[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey y'. All, welcome back to another episode of the short term show special episode series on the Zion national park slash Southern Utah market.
Today we are talking about calendars, pricing, seasonality, anything related to pricing the short term rental that you are buying to figure out how much you should be making each month, year, whatever. So we've got Cody Roberts, our Southern Utah agent. Then we have Luke who needs no introduction, but go ahead and introduce yourself.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Oh please listen one person at a time.
Short term rental management podcast and yeah, management Monday, 10 years running. The ShortterShop.com and a full time landlord and part time joke maker.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: In your, in your mind joke maker maybe not a joke lander.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Okay, here we go
[00:00:58] Speaker A: for one by the way. Anyway, so Cody, first let's talk about the seasonality of this market. We've talked about it in previous episodes, but let's just go back over it really quickly because this is the calendars and pricing episode.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Yeah, so definitely. So typically what you will see for peak seasons is going to be spring and fall and spring over the fall. So spring is the most popular time.
It's coming in right before it's too hot. If you remember, we've talked about this before, we're in the desert, it gets upwards of 120 degrees in the summertime, so it can get pretty hot. Now that doesn't mean people still don't come during the summertime because it's an outdoor activity and people like to come during the summer as well. But the peak season is the spring.
Summer is still busy. Winter time is our lullaby. That's when we won't get as many bookings, but we still do pretty good because people that are from areas that have a lot of snow or that's really cold, they can still come during the wintertime. And fun fact, a lot of the community type pools or even private pools, they'll heat them during the wintertime. So you can still have great fun activities outside. But yeah, our peak season is in the spring and fall.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Awesome. So opposite peak season of a lot of short term rental markets. So if y' all are out there thinking you might want to buy one, your second, third, you know, next short term rental in a market that has different peak seasons than the ones you already own. This might be a cool market for that. So Luke, what would be your pricing and calendar strategy in a market like this?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Well, you know, I mean something to consider is a small town, right? And you, you only have a, the actual city itself only has about 700 short term rental permits and so that's something to consider. Your.
The saturation word may or may not be involved here, you know, but there's other areas outside of the city where you can do this as well, and that's where Cody's going to come in handy with being an expert in the area and knowing where you can and cannot do this city, or, I'm sorry, the national park gets about 5 million visitors a year. All right? So this is. This is a whole different thing than, say, your Smokies or your Branson, because less travelers, but also much less places to stay. You know, it's a whole different vibe. And I think this is a great.
For somebody who really is invested in the area, loves going there, been going there since they were a kid, that kind of a thing, and looking for something that they can, you know, use with the family for many, many years. And, And. And all of that is a perfect market for that. So as far as tourism, you know, it is something you're gonna need to keep an eye on. I always do multiple base prices on price Labs, and I think that this market is perfect for that, where you have, you know, anywhere from 10 to 15 base prices per year. You're going to do that on your custom seasonal calendar. If you're using price labs, again, you're more than welcome to use whatever pricing software you would like, but that's the most common one around here. And obviously your March through May are going to be, you know, probably as high as you're going to get through the year. And then fall, September, October also going to be pretty high as well. And then you're doing your best to fill in the gaps in between those dates.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Okay, so knowing that, where are you setting. How are we figuring out where to set our base prices when, if we're new to this?
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Oh, 100 enemies all the time, you know.
Yeah. If you're brand.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: I'm sorry, what's an enemy for people who may just find this on YouTube and haven't listened to the whole series already?
[00:04:53] Speaker B: I'm gonna. I'm gonna get into that, but obviously Air DNA is. Is the first place that people go when they first get into this, and the most popular kind of data source out there, but there's plenty of them now. There's dozens of them where you can pay for, you know, data on. On other vacation rentals in the area, but for me, I'm going to go again. There's only 700 of them in the city itself, and that doesn't mean you're going to end up in the city. But I'm going to go find the property that has the most reviews. You know, this is enemy method 101. Find a property has a lot of reviews.
Find a property that has no reviews. I mean, you might even put these on a spreadsheet, or you can also favorite them on Airbnb. You can favorite them on Price Labs, so you can just refer back to them. You can build a comp set and your neighborhood data on Price Labs.
So again, I keep bringing up Price Labs. If you're brand new to this, it's a great idea to get a subscription there. And we do not offer any sort of affiliate codes or anything like that. So we're just giving honest opinions here, which is very important to us, and I think it's a good thing to point out.
So I would go on there and start building out my comp set. And again, you can heart properties on Airbnb, and they'll just be in your favorites list, and you can go back to them. And I would study them. And that's why we call them the enemies. Because, you know, way back in the day when that term was invented, we were like, let's make this person our enemy and figure out how we can conquer. You know, so that's what I would do. I generally prefer the property that has a lot of reviews. However, we do want to look at the property that doesn't have a lot of reviews and.
