DPGO Help Archives

Advice

Finding Your Ideal Vacation Rental Investment Location

March 11, 2021

Identifying your ideal vacation rental investment location is a serious challenge, even for experienced STR hosts. If you don’t live near your target location, it’s almost impossible to familiarize yourself with the norms of that unique market.

Short of paying for targeted market data, there are very few ways to get the sort of information you need to choose an investment location. Well, until now! Markets by DPGO was created to give all STR industry stakeholders the opportunity to gain in-depth market data for free!

What is Markets?

As a company that specializes in market data collection and analysis, we understand that sometimes access is one of the biggest hurdles. And we wanted to change that! Markets by DPGO was created to grant access to everyone.

Our Markets feature is exceptionally easy to use – all you need to do is enter the name of a county in the United States or an area in Canada and we’ll show you the key facts and figures. Our network is always expanding and we’ll update this page whenever our coverage area grows!

What Can I See on Markets?

We wanted Markets to show people the most important data. This data display covers the basic level of our market insights. It will also help you identify areas that may be of interest to you.

The insights that we display for free include market supply, day of the week price factor, average daily rate, minimum night stay requirement, occupancy rate, day of the week occupancy, and our helpful DPGO map!

How Does This Info Help Me Find A Location for My Vacation Rental Investment?

Let’s break it down. We’ll go through every data display and explain what it does and how it can help you identify areas of investment interest!

Market Supply

Knowing the total number of listings in any given area can show you more than you think. By using basic principles of business, if you find an area with a high number of listings, this usually means that the area is popular. On the other hand, areas with lower total listing figures can often suffer from lower levels of tourism interest.

However, this may not necessarily always be the case. Exclusivity comes into the discussion here, as do STR restrictions and simple geographical issues like plot size or topography.

We also made the decision to break down our market supply display into property types. It’s important to know which type of property is the most popular, and of which there is a possible shortage. You can use these displays to understand which type of property is the most popular.

Occupancy Rate

Arguably one of the most important metrics, our occupancy rate data block takes the occupancy rates of every listing in your target county/area and compiles an average for your convenience.

Areas with higher occupancy rates seem more impressive, but you need to keep the time of year in mind. For example, at the time of writing this, Orange County in California has an average occupancy rate of just 53%. Remember that this is an average figure of confirmed bookings in the area over the next 30 days. It is not a reflection of how well this area performs on an annual basis.

If you’re looking for a vacation rental investment location, then occupancy rate is a good indicator. While using the full DPGO service, we display a year of occupancy rates to give our users the best understanding of how any given area fares throughout the year.

Average Daily Rate

The average daily rate (ADR) tells potential vacation rental investors how much they stand to make on an average day as a rental owner in that market.

Again, this figure is an average of the confirmed booking prices for the next 30 days in that local market. This figure is also affected by global travel restrictions, seasonality, and other factors.

It may only be a local average but this figure gives you vital insight into your potential earnings. As a real estate investor, you should be examining the ROI (Return on Investment) critically in order to ascertain if you would be able to make any money back.

Day of the Week Price Factor

We’ve broken down the average daily rates by day of the week so you can see what is being charged on an average daily basis in your chosen area over the next 28 days.

Some STR locations depend heavily on weekend bookings, and to encourage more midweek bookings, hosts opt to charge lower rates for stays that commence between Monday and Wednesday. This information could be valuable in your hunt for the ideal vacation rental investment location as it gives you insight into the kinds of booking trends this area usually experiences.

Minimum Night Stay

Knowledgeable STR owners understand that setting minimum stay requirements will protect them from a spate of single-night bookings.

In order to keep your listing in line with the rest of the market, our minimum night stay display is broken down into duration sections. This gives you the easiest view of how many listings have certain minimum night stay requirements.

While you don’t want to always follow the trends and norms in your market, it may be worth considering how to carve yourself a niche in said market. Inner-city properties which are ideal for business travelers for example might attract more bookings if you allow shorter minimum night stays.

Day of the Week Occupancy

Sometimes it helps to see how the occupancy rates fare across the days of the week. This will help you identify whether the vacation rental investment location that you are considering is a weekend-only destination, or the occupancy is spread out evenly across the week.

Weekend-only destinations are often tricker to make a success. In order to break even, your weekend pricing needs to be much higher. After all, there are only four or five weekends in a month, which optimistically gives you ten bookable nights per month. This means higher rates and running the risk of scaring off potential bookings.

How Can DPGO Help?

Finding the right vacation rental investment location is a complex process. As a potential real estate investor, you’ll need to make sure that you’ve researched every aspect of the target market. If you haven’t, you risk losing money on a grand scale.

With DPGO, you’re giving yourself the best chance at making your STR business profitable. The key to success is information and we specialize in giving you the tools you need to price yourself to better business health.

