Good morning. I’m researching pricing to see if AirBnB is a good move financially for me. I’m in NC, close to the VA border with a large (4 beds, 2 baths), older home out in the country. I’m fairly close to a few universities and a Coast Guard base. I’ve looked at PriceLabs and AirDNA and my area (zip 27909) doesn’t come up in the search. I’ve looked at my local competition, too, but am clueless on how to price the property. I’ll only be renting out the whole house. Any suggestions on how/where to start with pricing? Thanks for your help!
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Hmm, did you try just looking around as a guest on Airbnb? I did a search for week-long stays under the “flexible” travel setting using the search term NC 27909 which suggested to me “Elizabeth City.” So I clicked on that and then zoomed out to look at the area. Then I entered 4 adults and 2 children as the number of people staying, since that would get me larger places with multiple bedrooms, like yours. I can see several 3-bedroom whole houses going for around $2000 a week at this time of year – not sure what the pricing would look like other times of year. And some 4 bedroom places for more like $3000 a week. These higher priced ones tend to be pretty fancy places near the water, or they have pools or other catchy amenities. Then I went to “filters” and selected 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. There are a few things in the area when I zoom out, ranging from $1200 to $5000 depending on how fancy and how close to the water they are.
So maybe you can just spend some time looking at how other things around you compare, and try that. When you first list, you’ll get a boost in traffic which will help people find your place while you get established and build some reviews. You can also offer discounts to help do that. But it can take a while to figure out the right pricing. For my Airbnb, I think we charge about twice now what we did when we first listed it a year ago, as we figured out what the market would tolerate and built a reputation. And it fluctuates a lot by season, so I can charge 2x to 3x more in summer than in winter, and 10x more on the week of New Year’s. So it can be hard to get a sense for your overall annual income just from looking at local competition.
I would think that being near the universities and the Coast Guard base would help a lot, but the universities stuff would be fairly seasonal: you’d attract families during the week that people are dropping off their kids and during sporting events and reunions. Not sure about the rhythms of a Coast Guard base.
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@lisanddavid, thanks for your response and insight. I was trying to compare apples-to-apples without too much variation in age, size, amenities. Thanks for helping me see that I should be looking through a bit larger lens. I’ll work on that this weekend.
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I am in a town near two large universities. During football games and graduations my price for my larger place is $600 a night and that is on the low side compared to other places. But other times of the year it’s just a small town that I live in so the price is around $120 a night
Even iIf you don’t own the property yet, aim to estimate its annual running costs. Add to that your property tax, any mortgage repayments, utilities and so on.
Then add to that the annual cost of running a rental - STR insurance, local taxes, licenses, fees, consumables, cleaning staff (if applicable) co-host (if applicable), maintenance, a good sum for contingencies and other foreseeable expenses.
Once you’ve done this and know how much the business will be costing you per year divide the final sum by the number of nights you realistically expect to be booked.
This gives you the nightly cost at that occupancy level. To determine your nightly fee, add the percentage profit you’re looking to make.
It’s a good idea to ask your accountant to do this because it’s highly likely that you wouldn’t think of all the annual coats that need to be added,