Take your revenue management to the next level with PriceLabs (Ep593)

Jasper Ribbers (00:03.325)
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad. Today, my guest is Becca Madigan. She is the head of the solutions team at Pricelabs. And she's here to talk about the recent breakthrough updates that Pricelabs released. Quite a lot of really exciting functionality, I have to say, that you guys released. So Becca, welcome to the show.

Becca Madigan (00:24.15)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (00:28.054)
Thank you so much for having me Jasper. This is really exciting.

Jasper Ribbers (00:31.313)
Yeah, yeah, you guys been working on that update for a long time, right?

Becca Madigan (00:35.958)
Yeah, this is really years in the making. So Price Hubs was launched back in 2014. We've gone through various iterations of our algorithm and various iterations of just our tools in general. But this one we've really been focusing on probably for the past two years. And then we've also added in a bunch of other really cool releases that come from not only sort of.

our wanting to improve on the tools, but also a lot of it is coming from our user feedback as well. So it's been really great to kind of bring that to market and be able to kind of show all these features that people have been asking for quite some time.

Jasper Ribbers (01:14.889)
Awesome. Well, I know we have a lot to cover, so let's, why don't we dive in? Why don't you start off with a quick kind of high level overview of the main updates that you guys have implemented.

Becca Madigan (01:17.206)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (01:25.654)
Yeah, do you want to go over sort of what Pricelabs is or just generally just jump into the, everybody knows? Good, okay, wonderful, good. Awesome, no, I love that. Yeah, so kind of like the main thing that we've sort of been focusing on, like I was saying for the past two years, it's been taking up a lot of our data science team's bandwidth as we've actually re-engineered our…

Jasper Ribbers (01:31.733)
I think people will be listening to this thing. They probably know.

Becca Madigan (01:51.934)
algorithm essentially from the ground up. So we've launched our new algorithm. All of the new users that have been joining a price lab since maybe August are on the new algorithm. We were A-B testing before that, and we're slowly rolling out the new algorithm to all of our current users. But we've made some really incredible changes. So in the past time since 2014,

A lot has changed. There's a lot more really good data available. There's data science in general has just sort of improved over time. So we're able to do a lot more. Essentially our data team got together and they said, if we were to rebuild this from the ground up, what would we actually have done differently? How can we really make the algorithm be sort of how it should be if we were just to completely reinvent it? Which can take some time. It takes a lot of…

a lot of effort, a lot of sort of re-engineering and testing. But what we've seen, at least in the past couple of months when we've started to sort of test this and launch this with our new users, is that on average, people are actually seeing a 26% uplift in Revpar if they weren't using Pricelapse before, moving to this new algorithm. And this is actually really incredible because a lot of the world sort of started using the algorithm.

going into maybe their shoulder season, like August, and at least in the US tends to be kind of like when things start to slow down. So we sort of actually expect that uplift to be greater once we've sort of been testing this for an entire year.

Jasper Ribbers (03:30.569)
Amazing. So yeah, what are the biggest updates?

Becca Madigan (03:35.414)
Yeah, so again, just to the algorithm, we've got a bunch of other things I will talk about in a minute, I'm sure. Essentially, how we were treating data before, we would sort of figure out markets, right? So if you are, so I'm based out of Charleston, South Carolina. So if you're in Charleston, we would essentially say, okay, this whole area generally is going to behave like the rest of the area. If you live in James Island versus Mount Pleasant versus

sort of these sub markets, generally things are going to act the same. So that's how we would treat our seasonality. We'd say this is gonna be your high season, this is gonna be your low season. And we could make some manual adjustments. We actually added a pacing factor last year to say, okay, is the market changing? Maybe there's more supply or less demand or something's going on that's causing this season to not really perform the way that it has in the past.