And also the properties that's got really great photos and maybe one that doesn't have great photos because there's really no such thing as a.
As a bad sample set of enemies. Now, there are enemies that are not doing their job. That doesn't mean they're not bad at being an enemy, because you can go in there and figure out what they're doing wrong and how you can improve on it. How do you know they're doing things wrong? Their calendar's empty.
Simple as that.
And then to be honest with you, if their calendar is too full, they're also doing things wrong.
You really only want, you know, again, depending on your market, depending on time of year, what you're looking for is the next three to four weeks to be, you know, depending on size of the property. A lot of variables here, but maybe 70 to 85% booked for the next three to four weeks is a nice little landmark, and that's somebody who's, you know, doing their job. Now, if off season, we may be looking at 30 to 50% or less.
So obviously, the time of year that you're looking at these does matter. And that does not mean that if you go look at, you know, October right now, which is traditionally a pretty busy mark, a busy month in this market, that it should be booked because it's a busy month. No, it's too far away.
And, and some folks will have success booking October this far out. And, and I say this as we're recording this in the springtime, just for cont.
However, you know, like I said, there are people that do like to book those big, important, heavy months far out. And there's ways to do that. You can advertise, you know, peak season, disc pix season deal or something like that, or you can do, run a promotion. There's a lot of promotions available now on all the listing platforms. VRBO, Airbnb, booking.com booking.com actually kind of started the whole promotions thing, although we don't see as much traffic from them in the United States as we do in other countries, as booking.com does operate in 47 countries, which is more than twice as much as many as their next closest competitor, which would be Airbnb.
So a lot to be said there, but really what I'm looking for is somebody who's working hard somewhere in that 100 review range is ideal for me. To be honest with you, once they get past four or five hundred reviews, they're probably a little, you know, bored and, and moved on with something in their life and, and maybe not paying as much of attention, but they're still, you know, definitely worth looking at.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: So, okay, so that's comp sets who you should be looking at to figure out what your base prices are. So let's say you've got this stuff figured out and you've owned it for a few months, and we're coming up on high season and you don't have bookings in, let's say, let's say October is the highest month you're expecting to, to get a lot, and you're, you're, you're not seeing your calendar fill up. At what point should you panic and at what point? And how do you, how do you fix that if you're coming up on high season and not seeing a lot of bookings?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Excellent. Excellent question.
The, the secret is it's, it's a ratio between price per night and advanced booking, right? So how far in advance am I booking this versus how much am I charging per night? And it's somewhere within that formula is perfection.
And if you're new, it might feel a lot more Warm and fuzzy to just go ahead and get October booked in, you know, July.
But if you've been doing this for a while, it's kind of like, you know, the cowboy sneaking up on the cows versus the cowboy running and jumping on the cows quickly or something like that is a terrible analogy. But you get my point. You get to the point, you get, you do this long enough, you realize, you know, okay, we can mosey on down to October and take our time and really get what we're looking for out of it.
But I would say, to answer your question, with an actual number, which I hate to give hard statistics, five weeks for a peak month, like, October is where I'm really looking for it to start picking up. Or maybe like a Labor Day.
I think a Labor Day is going to be six, five to six weeks, depending on the size of the home. If it's a smaller home, we could definitely do three or four.
But let me put it this way. If. If it's, if it's March and somebody books my Labor Day today, I'm. I'm a little scared. I'm like, oh, crap, I priced that thing too low. You know, so I'll go look at it and be like, did I, did I nail it or did I not had that recently with a Fourth of July, My, my biggest kind of. My flagship property 4th of July booked, and I happened to notice it and I was a little nervous and I went. And it ended up being a record breaker for me.
So I, you know, even though it booked further in advance, because this was, this was probably April when this happened for July, even, even though it booked a little further in advance than I normally would like, it was a fantastic price. So, you know, there's a sweet spot there of like, hey, keep your prices a little high until they get within six, seven weeks and then start paying attention. I'm again, major holidays and big peak months, but you also don't want to miss it either, because if you get too close, you know, if you get like right up on a Memorial Day or a Labor Day and it's not booked yet, you could be looking at, you know, just a regular old price per night because you kind of waited too long.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Gotcha. That makes sense. So price it higher further out, and then when you get about seven weeks out, start to incrementally lower it and then.
And then go from there.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Yeah, and it sounds.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Your hair with the, with the face.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Well, you know, we, we were just playing tennis a few minutes ago, so I'm still a little Humidity. But anyway, you got me sidetracked. You know, it sounds complicated. If you're brand new and you're listening to this and you're like, oh my, what are they talking about? This is too much work. Why would I want to do this? There's softwares that'll, you know, do it for you. Now you do need to manage the software and pay attention to it and get in there and, and get on it and, and again, when you're new, you don't know what, what you should be telling the software to do. So the, the biggest thing for me when teaching people how to price a home is, is patience.
