I’ve been doing my research in my area and there are roughly 150 or so similar listings to me (can take over 2 people, most are “whole house”). When I turn on the IB filter it drops to 25-50 most weekends, and then when I turn on the SH filter as well it drops to like 5-10 places. Even when searching for only 2 people (which is of course preferred by me!), it still is only like 15 “whole house” places, so still great!
So getting SH will be huge for me, especially off season as anyone who uses those filters will see that I’m like 30% cheaper than the cheapest of those places. There are of course other factors as most of those places are in the city and I’m suburban (though still great for vacation/site-seeing) and my place is above a garage and almost 100 years old and a lot of these are fancy apartments or actually a whole house, hence why I’m 30-300% cheaper than these places.
BUT, I have a great clean place and have 89% 5-star reviews and the only 4 stars I have are under “Cleanliness”- because it’s an old building that needs to be upgraded due to old materials. Kinda stinks, but obviously cabinets from the 50s don’t look as those recently remodeled. I can live with that. And we’re planning to redo those eventually and then I can charge more!
But back to my main concern: Has anyone seen a change in their guests and reviews after getting SH? Of course I’d like to maintain it as it would give me a huge search boost. And I’m planning to stay exactly the same since I know what I offer I’m not raising my prices until I do actual upgrades, etc. My main concern goes along with what @konacoconutz has commented on why she doesn’t care for SH in that it may make unrealistic expectations with future guests and therefore bring future reviews down.
I’m 100% on accuracy. My reviews support that too and only “complain” about things I fully disclose, haha. I show pictures of the steps people have to use to access the apartment. I show clear pictures of everything and caption them. I just know people tend not to read and am mainly concerned that someone’s going to go cheap and filter SH and expect a fully upgraded space and then be disappointed because they don’t read or look at pictures.