Now, so we've sort of moved away from that sort of model of like it is in a market essentially, and we are looking at the 350 closest units to yore. So if you have 10 units, even if they're within the same general market, if one's sort of on the east side and one's on the west side, there might be slight differences in demand throughout the year, but also, you know, day of week events.

all that stuff. So we've actually moved the seasonal model down to sort of that hyper local set of data and it's making it a lot better because you'll think about it. So again, we're using very similar size listings. So if you have a really large home, a six, seven bedroom home, there's tend to be a lot more extreme in their seasonality. If you're in your high season, you…

probably are going to pay more for a seven-bedroom home. Whereas if you're in sort of the low season, not many large groups are necessarily traveling together. That's just one example, but there's been a lot of really, really cool stuff that's been added to the algorithm. A lot of stuff that just me as sort of, you know, somebody that's working with the tool every day, I've seen…

Becca Madigan (05:54.078)
it's able to pick up a lot more nuances in the market and how things are really changing, which is really, really important nowadays because you're kind of having to deal with the new normal.

Jasper Ribbers (06:01.33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, 100%. So your algorithm now is called hyperlocal pills. And I just want to point out for everybody who's listening, regardless of what price app you use, you have to really understand what it's using as a comset to price your listing. Just to give an example, we're in Ida Wilde, and there's a market, Palm Springs, which is very closest.

Becca Madigan (06:08.302)
Yes. Hyperlocal. Paul.

Jasper Ribbers (06:28.441)
If you draw a straight line, it's super close to us. So if we put our market too wide, it's going to pick up units and Palm Springs, which has completely different seasonality then, because that's desert and we're mountain. So it's completely different. So for anybody out there, make sure you know what your app is comparing you to and make sure that that's actually accurate. Make sure it's the same.

It's high, it's local enough that it has the same market characteristics.

Becca Madigan (07:01.958)
No, definitely, definitely. And then in addition to like the hyperlocal pulse rollout, we've also rolled out like over 20, I wanna say like 26 or 28 other new features that are supposed to help both hosts and larger property managers. One focus that I think has been really, really interesting is that we're really trying to make data more accessible. We're trying to make…

allow you to really have a deeper understanding of your own metrics. So one thing that I've been pushing for and they've been working on for about a year is the new metrics on our dashboard. Before we showed you, we call them health indicators. There are sort of three dates that you can look at. You know, by default, seven days, 30 days and 60 days. You could basically see for every single one of your properties.

where you are at occupancy wise, relative to the competition around you. Again, those 350 or so similar size listings. Now you can actually look at a ton of different metrics, things like your pickup, things like your well forward looking occupancy, past looking occupancy, you can compare at the same time last year, but really just allowing you to sort of view everything on your dashboard.

just very easily. You can also filter. So if you wanna see all of your listings that are like, you know, less than 20% occupied, you can quickly pull all those right up to the top, which is really, really neat.

Jasper Ribbers (08:34.941)
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the performance metrics, because that's one of the things that I really enjoy, the functionalities that I really enjoy. And the reason I enjoyed him is because, especially if you have a larger portfolio, I'm helping one of our private clients who has 39 listings with their revenue management. And for me to go in there and click on every single listing and review everything that's in there would just be way too time consuming.

So I really like the performance metrics. So what this is, is on your pricing dashboard, you can basically select free metrics that you want to see on your dashboard. Now, before you guys only had occupancy there, right? And now, you can choose like a whole range of metrics, which is super helpful because, you know, it depends what you want to see, that kind of depends on your market.

Becca Madigan (09:19.239)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Becca Madigan (09:25.27)
Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (09:34.545)
Um, you know, I like to look at the occupancy, but depending on like what type of units you can, you might want to look at the seven day to 15 day to 30 day. And for, if you have larger homes, you might want to look at more like, you know, far out, right, like 30, 60, 90. But now we there's, you know, we, we were already able to select the amount of days that you want to look out. But now there's, there's a lot of stuff that you can look at, not just, uh, occupancy, right? There's a.

Becca Madigan (09:46.754)
further out. Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (10:02.269)
Revenue, Rathbar, ADR, there's Knight's Book, booking pickup. There's so much stuff that you can look at. And it allows you to quickly get an idea of what's happening, where we're at, which is part of my daily routine for revenue management. It's just scanning and seeing, OK, is there a red flag that I have to look deeper into? Is there a unit that's maybe

Becca Madigan (10:05.18)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (10:16.76)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (10:27.958)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (10:32.329)
not picking up on demand, or is there a unit that's not occupied, or is it a unit that's way too occupied, if you will. So yeah, that's something that I personally really enjoy about this feature.