You really don't know what the property can do or what the property should be doing until you've owned it for a good, you know, half a season or more.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: What would be your advice on minimum night stays? Because a lot of people, they'll see like big property managers in their market. 5 night, minimum night stay, 7 night, minimum night stay in the high season. What would be your advice on minimum night stays?
[00:13:07] Speaker B: You know, that's something to keep an eye on when you're dealing with a market that is traditionally, you know, a property management company market, which I'll let Cody speak on that here in a second.
Most of the time you'll see that they have pretty high minimum night stays.
And, and that's a really easy way to, to really kind of smoke the competition. There's no reason to not to not lower your midnight stay. I mean it's a great way to keep your cleaner happy, keep her, you know, him or her busy working more and keep the property functional. It's a great boost to your, your gross income for the year. But yeah, that's something to keep an eye on. I have no problem renting a one or a two bedroom for, you know, one night stay. Now I don't even know if those exist. I'll let Cody talk about that. But four, five bedrooms. Three, four, five bedrooms. You know, definitely two night minimums. I'm totally cool with that. So what size properties are we dealing with on a regular basis?
[00:14:07] Speaker C: Well, one thing on the, the night stay that looks, that's typical. So nightly rentals or one night stays are a thing, but they're not as popular here. So the average here is two and a half to four and a half nights. That's what's typical.
So that doesn't mean that you can't get a one night stay and it's just not, not as common. And then the popular, from what I've Seen, the popular size homes are going to be your, your three plus bedrooms. And I would say even four and fives are a little bit more popular.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Yeah, which makes sense. I mean, you know, if you think about the grand scheme of the world, like whoever, if you're listening to this on YouTube or wherever, think about your town, where you live. Are there a bunch of one bedroom houses hanging out in your town? No. You know, it's pretty uncommon for a one bedroom house to exist or a two bedroom house to exist. Now they do exist in major vacation destinations like the Smokies. There's tons of zero and one bedroom houses in the Smokies, but in the grand scheme of residential real estate, they're weird.
Why would a builder even build such a thing? You know, it doesn't make any sense. We want to build bigger builder property, build a bigger property and make more money on it.
Usually a zero, one or two bedroom and average Joe USA is going to be a condo or a townhouse type of a thing. So definitely not surprised.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: The other side of it too is the average people per stay is 3.6. Right. So we're seeing more families showing up and that doesn't mean that they're, you know, obviously we get all range of people, but the average at 3.6, you know, you're going to need more than a one bedroom to have 3.6 people in there, obviously.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. But you know, it's interesting you say that the. What was the midnight's day average?
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Two and a half to four and a half.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Okay. So again, if you've got a property that you're willing to do one or two nights, no reason not to, you may get, you know, 5 to 5% more bookings per year, something like that. But again, you know, if the average property size is three, three and a half bedrooms, you know, you probably don't in a lot of cases want to go down to one night stay on a three bedroom because, you know, what are we doing in there? It's a big house. Why are you only staying one night? There's, you know, this age old thing. Whereas potential for a party might go a little higher. Now, Cody, are we partying in your market?
[00:16:38] Speaker C: I mean, obviously it happens, but no, it's not as big as some of the other markets that I've seen.
So luckily it's not as big of an issue here.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I just don't see that. To me it seems like the families coming through on the motorhomes and things like that.
[00:16:56] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay, so I would say, the biggest mistake that I see people make with pricing and pricing tools like price Labs is, is they'll come to me and they'll say, oh, Avery, I'm not making any money. My calendar's not full. I'm not getting bookings. And I'll say, okay, let me see your price labs. Or I'll say, what does your pricing look like? And they'll say, I don't know. Price Labs is doing it.
So Price Labs is, you do have to manage it. You can't just turn it on and walk away and go sit on the beach with a margarita for the rest of your life. You have to manage your price Labs. You need to be in there. Luke, would you say weekly or daily that they need to be looking at their price labs and making sure it all. Everything's getting booked and working the way that it should?
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Well, two things. Number one, you're right. We do see that every single day. You know, people come through short term shop/sdsplus.com we do coaching for very inexpensive, specifically for Avery's clients that we were, you know, trying to help them along their house buying journey.
You can find
[email protected], but it is every single day that people, they get a little lazy and they're like, I'm paying Price Labs. Which, by the way, is very inexpensive.
