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I was reading the AirBnB September update and noticed Chesky mentioned their pricing comparison tool where they compare your price with “similar listings”.
So I tried it for my listing. We’re in an area with widely diverse listings and not much quality consistency, so I wasn’t expecting much. Well, I was right. We have a large three-bedroom villa with pool and staff, and they just grabbed anything in our area that was a home or apartment with between one and five bedrooms.
I can’t follow their math or logic - how can an average be a range? And this data actually isn’t helpful since the unbooked properties are cheaper than the booked properties!
Anyone using this tool? Is it useful for you?
I used that ages ago and realized it was ABB pushing for a race to the bottom for pricing. “Your in-home bedroom with a king size bed, large pool, canal view is $30/night more expensive than the in-home share 5 miles away from you, smaller bed, no parking in the driveway, and the pool is in the community for community members only. So lower your price, please, to get more bookings.”
I raised my price, got more bookings (the king sized bed really got a surprising number of bookings), and added more photos of how the place is laid out.
An algorithm can’t determine what is a “similar listing”. It compares your place to ones with the same number of bedrooms, beds, bathrooms, guest counts, etc. It has no idea whether one place is old and poorly maintained, or kept in great condition. Has no idea whether one place provides a few threadbare towels and cheap microfiber sheets, or stacks of fluffy towels and 800 count Egyptian cotton bedding. Doesn’t know if you’re on a quiet dead end street or a noisy thoroughfare.
My town is small enough that I am familiar with most of the places Airbnb lists as “similar”. They aren’t. So I can’t imagine their pricing tool would be useful.
Not in my neighborhood! They used any separate property that has 1 to 5 bedrooms.
The analysis might have some merit in a “condotel” or other neighborhoods that have many of the same kind of property. But I agree with @muddy - there’s far more to comparing properties than just bedrooms, beds and bathrooms.
Wow, you’d think at least # of bedrooms would enter into the algorithm.
I have a “similar property” on my page that’s a “Monster Truck on the Beach”, a truck with a camper on the back. My place is 2km. from the beach, on a quiet countryside road. This “similar property” boasts a scrappy dirt/sand yard (my house is set in a lush tropical garden) and an outside shower stall that consists of a grubby looking curtain strung up around a shower head on a pole.
I think there are too few properties of our size in the area. There’s 14 (including us) within a two-mile radius of us, with four of those being apartments.