Becca Madigan (10:39.214)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (10:46.454)
Yeah, and I will say you don't need to look at all the metrics. We sort of chose metrics based on what our users were requesting. Uh, if you add all of them, it might be a little bit overwhelming. So take time, get, you know, a little bit deeper understanding of which metrics are important to you. And then you can set it up so that you're, you're quickly able to reference things, uh, right, right from the dashboard there.

Jasper Ribbers (10:58.677)
Yeah

Jasper Ribbers (11:09.713)
Yeah. And actually, it's funny. I didn't even realize. You can add as many metrics as you want.

Becca Madigan (11:14.642)
Yeah, yeah, it used to just be those three, but yeah, now you can add as many as you want. So it's pretty cool. Cool. You're playing around with it right now.

Jasper Ribbers (11:27.766)
Yeah, it is. I'm actually updating my dashboard right now. Cause I was like, oh, I didn't realize that.

Becca Madigan (11:32.814)
You're like, wait a minute.

Jasper Ribbers (11:35.721)
That's amazing. There's no limit to how many you can add.

Becca Madigan (11:40.022)
Um, there might be some limit. I honestly, I feel like again, the limit is going to be like your ability to like understand all the data at once, um, more than how many you, you can physically add.

Jasper Ribbers (11:54.985)
Gotcha. Yeah, that's really useful. Another thing that's really useful is you can sort from low to high or high to low, right? So for example, I just added booking pickup in the last 30 days, right? And then if you sort that, I can see, oh, we had one listing that got eight new bookings in the last.

Becca Madigan (12:06.506)
You can also.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (12:21.365)
30 days, but we also have a few that got zero new bookings in the last 30 days, right? So that's like really good information to have.

Becca Madigan (12:25.847)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, another one that's sort of neat and I think underused is number of days sitting at your minimum price, especially like when you're going into your sort of off season, low season, shoulder season. If you're not getting any bookings and you're sitting at your minimum price for, you know, the next 30 days, that can be a really good indicator. Of course, you want to take into account like your operational costs and things, but if…

If there is any flexibility on that minimum, that's a really good metric to take a look at.

Jasper Ribbers (13:02.017)
Interesting. Minimum price hitting dates. That's the one you're talking about, right? Interesting. Damn, I'm going to play around with this after our podcast. Sweet. So we covered hyper local pulse, then we covered performance metrics. I personally, one thing that I really like is the fact that you guys now have an app, like a desktop app.

Becca Madigan (13:06.699)
Yeah, yeah.

Becca Madigan (13:12.374)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (13:30.954)
Yes.

Jasper Ribbers (13:31.633)
Cause I think one thing that we all deal with is you have a hundred taps open and then you constantly looking for, you know, where's the info. Just being able to, you know, just open up the app is so much easier. Does it actually speed up the system as well versus using the WebRiser?

Becca Madigan (13:37.668)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (13:48.586)
Yeah, yeah, we have found that especially if you are somebody like me or you that has a million tabs open. Again, I'm not part of our engineering team, but I think that we no longer have to share like computing data with the web browser, and that tends to free things up and speed everything up a little bit, a little bit more, which is really nice.

Jasper Ribbers (14:15.838)
Yes, that's definitely important because sometimes as useful as the softwares are that we can use these days, there's so much technology, sometimes it's a little slow. So being able to have the app and speed it up is definitely good. What else do we want to feature here?

Becca Madigan (14:23.398)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Becca Madigan (14:30.51)
Mm-hmm. Definitely.

Becca Madigan (14:38.03)
Yeah, I would say probably the smart presets is a really cool one to talk about. If you are new to price ups, you won't know that it was any other way. Essentially when you first log in and add your listings, there's going to be a little pop-up that says, hey, tell us a little bit more about yourself. What type of listings do you manage? Do you have short-term, mid-term? Are you like a multi-unit, maybe like a hotel operator?