We designed Markets to offer STR hosts, owners, and managers, even if they are not DPGO users, to offer guidance to those who need it. Markets is one of the easiest ways to access information that can help you decide on your independent pricing strategy.

DPGO users enjoy these insights and more when they sign up for an account and connect their Airbnb profiles. Our dynamic pricing engine not only optimizes your pricing but automates it too. Staying competitive is vital and DPGO makes sure you stay on top of the game 24/7, 365.

To start your DPGO journey, register now for your free 30-day trial.

While you’re here, why not stay a while longer and read through some of our latest posts? Here you can read our Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your DPGO Dynamic Pricing. Knowing the profitability of Airbnb Plus vs being an Airbnb Superhost is really important to identify your next steps – learn more here. Learn how travel trends affect STR pricing here.

DPGO Help

Stay in Complete Control: Dynamic Pricing with DPGO

March 8, 2021

The leap to dynamic pricing can feel intimidating, but we’re here to show you that using DPGO is as easy-as-pie and by far the best decision you can make for your short-term rental business.

If you’re not using the right pricing tool, turning on dynamic pricing can sometimes feel like you’re giving away control of your listing, but nothing could be further from the truth when you’re using DPGO. We designed DPGO as an optimization tool. We work for you to make your property listing the most profitable it can be.

Our pricing tool is incredibly detailed. We want our users to feel 100% in control of their listing. We can’t automate your pricing without you first setting up the ins and outs of your pricing strategy. Of course, we will help you decide on a pricing strategy, but we need some information from you first. These input values that we ask you to specify give us a pricing framework within which to work.

We know that it can seem scary, but that is what this guide is for – to show you that you are in control of your listing at every stage of the dynamic pricing process. Nothing happens to your prices without you first completing the set-up process. DPGO is a tool for business optimization, not business hijacking.

With that said, let’s dive straight into the DPGO registration process.

How Do I Register for DPGO?

Step One: Go to Our Website

Visit www.dpgo.com and click the blue “SIGN UP FOR FREE” button in the top right-hand corner. If you clicked on a Registration link from one of our social media posts, blog posts, or emails, you’ll be taken straight to the registration page.

Step Two: Enter Your Details

Enter your personal details, agree to the Terms and Privacy Policy, and click “SIGN UP”. Or, if you prefer, you can register with your Google or Facebook account.

Step Three: Connect Your Airbnb Account

After you click “SIGN UP”, you’ll be taken to the Connect to Airbnb page. Here, you’ll need to enter your Airbnb login details and allow DPGO to import your property listing specifics. DPGO needs access to these details to create our dynamic pricing recommendations.

We gain access to Airbnb in read-only mode, and we never store your security-sensitive information like passwords. We are only permitted to make certain Airbnb-authorized changes, like updating your minimum stay requirements. If you have more questions about how DPGO accesses your Airbnb account, please feel free to reach out to our support team and they will answer any questions that you might have! You can reach them at support@dpgo.com.

Please Note: If you do not have a unique password for Airbnb because you signed up for Airbnb with Facebook or Gmail, you will first need to create an individual password for your Airbnb account. You cannot connect to DPGO without having a password specifically for your Airbnb account. Click here to visit the Airbnb help page.

Step Four: Airbnb Approval

As you’re granting DPGO, a third party, access to your account, Airbnb may need to verify your identity for safety reasons. This discretionary step ensures that you’re kept secure and that Airbnb will allow your connection with DPGO to go ahead. Depending on your account, Airbnb may send you a verification code (either by email or text, depending on which you select) and all you need to do is enter the code that Airbnb sends you, and the connection can get started!

Step Five: Wait for Connection

DPGO will then establish a connection with your Airbnb account. Please be patient and do not close your connection window. If you run into any issues, please feel free to send an email to support@dpgo.com and we’ll be on hand to help!

It doesn’t take long for DPGO to connect with your Airbnb account but it’s important that you stay on the page and do not refresh your browser window.

Please Note: You may also receive an email from Airbnb alerting you to a new sign-in session. This is totally normal and nothing at all to worry about. Please do not change your Airbnb password. If you do, your connection with DPGO will expire and you will have to go through the set-up process once again.

Step Six: Set-Up Completed!

Now your Airbnb account is connected to DPGO, you’ll be presented with our recommendations for your dynamic pricing strategy.

In the next section, we’ll walk you through every settings tab and show you how to make the most out of DPGO!

How Do I Make Changes to My Dynamic Pricing Settings?

Price Settings

The “Prices” subheading menu allows users to enter their desired Base Price, plus a figure for maximum and minimum pricing limits. The vast majority of our users opt to enter both a Base Price and a minimum price, but not a maximum price.

Your Base Price forms the foundation of your pricing strategy. We give you four options: you can choose one from our three recommendations (Conservative, Recommended, or Aggressive), or you can enter your own number for a ‘Custom’ strategy.

