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I am considering becoming a host in Shanghai, China. I’ve been doing some research and notice that hosts here have VERY LITTLE reviews. For example, one host with a nice property rented her place last year for about 258 days out of 307 that she had it available, but she only has FOUR reviews. This is only one example, but it is the trend for this city. Why is that? This is something I have to get to the bottom of before I take the step to becoming a host.
I think it is a problem because there are some who rented their properties out for many days and have zero reviews. Many with low occupancy rate had less than 10 reviews. Actually, not many have 10.
I just took a look at Shanghai and almost every host as I scrolled down and down and down had over a hundred reviews. The fewest reviews I saw was 19. So I have no idea what you are looking at. How many thousands of Airbnbs are there in Shanghai? And you have no way of knowing (unless you know her and she told you this) from just looking at the listing how many days she rented or had available. It’s possible that she got a repeat guest or longer term booking who didn’t leave a review for each visit.
I realized that I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have said “trend for this city.”
It would have been accurate if I said “part of the city where I’m thinking of hosting.” So my bad!
I was looking at data from airDNA. I compared airdna and airbnb and there are more properties shown on airbnb, so there are some discrepancies that I didn’t notice before. Thanks for your post. It alerted me to that.
I did some back calculations to get an estimate of how many days certain properties were rented using data on airdna.
It seems like where I want to host has little reviews. I keep on seeing properties that were rented for like 50 days and have only 1-2 reviews. Hmmm…
Sometimes we learn our market by participating. Set your Booking options to only allow bookings for the near term. If it turns out to not be your cup of tea then no loss, just stop hosting.
I’m a customer success agent at AirDNA. It can be common to see properties with high revenue yet low reviews in our data. The majority of professional hosts and property managers are using Airbnb as only one of many channels to market their property. HomeAway, Booking and other private websites will often make up the majority of total bookings. The good news is that no matter where a booking actually occurs, the core signals to our algorithm remain the same. In most circumstances, bookings from other platforms will also be picked up as a reservation by our model. Listings with high performance but low review count will most likely be listings that are performing well on other sites than Airbnb.
Drop us an email or call and we would be happy to run through a demo of the Shanghai dashboard with you!
That’s what I initially thought. In China, Tujia, an airbnb equivalent, is huge. I think it’s bigger than airbnb for the domestic market. However, I don’t think Tujia can be synced with Airbnb. I asked Airbnb about this and they don’t know for sure, but they don’t think it can be synced. I’d ask Tujia myself, but I can’t speak Mandarin. People around me who can are so computer illiterate, if I say “sync,” they’ll think about the kitchen, so I got a problem there…
Since I have you here, I’ve been working with chat people on Airdna (maybe you’re one of them). Shanghai has a huge number of international guests, so I’ve been trying to find a cluster of properties that have a majority of their reviews in English. I have yet to find one property like that. I looked at all the top properties, but none. Very weird. What do you think is going on? This information is crucial to me.