Jasper Ribbers (14:42.047)
Hmm

Becca Madigan (15:06.102)
So you select what type of properties you have, and then you say whether or not you've used dynamic pricing before. And then when you actually go in to set up your listings, we show you essentially a bunch of different customizations that we've found to make similar operators successful. Not saying that you necessarily need to use all these customizations, but again, as we've been listening to feedback over the past couple of years, everybody says, price labs, you're great.

but maybe you can be a little bit complicated sometimes. It's sort of like going to one of those restaurants that has like a ton on the menu. It's kind of hard to like discern really what you want to choose. This way, we're kind of just able to sort of filter what you're able to see. All the options, all the customizations are still available to you. But again, if you are a short-term rental operator that has never used dynamic pricing before, we can…

quickly show you, hey, these are five things that you might want to customize from our system and here's why you want to do it and how maybe you want to make those changes. Again, just really making the system more accessible and just a little bit easier to use. I think it's really great. Of course, you don't like when you select those things on the pop-up, you're not stuck with those options forever. You can always go into your settings and make adjustments there.

Jasper Ribbers (16:25.948)
Mm.

Yeah. And I think this is something that I see with the people that I work with is a bit of a challenge. As you mentioned, like the, it's like, as, as a company, you have to, people want more functionality. People always want more functionality, right? Hey, can I do this? Can I do that? And you're like, okay, cool. Well, let me implement that. And then before you know, it's like, you have so much functionality that people get confused and overwhelmed, which is totally, totally understandable. So

Becca Madigan (16:43.986)
Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Becca Madigan (16:53.791)
Exactly.

Jasper Ribbers (16:57.593)
I think that's good that you can kind of, because I'm sure a lot of hosts just don't really know how to use all this functionality, what values to set. So just saying like, hey, you know what? Based on your unit info, this is kind of what we recommend.

Becca Madigan (17:07.059)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (17:12.466)
Exactly. I will say like I've been onboarding customers for a long time and sort of the biggest mistake that I see people do is they go in and they turn everything on and they just put Random customizations in because I don't I think that they think they need to so hopefully here There's like little info bubbles you hover over and it gives you a tip It really explains sort of the whys and the hows of it So hopefully it'll just make everybody's lives a little bit easier

Jasper Ribbers (17:42.201)
Yeah, by the way, I 100% agree. I see that. I see that as well. So one big piece of advice to anybody listening right now, if you don't really know what you're doing, then just leave it as a default. Only change the nitty gritty if you really know what you're doing and if you really understand the data and it makes sense to do it. But otherwise, because you're more likely to do harm than benefit, in my opinion.

Becca Madigan (17:48.469)
I'm sorry.

Becca Madigan (17:54.289)
Yeah, just don't touch it. Yeah.

Becca Madigan (18:00.718)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (18:04.215)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (18:11.615)
No, very, very true. And this is sort of somewhat related. I don't know if it was one of the points that we were going to sort of really focus on today, but on the same line that when we are sort of developing all these customizations, we are aware that people don't really know, hey, what should I make my minimum stay be? What should I make my last minute, you know, prices be? So that's one of the biggest things that we've sort of…

Jasper Ribbers (18:13.697)
Thanks for watching!

Becca Madigan (18:39.318)
than focusing on this year. And it is a part of this release is we're really adding a lot of data to those customizations so you don't have to figure those things out. So earlier this year, we released our, we need a shorter name for it, but our like length of stay recommendation engine, minimum stay recommendation engine. And essentially we are pulling in data from all of the listings around you, actually looking at the,

lengths of stay that have been booked and how far out bookings are being made. And we can actually recommend settings saying, hey, you know, 90 days out, you want a six night stay, then drop that down to a four night stay within 30 days and then a two night stay within the next week. So that's been really cool to see. And also, if you're on the hyper local pulse, the latest sort of smart customization that we've brought out our last minute prices and our far out premiums. So before.

our last minute prices and far out premium defaults were just sort of static. They were set. Of course, our data science team did a bunch of research and said generally this strategy should work for all markets. But now again, it's going to be calculated just based on your comp set and it's going to be recalculated every day. And what's really cool about that again, if we're coming into our low season, our booking window, our opportunities to book,

is going to look a lot different than maybe other times of the year. So having your last minute prices actually fluctuate with the market is something that I think is pretty groundbreaking.