There is a big difference between a revenue manager and price Labs. Now, that's a whole nother can of worms. There are people out there that you can pay to just do your pricing. To me, that's also not that great of an idea. If you're gonna do that, just give it to a property manager. Let them do everything. You know, I mean, that's me. There's plenty of property managers out there, and there's nothing wrong with using them. So why would you just have just. Just the pricing? I don't know, but it's easy to fix that. You just have to kind of change the mindset and, you know, make them realize, hey, this race car is not going to drive itself 100%.
And then what you. There was just two comments there that I've. I got lost in the first one,
[00:18:50] Speaker A: I think that was really it, that Price Labs or whatever pricing tool you're using, you need to pay attention to. Oh, the second question was, how often do they need to be in there managing it?
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Again, no, wrong answer. You know, again, a client that makes, you know, $1.7 million a year owner operator on a single family residential rental property, not going to Pay as much attention, doesn't need to pay as much attention, but somebody that's just a regular, you know, person that, that really is finding. A lot of people find joy in this. You know, we have tons of clients that really love this.
They, they, they love having it as a part of their family. It almost becomes like an additional family member of the property, you know, so that person's going to be in there changing prices more often. We see it all the time where this almost becomes their identity. You know, it's like I'm, I'm a short term rental host and I, I play tennis and I like race cars, you know, or whatever.
And those people are going to be in there more often. But, you know, to answer your question, I would say that if you're not doing it, getting in there once a week, you're definitely doing yourself a disservice. Just keep an eye on things, Make a few tweaks here, here and there. Make sure the close end dates are getting some action.
You can even check your metrics. You can see how many impressions you're getting on Airbnb versus vrbo, how many people are looking at your listings versus how many people are clicking on your listings. And you can really drive yourself nuts with it if you want to.
So be honest with you. At Short Term Shop plus, we see both, we see both of those candidates, but the people that are driving themselves nuts to the point where they can't even breathe with all this, these numbers and data. And then you get the people that are the complete opposite of that, where they just go to price labs, help me click, help me choose a base rate, and then they never do anything ever again. You know, so a couple of different
[00:20:37] Speaker C: profiles and Luke Avery, I've heard you guys both say this multiple times, which is this, this is not a passive income arena. I don't even know if there is passive income that truly exists in the world. Like, you do have to work at this and to be successful, it takes a little bit of effort.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: Yeah. To be honest with you, it's the same thing with long term rentals. We have apartments, we have duplexes, we have single families that we rent to, people, you know, with long term leases.
Passive. Who came up with that? I mean, is that Kiyosaki? Who do we blame for that? You know, but at the same time, Cody, I love every second of it. Now, I don't love it when something burns down or when I have an issue with this, that and the other, you know, know, there's, there's all kinds of things that have been. That have happened in our career, we don't love. We don't love the drama. But. But even, you know, if you like. Last weekend, Avery and I went and looked at a couple of our long terms. We were in the town where they were and we went driving around. We had a couple extra hours to kill.
And I was lucky enough to get her to go with me because normally I'm by myself when I do that stuff. And we found all kinds of stuff wrong with these two. We had two, Two properties empty. This is town where we have, I don't know, 60 something units. And we went and looked at the two empties and they both had major.
I was like. And one of them was already rented. You know, this is. And I have those with a property manager. And I called him up and I was like, dude, what is. Why is there a sign in the yard? This thing is not rent ready. He goes, actually, we already have a tenant on it. And I'm like, have they seen it in real life? Because this is not. I'm not moving a tenant into this thing. These floors are terrible. I mean, again, it was nothing big. We could.
We get my. I'll get my crew in there. It's done in three or four days.
Even if the tenant is moving, already signed a lease, we can have it done by the time they move in. But this is not a pro. I was like, this is not a product I'm going to present to, you know, a tenant.
So, you know, again, I tell you that because I. I loved it. I walked in there, I took a bunch of videos. We're going to change this, this, this and this. I send it over to my team, we turn it into a nice, very nice looking house for these folks to move in and raise their kids or whatever they're doing and, and, you know, making the world a better place.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: The same things with the short term. It's the same thing with the short term.
They said they're just vacationing rather than doing spelling homework, you know.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Right, right.
Well, Cody, I think we've pretty much covered everything. Do you think there's anything else that we need to cover in terms of pricing or calendars, revenue management in this market?
[00:23:16] Speaker C: No, honestly, I think we captured all of it.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: All right, well, thank you guys so much for listening to the short term show special episode series on the Zion national park slash southern Utah area. Luke, looked like you wanted to say one more thing before.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I did want to say that. I. I look like a pale walking dead zombie compared to you. You look great by the way. And it also is Avery's. Avery's birthday today. So I did want to mention that. Happy birthday and thanks for having me.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Thank you very much listeners. If you are interested in buying a short term rental in the southern Utah market, email us at agents at the shorttermshop. Com and we'll get you connected with Cody and with that we will see you next week.
