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Airbnb Pricing Tips

August 24, 2016

Whether you are just starting out on Airbnb, or an experienced Airbnb Superhost, pricing your listing is one of the more difficult aspects of the Airbnb hosting experience.

Unlike major hotels and airlines that have hundreds of identical inventory, your Airbnb is as unique and unlike any other, so you really only have one opportunity to maximize revenue on your listing for any given day.

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At Beyond, our whole team started out as Airbnb hosts ourselves, and we experienced the same problem most hosts encounter: what is the best Airbnb pricing tips to maximize revenue?

Although the Airbnb occupancy rate can differ by every market, here are 4 tips to get started pricing like Airbnb Superhosts:

1. Pick a starting Base Price for your Airbnb listing

This should be roughly your average nightly rate for your Airbnb, and if you do not have historical data for your listing, you can start by searching your local competition on Airbnb. Find a listing on Airbnb of similar size (bedroom and bathroom) and quality, and ensure that listing has a few confirmed reservations in the next couple of months. You can do this by making sure the Airbnb listing you are looking at has a few positive reviews and has a few booked days in the upcoming months. Take that Base Price and use it as your starting average nightly rate.

2. Understand your market's basic Airbnb seasonality

Are you located in a ski resort? Or Miami? The seasonality for every market is different, so it's important to do the research to understand the rough seasonality of your market. You can view our 2015 Airbnb seasonality graphs on our Plotly page, but if your market is not listed, feel free to shoot us an email to support@beyondpricing.com and we'll upload it shortly!

3. Account for the difference in demand on weekends compared to weekdays.

Airbnb demand can differ drastically depending on the day of week. It's safe to say that most major Airbnb markets have stronger weekend demand than weekday demand, but that is not always the case. Adjusting for the difference in demand for all 7 days can be tough, but you can get a rough sense of the weekend versus weekday demand difference by trialing your Airbnb listing in our demo.

4. Increase Airbnb prices for major events.

Holidays, festivals, conferences, and any other major urban event can all spike Airbnb demand and allow you to increase prices for your Airbnb listing. However, sometimes these major events can have an inverse effect as Airbnb competition spikes for first time hosts listing their apartment or home for that one event alone which happened in Philadelphia for the Pope visit and for the Superbowl in San Francisco. Knowing exactly what to price for each event can be tricky, and year over year demand for any event can change. So too can the Airbnb supply in that market. For this reason, we highly recommend using our real-time demand-driven Airbnb pricing tool such as us, Beyond.

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