Jasper Ribbers (20:18.441)
Yeah, 100%. Let's see. What else do we have to cover here? There's a few more. I know you guys have like 20 updates, so you probably don't have time to go through all of them. But.

Becca Madigan (20:31.158)
Yeah, no, of course, of course. I know, so like, I don't know, team management, if your users have, or if your listeners have team members, before you sort of had to just share a login, and maybe you have somebody that's taking care of your properties in California, and somebody that's taking care of your properties in South Carolina, and maybe they wanna see each other's properties, but you don't want them to touch each other's properties.

Jasper Ribbers (20:43.05)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (21:01.086)
Or if there's multiple hands in there, you don't want them, or you wanna be able to see who's actually making changes. So our new team management is something that's pretty neat. Something that a lot of people have actually been asking for.

Jasper Ribbers (21:14.669)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, especially for people that have larger portfolios, that might make sense, right, to have a different team member. Like, have somebody look at all the studios and one bedrooms and somebody look at all the larger homes, for example, because they're so different.

Becca Madigan (21:20.739)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (21:29.678)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or even if you're just a single operator, I work with a lot of people that have virtual assistants that are helping them with their pricing strategy. So instead of you just sharing your login, you can make a separate login for your assistant that's helping you to kind of track them, see what they're doing, actually make sure that they're actually going in and making changes when they're supposed to.

Jasper Ribbers (21:55.789)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. One thing that I also have noticed is you guys have quite a lot of education for hosts, right? Which I think is really, really important. Like what I've learned from kind of working with a lot of hosts over the last few months and helping them with the revenue management, I realized it's one thing to have a dynamic pricing app, but it's another thing to actually

understand how to use it and there's definitely a learning curve there, right? So I've been watching those webinars that you guys did. Is that like, wouldn't you let everybody know like how if people are using Pricelapse, like how can they get access to those webinars?

Becca Madigan (22:26.699)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (22:39.902)
Yeah, we try to be very accessible. So if you're actually on your price lab screen, like logged into your account in the lower right-hand corner, there's two bubbles, there's like a help chat bubble. And then there's a bubble. That's like a little graduation cap. If you click that bubble, it'll direct you to a bunch of really great resources. Our live trainings are recorded trainings, upcoming updates, things like that. If you're not signed up yet, you can always go to our YouTube channel, all of our.

webinars are posted there. And then of course if you go to hello.pricelabs.co there's a tab that's resources and there's a trainings tab under there along with a bunch of other really great free resources. I'll plug those while I'm talking about this. We did just launch a really cool revenue estimator so if you are

an investor and you want to get a revenue estimation for free. Again, if you go to hello.pricehubs.co under our resources, there's a really, really cool new tool that we've developed that can sort of, you'll basically give us an address and a bedroom count and we'll give you an average of what we're seeing in the area. Definitely check that out too.

Jasper Ribbers (23:58.581)
Awesome, yeah, definitely is something that I think is really important to educate yourself, because I see so many hosts who sign up for a pricing tool and then put in a bass price, turn it on, and then never kind of look at it again. And that's not the best way to use it.

Becca Madigan (24:05.863)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (24:11.49)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (24:16.19)
Yeah, I mean, if you if you are in the US, if you're in sort of times on where you could make a US webinar work, we do run our one webinars every single day. So Monday through Friday, and then we have an advanced webinar every Thursday. So what's really great about those is there tend to be like less than 20 people in them. And we answer all of your questions. So even if you just you know, you don't need to stay for the entire webinar, you can always hop on. Usually, there's like a, you know, five minute waiting period where we

wait for everybody to join, you can just say, Hey, I've got these three questions. Of course, if it's like a very specific to your account, just reach out to our support team, because we can always do like a quick one-on-one call with you. But if it's more of a general question that like, Hey, like what is a base price? Um, our team can definitely quickly answer that. Um, on, on one of our sort of group trainings is what we call them.

Jasper Ribbers (24:48.024)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (25:08.309)
Sure. One topic that I would love to dive into a little bit deeper is the CompSats. And this is something that whenever you are on a revenue management panel, webinar, training, whatever it is, they always talk about CompSats. Can you explain what exactly that means?