The ‘Conservative’ strategy is aimed at keeping your occupancy at a steady and reliable rate. The ‘Aggressive’ strategy is designed to get you as much revenue as possible. The ‘Recommended’ strategy is a balance of the two.

Setting a minimum price ensures that our pricing engine never sets your rates lower than that number. This figure should cover your costs and include a buffer, which you can decide for yourself. We do not offer recommendations for either minimum or maximum price. When you add a minimum price, we would recommend watching the average nightly rate for your area. If your minimum rate exceeds the average, there is a possibility that your listings won’t get the same exposure on Airbnb and this will result in a lower occupancy rate.

This is your DPGO Pricing menu. Here you can set your Base Price, plus your Minimum and Maximum prices.

Minimum Stays

Having a strategy for minimum stays can make the difference between a profitable Airbnb listing and one that costs more than it makes. Accepting single night bookings means higher cleaning costs, and quite frankly, more work.

The Minimum Stay menu tab allows you to enter a global minimum night stay requirement and allows you to select whether or not you want to allow gap night stays. The Gap Night function works only for those gaps in your calendar that cannot be sold as one booking because of the minimum night stay requirements. In this case, the algorithm reduces the requirements for the gap to be sold as a complete package. If you do not want to allow single-night stays, simply disable this setting.

We wanted our users to experience the pinnacle in Airbnb management technology, so we designed a range of features including our day-of-the-week minimum stay capabilities. This menu allows you to set minimum stay requirements according to the day of the week on which the booking starts. Most of our users opt to set higher minimum night stays for weekends. Often our users set their weekends to have a 2-night minimum in order to ensure their entire weekend is booked.

You can also set date-specific and time-sensitive requirements in regards to the length of stay. The time-sensitive minimum stay settings allow you to create rules to automatically adjust the minimum stay requirements based on the number of days that will elapse between the booking date and check-in. Date-based minimum night stays allow you to manage different requirements across different periods. For example, most hosts opt to set a higher minimum night stay requirement over Christmas and New Year, or during school holidays.

Discounts

On our Discounts tab, users can set both last-minute and long-term discounts. For last-minute discounts, we offer the standard four DPGO strategies: Conservative, Aggressive, Custom, and Recommended. If you select ‘Custom’, you can enter the percentage discount that you’d like to offer. You will also need to enter the number of days before check-in that the discount will be valid.

We see plenty of variation in these numbers, but if you’re not very familiar with offering discounts, try the ‘Recommended’ strategy and review your listing’s performance after a month or so.

We’ve divided long-term discounts into sections: weekly, monthly, and custom. With DPGO, you can decide on the percentage discount that you’d like to offer for bookings over 7 and 28 days. You can also set custom discounts for custom lengths of time. Make sure you review their effectiveness after a month and make some changes if you’re not happy with the performance.

Weekends

We thought long and hard about how we can streamline our user’s weekend pricing strategies. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are critical opportunities to increase your Airbnb profitability.

Again, you can choose from four strategies: Conservative, Aggressive, Custom, and Recommended. If you chose ‘Custom’, you’ll be able to input your own percentage increase for weekend bookings. Please note that your ‘Custom’ percentage is not static. If the recommended percentage shifts, your custom percentage will change too.

Seasonality

Short-term rentals, no matter where in the world they are located, have peak and off-peak business seasons. Our ‘Seasonality’ settings allow our users to adjust their pricing strategies according to the month of the year.

Our recommendations are based on historical booking trends in your area as well as data-driven forecasts for what we think the market will do during your next peak season. We’re sure you’ve come to realize by now that we will always allow you to input your own values and design your own strategy when we can. And our ‘Seasonality’ settings are no exception.

Users are also able to manually alter their monthly seasonal adjustments with our helpful monthly slider menu. These seasonal adjustments are relative to your Base Price, so if you update your Base Price, your seasonal adjustments will also change.

Set Your Property Nickname

For ease of reference, we recommend using our nickname function to help track your listings more efficiently than ever!

While you’re here, why not have a read of a few more of our posts? We recently developed a 6 Ways to Success guide for Airbnb hosts. Ever wondered if Airbnb Plus or being a Superhost helps with business? We found out… DPGO is for everyone, and we wanted to go into more detail on how DPGO is the perfect dynamic pricing tool for property managers.

Advice

The Dynamic Pricing Tool for Property Managers

February 4, 2021

If you’re looking to boost your Airbnb occupancy rate with a clear pricing strategy, then our dynamic pricing tool is perfect for you! DPGO is ideal for every Airbnb host, no matter the size of their listing property portfolio. Whether you’re managing one listing or one hundred listings, DPGO can help!

