Running an Airbnb business or short-term rental company is equal parts hospitality and strategy. Sure, guests love the cozy decor and personal touches, but at the end of the day, you are running a business. And success comes down to how well you compete in your market. That’s where Beyond comes in.
At Beyond, we’re proud that our users’ listings are consistently outperforming the competition by 20% or more in revenue.
But don’t just take our word for it. This isn’t a guess, but grounded in hard numbers. So, how do we actually calculate that? Let’s break it down:
The Goal
We are invested in your success (it’s literally our business model), which means that we are constantly improving our solution to ensure that you make the most revenue and get the most bookings possible. And to make sure we’re delivering on that promise, we need a way to measure performance and check in on how you’re really doing.
To truly understand performance, we look at how your properties stack up against other short-term rentals in your market. And to keep things fair, we make sure it’s an “apples to apples” comparison, measuring your listings against a carefully matched group of similar properties, also known as a comp set.
Step 1: Listing Matching
First, we connect your property that is using Beyond to its Airbnb counterpart. This process is important because it adds rich data that we do not get from property management system (PMS) connections, like guest reviews and property capacity. If your Airbnb account is connected to Beyond, this process is easy, and we match based on the Airbnb ID.
For PMS connections, we do some detective work by:
- Narrowing down listings by bedroom and bathroom counts
- Analyzing the location using precise coordinates
- Comparing the title of the listings
- Comparing similar amenities
- Comparing reviews and star ratings
- Comparing photos with image recognition technology and a deep neural network
This process ensures that we have found your property’s “twin” on Airbnb to ensure we can build accurate comp sets. Beyond is currently working on a future version where users can view and confirm listing matches for utmost accuracy.
Step 2: Building a Comp Set
Once we have matched your listing to its Airbnb counterpart, we then create a custom competitive set (comp set) for each of your properties connected to Beyond. This helps us benchmark your property against a group of similar properties. Here’s how we do this:
- We store details regarding property features like bedroom count, bathroom count, amenities, star ratings, and more.
- We filter for properties that are physically located near yours.
- We add weights to each feature and factor by importance (for example, having a private pool might be more important for listing similarity than a 4-star rating).
- We then calculate a similarity score and select 20 similar properties for comparison.
This ensures that we have a fair, data-driven set of listings to compare your performance against.
Step 3: Calculating Performance
When your listing and its comp set are ready, we measure how your property performs relative to these similar listings. We also calculate how many listings in your Beyond account have an available competitive set to ensure there is enough statistically significant data to make a conclusion.
From here, we compare revenue performance data to confidently say “your listing is outperforming the market by 20% or more.”
Why This Matters
Property managers use Beyond to maximize performance and beat their competition, not just to say that they use a dynamic pricing algorithm. At Beyond, our revenue management and data science teams are constantly working to innovate our dynamic pricing algorithm to make our customers more money.
When you win, we win. Check out some of our latest algorithm enhancements and their impact to revenue:
Ready to beat your short-term rental competition? Join thousands of others using Beyond today!