Becca Madigan (25:25.588)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (25:31.87)
Okay, so what a comp set is, essentially a comp set is your competitive set. So if you look at your neighborhood, we consider like a hyper local neighborhood, who around you is similar to you. Now, if you're talking about our dynamic pricing tool, we curate a comp set of 350, sometimes less than that if you're in a really rural area, but generally,

about 350 of the closest units to you of similar size. So if you have a two bedroom, we'd be looking at one bedrooms, two bedrooms and three bedrooms. If you have an eight bedroom home, we sort of expand that a little bit. Typically there's just not a ton of eight bedroom homes. It's really hard to get 350 of them within a reasonable radius. But you can go further than that. So we sort of cast a wider net so that we're able to capture really

all of the different things that are going on in the market. But you can go further. You can say, I just want to look at the other two bedrooms that are pet friendly and have a pool just in my community. While that might not necessarily be enough data to truly understand the intricacies of your market, you can definitely see where they're pricing against you. You can see what their occupancy, things like that look like.

And there's a couple of ways to do that within PriceLab. So we do have our market dashboards tool. And you can actually pull in your compsets that you're creating in market dashboards into both portfolio analytics, which is our sort of business analytics tool that gives us sort of, gives you access to your own data, as well as in neighborhood data in that dynamic pricing tool.

We've always been able to make comp sets in Market Dashboards, but we've made it so much easier. It used to be kind of like you'd have to put in like little formulas in a box. And it was, it was just really complicated. I've run a Market Dashboards webinar at the beginning of each month. So this is September 28th. So next week we'll be running our, our Market Dashboards webinar on Wednesday.

Becca Madigan (27:47.702)
But we would have to physically show people like, okay, this symbol is gonna do this and this is gonna do that. But now it's just there's a little button that says filter. And it's almost like if you were online shopping, you can say, I wanna look at two bedrooms, three bedrooms with one bath, two bath, three bath, pet friendly, yes or no, pool, yes or no. And then we're gonna sort of filter down all the listings in this area for you that match the criteria that you are setting up.

Once you have a smaller set, you can actually go through and click on each of the listings links so you can see aesthetically, yes, maybe they have all the sort of features that I want, but maybe they've used their Nokia phone from 1995 to take off the listing photos, and they're not actually a good comp for you because you know that you need professional photos if you're gonna be successful. And then, yeah, again, you can pull all that data, you can look at just a report just for those specific listings.

Jasper Ribbers (28:39.201)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (28:48.154)
and it's really, really powerful.

Jasper Ribbers (28:51.59)
Yeah, and I think just to kind of stress the importance to this, I'm looking at my market dashboard right now for one of the portfolios I manage. And there's 939 listings in this particular area, right? But in this market, there's really like there's a beach, for example, right? And so I've noticed that units that are on the beach or like very close to the beach.

behave differently than units that are 15 minute drive from the beach, right? So that's something that is easy to overlook, but that's really important, right? Also, if you have a pool, for example, you definitely want to compare yourself to other listings that have a pool and just kind of see, OK, are these units, what are the factors that make the, how to say that, that will determine

Becca Madigan (29:23.959)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (29:48.525)
your unit should be priced, if that makes sense. It's almost like creating subsets in your marketplace where you're recognizing, oh, these type of units, they book a little, the booking window's a little longer, they're a little shorter, right? Or like people pay more for the high demand dates compared to other units. That's super important information to have. So being able to play around with that, I think can teach you a lot about the market. So you're talking about

Becca Madigan (30:03.074)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (30:07.893)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (30:13.846)
Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (30:18.145)
you know, creating compsets where we can just, we can compare data, but is the actual, the compsets that PriceLab uses to recommend the prices, is that something that we can change or is that like a default?