Our algorithm works with real-time market data to determine the best price for your listing. Our recommendations are specific to the given market environment at the time. Not only does this help vacation rental owners optimize their earnings, but it can also be used as an added tool for property managers and businesses.

In this post, we wanted to explore the suitability of the DPGO dynamic pricing tool for use by property management companies.

Multi-Listing Dynamic Pricing Tool

There is no limit to the number of listing you can manage under one DPGO profile. In fact, we have clients with over 3,000 listings! DPGO assists with automation, strategy, and reporting. Our dynamic pricing software takes the manual effort out of rental pricing.

Our pricing recommendations are based on a number of factors. These include the market environment, competitors, exchange rates, the pricing limits you set (like base price), and more. Our pricing solutions mean that property managers can set up a pricing framework and leave us to do the rest.

We are always available to help users with a large number of listings set up the pricing rules for each of their properties. And because this customization process can be laborious, we’re on hand to help! For users with a smaller number of listings, setting up your pricing limits takes minutes. Plus, you only ever need to do it once!

We offer four pricing strategies: Recommended, More Conservative, More Aggressive, and Custom. You can choose different strategies for each of your client’s listings, depending on their needs. Our Recommended strategy is unique to each listing and is created by analyzing expansive amounts of local market data. Our price recommendations give your listing the best chance of securing bookings. By making use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we optimize your daily rates with competitive pricing!

DPGO Charting Capabilities

When you’re managing the prices of multiple short-term rental properties, success reporting is important. Your clients will want to see your progress, and our charting capabilities will help you illustrate your progress!

Our DPGO Performance Dashboard features a range of easy-to-read graphs and charts. These charts illustrate a range of data from the average length of stay to historical data and pricing. We offer high functionality for multiple users via the user-friendly DPGO interface.

Dynamic Pricing Tool Health Score

By using our smart pricing solutions, your channel managers can keep track of a listing’s process and improvement thanks to our health score capabilities. We generate a listing’s health score by analyzing how well your listing booking out in a set period. Then we use that data to create a score out of 10. The higher the score, the healthier the listing! DPGO also allows you to keep track of your previous health scores, which helps you keep track of progress.

Our DPGO interface also shows you the average Health Score in your listing’s local area. This is a great comparison tool and will help you understand how to further improve your property’s performance! It gives you a real-time figure to take to your clients and illustrate how well your company is doing in managing their property.

Better Airbnb Revenue Management

We already did a post on revenue management, but we didn’t really go into detail about how we can help property managers. Your clients want their listings to be a success. And while you manage the listing, we help you find the optimal prices to get as much for your clients as possible.

Our complex data metrics allows you to pinpoint why a listing is not succeeding in the way it should. Then our expert advice can help you fix it! Price optimization is a very specialized subject and only those with access to market data can truly optimize your prices.

In the rental industry, it’s all about finding the right price. With DPGO, finding that price, securing that booking, and impressing that client has never been easier.

Short-Term Rental Seasonality

When you’re managing multiple listings across multiple cities, the high season could be different for each one. But how are you supposed to manage seasonal price changes? Good thing you’re a DPGO user! We designed a special seasonality function that allows you to change your pricing based on the month. And you can set this up months in advance. DPGO users will be given four options for seasonality adjustment strategies: Conservative, Aggressive, Custom, and Recommended.

By pricing more aggressively in your busier periods, you can secure more revenue. Similarly in historically quieter periods, offering more flexible rates will boost occupancy rates. This will increase a listing’s annual profitability and make your clients very happy!

Once again, if you need help setting up seasonality adjustment settings, let us know and someone from our Support Team will be in touch to offer assistance.

Last-Minute Discounts

Ideally, your listings are booked for the optimal price with the ideal length of stay, well in advance. But what should you do if you still have gaps in your calendars and the dates are fast approaching?

In order to sell as many dates in your calendar as possible, we created the automatic last-minute discount function. If you get within a set number of days before an unbooked date, you can set DPGO to offer a preset percentage discount in order to encourage a booking.

We will never advertise rates lower than your base price, so offering a discount simply secures a booking and scores you extra revenue when you might have missed out completely. As long as your Base Price is set correctly, offering a discount simply increases the likelihood of a booking. Yes, you are bringing in less money than you would at non-discounted prices, but any booking above your Base Price is better than no booking!

DPGO Integration Opportunities

If you’d like to explore the option of a DPGO integration with your property management systems, then you can contact us directly at info@dpgo.com.

If you’d like to try DPGO, then sign up for your free 30-day trial here. You don’t need to register a credit card when you sign up and there are no hidden fees! If you decide that DPGO is not for you, cancel your profile at any time, for no cost whatsoever.

While you’re here, why not take a look at a few of our other blog posts? Do you know which cancellation policy is right for you? Well, find out here! We also dived into the data on how to best price your listings during high season!