non-optimised listings
When you register for the services of an Airbnb management company, you are also enrolling your property to be set-up professionally.
The results of the BDRC Jones Donald Australian Private Property Investor Study found that, out of the 500 investors asked about the profitability of their properties, 51% of those with professionally managed properties yielded positive rental returns, compared to 36% of those who self-manage.
The stats on professional vs non-professional photography
The first thing a potential guest will see on your listing is your photos. They can be the very reason why your listing caught the user’s eye and lead to a booking. It only stands to reason that good photography is a must on Airbnb.
How important is good photography? So important, in fact, that Airbnb did an internal study on the subject and found that listings that are presented with professional-level photographs earn 40% more revenue than those without.
A Carnegie-Mellon University study dove even deeper to find out what makes a great photo. The study cited 12 separate parameters of Airbnb listing photos that could be optimised like brightness, composition, and image clarity. Each parameter was measured in terms of how many extra booked nights might be gained from their optimisation.
The difference was significant. They found that 72% of the half-million photos analysed were characterised as “low-quality” and more notably, if all 12 parameters were optimised, it could lead to an extra 60+ booked nights per year.
Keeping your photos in good quality and updated is a must as it directly brings in revenue. Updated photos also set the expectations of the guests and meeting those expectations is the best way to avoid low ratings.
Importance of optimised pricing
While Airbnb used to be a small start-up, we now know that it’s already a household name. Given how massive the company has grown, it’s not much of a surprise that competition has also increased exponentially. What optimised or dynamic pricing can do for you is keep your listings at par with the rates of the most competitive listings in your area based on the market’s supply and demand.
We know that demand for Airbnb fluctuates since seasonality, day of the week, and special events all play a role. A Tuesday night will understandably not have the same value as a Saturday night and a week with a festival going on in the area will be busier than a week when no special occasion is happening. So what happens when a host has a static price?
While seasonality, day of the week, and festivities all play a part, the location of your property and how it’s positioned will also play crucial roles. Expect higher occupancy for vacation homes during the weekends but Airbnbs designed for business travel will probably do much better during weekdays.
What we have to remember is that dynamic pricing plays a large role in maximising your property’s return. So much so that according to data from Beyond Pricing, static pricing plans can stand to gain up to 43% on revenues when switched to dynamic pricing. Property management usually includes optimised pricing for your listings and you can take advantage of this when you sign up for their services.
At Hometime, we take care of every single component of your Airbnb listing, from cleaning, customer service, maintenance, and yes, even professional photography and optimised pricing. Get in touch with us for a free consultation and let’s work together on making your listing reach its highest potential.