Becca Madigan (30:22.199)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (30:32.59)
Currently it's not something that you can change. It is a default, but something that we have adjusted recently, especially if you are, and this is useful especially if you are maybe like a, an operator of like a multi-unit type of situation, either it's like a hotel or maybe just like studios in a city, you can now curate a comp set of hotels and adjust the weight of the algorithm.

basically say let's pay a little bit more attention to the hotels in my comp set. Currently if you're just using our sort of standard operation hotels account for a really small amount of the algorithm. I believe it's like something like 10 percent. We're really just looking for dates where maybe hotels have raised their prices and maybe we aren't quite seeing any demand develop in the short-term rental market.

but we're gonna put in a little bit of a bump just in case. There is something that people just aren't looking for yet. So now you can actually hand pick the different hotels that you wanna surprise against, and then you can say, actually, I'm a multi unit operator, I've got studios in a city, and I'm actually competing against hotels. Let me increase the weight of the hotel comp set against the short-term rentals in the area.

Jasper Ribbers (31:57.793)
Mm. Gotcha. And then is there a way for us, you mentioned, like, Price Labs will select 350 listings to base their recommendations off. Is there a way for us to see which those units are?

Becca Madigan (32:06.573)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (32:11.966)
Yeah, of course. In your dashboard, if you go to any of your listings, so the pricing dashboard, click review prices or click on the listing's name, you're going to initially see your calendar pop up. Just above your calendar, you're going to see a couple of tabs, calendar, neighborhood data, and I think hotel data. If you go to neighborhood data and you scroll down, you're going to see an option to show map and all of the…

Jasper Ribbers (32:29.962)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (32:38.914)
of dots that you see on the map are going to be the listings in that hyper local comp set.

Jasper Ribbers (32:46.541)
Right, and there's a neat feature that I quite enjoy actually in that same area there. So you can click on Show Map. And also, there's an overview section above that, right, where it gives you an overview of the units that PriceUp is looking at, correct?

Becca Madigan (33:00.543)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (33:06.743)
Yes. Yes, it is. So yeah, you can see the, like the number of listings and what their average, like ADRs are and sort of that overview. But if you actually want to see physically where those 350 units are and be able to click on and open up the Airbnb page, then you'd want to look at them now.

Jasper Ribbers (33:23.709)
Right. And then one feature that I think is really nice is below there is Compare competitor calendar, where you can actually select up to 10 listings. You can select up to 10 listings that you feel like are the most similar to yours, especially useful for like I have one unit here, for example, that's kind of outside of the city. So it's a little bit more.

You know, if you're downtown, like studio, like you're so similar to a lot of other studios and there's tons of them. But if you're a little bit out of town and there's not that many similar units to yours, like you kind of really have to look at the actual units and see like, hey, is this comparable? Because you might have a two bedroom that's kind of like a standard, you know, home. And then, you know, next to you is somebody who built like a super fancy A-frame, right? And it's like, you can't really compare that, right? So

Becca Madigan (33:54.305)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (34:14.66)
Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (34:17.365)
you know, especially in those type of markets where the diversity is a little larger, I think it's really useful. You can just literally pick the units where you feel like, okay, these are really similar to mine, similar luxury or similar size, location, all the amenities, all that stuff. And then you can actually look at the calendars. So you can see like, oh, how am I priced and occupied compared to…

Becca Madigan (34:22.829)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (34:38.505)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (34:46.281)
These specific listings that I feel like are most similar to.

Becca Madigan (34:51.458)
No, exactly. What's cool, I believe when you're actually looking at the dates that are booked on your like competitor's calendar, you'll see the dates that are crossed out and the price sort of that they were potentially booked for. Of course, if somebody calls and says, hey, or I think we were just talking about direct bookings via Instagram before we went live, somebody reached out to you and negotiated a lower price. Of course, we wouldn't be able to pick that up from scrape data.

but you can see what the listing was listed at when those dates went offline, which I think is really, really interesting information.

Jasper Ribbers (35:29.361)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's just very easy to see. It's very easy to compare your prices. You can scroll through the calendar. I'm doing it right now. You can see, hey, why are these units booked this weekend, and I'm not booked yet? It's like, oh, let's look at how much of the demand has already hit. And we can see that on the Coupons C graph that's on the same page. And then see, OK, do I need to?

Becca Madigan (35:37.462)
I'm gonna go ahead.

