A MBA student ask for your help and do a simple survey

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I am a student in the MBA programme researching Airbnb pricing and am about to a host, I am asking for 3 minutes of your time to help me complete the questionnaire below to be better landlords together.

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Thank you to every host who supported and participated.

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One thing you should be aware of is that most of us are not “landlords”. Landlords are those who have long term tenants, and are subject to landlord/tenant laws.

Short term rentals mean we are hosts, not landlords, and we have guests, not tenants.

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You will not get accurate ‘landlord’ information here. As @muddy says, we are not landlords.

There are people on this form who have only just started in the business; there are those who have been in the hospitality industry for decades.

Members here are from all over the world. Most offer completely different rental options. We are extremely diverse.

You won’t get an accurate view of the industry from members here. I suggest you post your questionnaire elsewhere - somewhere with more defined criteria.

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Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate the diverse experiences and backgrounds of the members here. My purpose is to collect different insights, understand that diversity may bring a wide range of responses, and find as much as possible in the research to help preliminary hosts use dynamic pricing. I’ll certainly consider your suggestion, do you have any better publishing platform suggestions? Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

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Thank you for pointing out the distinction. I appreciate the clarification between “hosts” in short-term rentals and traditional “landlords” in long-term tenancies. I’ll ensure to use the terms accurately moving forward. Thanks for your understanding and guidance.

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Do Hosts need help on this, beyond using services like PriceLabs or Wheelhouse?

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The problem with most of these surveys (and we get a lot here) is that it doesn’t appear that most of the surveyers have done basic research and think that hosts are in need of things which already exist.

There are plenty of options for dynamic pricing that hosts have been using for years.

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Thanks for your reply. You mean most hosts use AIRBNB’s smart pricing? or other dynamic pricing tools?

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I don’t know about “most”, but those who do use dynamic pricing have several options to choose from, either Airbnb’s, or others.
And many hosts have no interest in having AI set their prices and prefer to do it themselves.

An algorithm doesn’t have the ability to truly compare properties and determine a fair price for them. It doesn’t know if 3 bedroom house A is in a noisy location and 3 bedroom house B is in a quiet area, it doesn’t know if House A has a responsive, caring host and House B has a host who is hard to reach and doesn’t deal with issues promptly, it doesn’t know if House A has cheap, wobbly, stained furniture and House B has a nicely curated collection of furnishings.

In other words, what it is capable of comparing for its pricing are not necessarily similar listings in but a few criteria. Most hosts here can get more $ than what pricing AI suggests without sacrificing guest satisfaction. And simply acheiving full occupancy by pricing competitively isn’t what a lot of hosts consider to be worthwhile.

I’d rather have my rental sit empty than accept some low price and get the bad guests that often come with too-low pricing.

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Thank you for your reply. Your suggestion is very important to my research :+1:. I think the purpose of the research is to help small landlords to simply use dynamic pricing to increase revenue and improve service levels.

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You are referring to hosts as landlords again.

And why do you think small-time hosts need to “improve service levels”? If hosts get 5* reviews, they are obviously providing good service to their guests. And bad hosts won’t improve their service levels just because they have increased revenue.

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In many businesses it’s important to manage expectations. This applies especially to the hospitality business and particularly to STRs.

I want you to understand your expectations here with your survey. I strongly suspect that your results will not be useful to you because of the enormous range of hosts, hosting styles, locations and rental types represented at this forum.

Please do not take them as ‘typical’.

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Sorry, I mistyped again, What I meant was that smaller hosts can offer more competitive rates with some of the AI tools.

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I assume I’m pointing out the obvious here, but doing a survey gratis is not going to get many busy “landlords” here to participate. We are used to being offered a fee.

With three grammar mistakes in your topic title alone and frequent replies to this forum for hosts (see forum name) misidentifying them as ‘landlords’ casts doubt that the survey itself is constructed correctly. Yes, it is a student, but it looks to me like we are heading for a poor grade. I’ll pass.

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That’s not called “mistyping”- it’s called not understanding who you are trying to market your survey to.
And in one post you talk about AI increasing revenue, now you say “more competitive rates”, which means lowering them. No one is interested in a race to the bottom.
And why is this aimed at “smaller hosts”? Smaller hosts can manage their businesses fine without AI. It’s the hosts with dozens or hundreds of listings who want to automate everything.
It really doesn’t seem like you understand the business or the market you are targeting.

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@Prettycool - how is AI in pricing different than the dynamic pricing tools out there already?

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Thanks for your feedback. It’s made the difference between landlords and hosts deeper for me.

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I’m starting to think the original post here and the responses by the OP are all AI generated.

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Nono no, I want you to be assured that I typed every message myself and I don’t use AI to generate answers yet.