Becca Madigan (35:50.051)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (35:56.977)
take action here? Is there something going on? Or is it just like, should I be patient and not lower my prices, knowing that I probably will get booked based on last year's data and everything? So it really allows you to get really, really granular on a certain listing. So it's awesome. Sweet. Well, we've gone through a lot. Any final thoughts? Anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to bring up?

Becca Madigan (36:03.733)
Mm-hmm.

Becca Madigan (36:17.879)
Yeah.

Becca Madigan (36:23.71)
Yeah, I think I should have probably talked about this at the top of the meeting. We went through hyperlocal pulse, but I don't know that we really talked about migrating to the new algorithm if you aren't currently on it. So if you're a current PriceLabs user, you can actually check which algorithm you are on just on your main pricing dashboard. I think if you click call and visibility,

there's now an option where you can select where it says algorithm version. And once that's selected, you'll be able to see for each of your listings if it's on the old algorithm or if it's on hyperlocal pulse. And if your account is ready for migration, you'll actually see a little button there that says migrate. There's gonna be a tool that pops up that basically says, hey, this is your pricing currently with the old algorithm.

this is what your pricing is going to look like with the new algorithm. There are a couple of things that you might need to adjust. So because the new algorithm is doing better at understanding, you know, intricacies in your market. If you've made customizations to sort of make up for where the algorithm was lacking before, you might need to turn those off. So things like if you're using seasonal base prices, day of week customizations, and sometimes if you're, if you're changing your base price a lot.

Jasper Ribbers (37:42.247)
Mm.

Becca Madigan (37:50.806)
you might even need to adjust your base price a little bit. But when you click that migrate, there's gonna be a little tool that pops up that kind of helps you understand those things that you need to adjust. But of course, if you have any questions or if you wanna migrate sooner rather than later, just reach out to us at support at pricelabs.co. We are there to help you. We are there to help you understand and just feel confident in your pricing strategy.

Jasper Ribbers (38:15.477)
Awesome. Well, Becca, thank you so much for joining. And for the people who are listening, and if you're not using a pricing app, I highly recommend you use one. Price app is great. I'm really enjoying using this tool. You can get a discount if you use a code, GPFYP.

I believe you get a $10 credit. You get a free trial anyway. So you get a free trial for 30 days. You get a free dashboard, market dashboard as well. So you can get a lot of data about your markets. And last but not least, if you want to learn more about revenue management and if you want to know the five most common mistakes that we see that hosts are making, Eric and I created a pretty cool little e-book.

Becca Madigan (38:46.295)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (39:10.313)
It also includes an overview of the most commonly used terms in revenue management. When I started going deep in revenue management in the first couple of conversations I listened to, I didn't know what people were talking about, because there's so much lingo. So you got to, yeah, it's like Chinese. So what we did is in our e-book, we basically put together, I don't know, the.

Becca Madigan (39:22.702)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a whole other language.

Jasper Ribbers (39:35.529)
50 most common terms and just put in a short explanation so that you can kind of have that as a resource like whenever you go deeper into revenue management, you understand what people are talking about. So this ebook, you can download it for free at getpaidforyourpet.com slash cash. So just go to getpaidforyourpet.com slash cash and you'll see there's our ebook, you can download it for free.

And we're also doing a training on Wednesday. We're doing a webinar on the same topic of revenue management as well, where Eric and I are going to have some fun in our studio. We're not making it too serious. We're going to have a lot of fun with this, but we're going to teach you kind of the stuff that we have learned over the last years and especially the last few months, like working more intensely with a little host. So if you go to cash, getpaidforped.com slash cash, you can download the ebook and then

You can also sign up for the training or if you just want to sign up for the training Then you can also go to get paid for your pet.com says training, but I highly recommend download the ebook I think it'll be useful. So with that said That's it for today everybody. So hope you have a great weekend Becca. Thanks again for joining I'm sure we'll have you back on at some point in the future

Becca Madigan (40:53.386)
Thanks so much. Yeah, I love you. This is great.

Jasper Ribbers (40:57.361)
Awesome. And to listeners, hope you enjoyed this podcast. We'll be back next week. Of course. So see you then.

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