We operate two 1/1's a few blocks West of the Pearl in San Antonio. We've generally been able to coast along without any real understanding of the algorithm but I think that to do well in this environment we need to up our game. I am hoping we can get a discussion going we can all learn a thing or two from, perhaps we can get a discord group up and running?

We've seen a 20% reduction (down to 60% occupancy for last 30 days) in average occupancy rate this month and the slope of our future bookings are way off the normal pace as well. We went through and updated our listings to have better SEO and added some recent review quotes to pictures in an effort to keep people on our pages longer. We're also going to expand to VRBO in an effort to help with more view.

One of my biggest questions is how to increase our booking conversion rate. Here are some of our stats for the last 30 days:

• .37% overall conversion
• 58.4% first page search impression
• 9.78% search to listing
• 3.78% listing to booking conversion

I can't imagine .37% is very good but I also don't understand how these are calculated. According to our data we're .03% higher than similar listings in our area, so right about average. What's really odd is that one of the apartments is a workhorse and the other lags behind about 10%. They have all the same finishes and furniture but the work horse is an open layout, the other is more closed off with a true living room and kitchen.

Apartment 2

Apartment 3

Here are our two listings. We have 98 more wishlist additions over the last 30 days than similar listings, which I understand is an important metric to the algorithm. The trend is down here too. PS, if you happen to check out the listings please consider giving us a wishlist addition, that's good for a temporary boost.

If anyone has any insight, or references where I can learn more I would appreciate it.

TIA

Thanks Eclipse, we do plan to update the pics. They are from two years ago and don't show any of the artwork we now have on the walls. I can see what you're talking about on the light now too, both have tons of natural light so I've not really noticed the pics don't show that.

We used to have the front elevation as the first pic but we're told that's less attention grabbing than an interior pic. It also led to tons of confusion as people thought they were getting the whole house, one thing we've learned is you can not make your listing or check instructions dumb enough.

We just updated the titles to include the SEO words that we hope help drive views. The newest changes to the platform don't let people see the title until they click on the listing anyway. However, the SEO words in the title do still effect the search ranking apparently. I've no experience with this part so I certainly do appreciate the comment.

I add that when I book STRs it always feels like a crap shoot on location. Your place could be nice but the rest of the homes could be junk. You could walk to everything, but wouldn't want to.

Maybe a street view or two would add to the listing?

mwp02ag said:

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It also led to tons of confusion as people thought they were getting the whole house, one thing we've learned is you can not make your listing or check instructions dumb enough.

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I definitely get it.

I've booked houses before and been frustrated because some detail isn't listed, and when I go back to the listing I see it was right in front of me the whole time. It's tough sometimes to take everything in, especially when you are looking at multiple houses.

p_bubel said:

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I add that when I book STRs it always feels like a crap shoot on location. Your place could be nice but the rest of the homes could be junk. You could walk to everything, but wouldn't want to.

Maybe a street view or two would add to the listing?

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Great point.

I always work really hard to narrow down the location and do a Google street view search around the area before I book.

EclipseAg said:

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I'm no longer a STR owner but I do rent a lot (primarily from VRBO).

My first impression of your listings is that the photos are really dark and a bit foreboding.

I would reshoot with a lot more light and add a lot more photos, including close-ups of your amenities. As a renter, I always want more photos rather than less. I'm trying to put together in my mind what the house looks like and how it flows, and any thing you can do to help that is a plus.

For both units, I would also lead with the outside photo of the house with the historical background in the cutline because that's really cool. I would also mention it's a historical home in your main listing headline. I would think that would be more enticing to a lot of guests than "comfy bed."

Just my thoughts. Your place is really nice!

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Now do mine!

https://abnb.me/mvk8HcZ1zsb

Hey Im looking for a family vacation place on the water so I can take my dad fishing from the dock. I wish listed it.

Back to OP, anyone have any insight on the algorithm questions? That's where we need the most help.

itsyourboypookie said:

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EclipseAg said:

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I'm no longer a STR owner but I do rent a lot (primarily from VRBO).

My first impression of your listings is that the photos are really dark and a bit foreboding.

I would reshoot with a lot more light and add a lot more photos, including close-ups of your amenities. As a renter, I always want more photos rather than less. I'm trying to put together in my mind what the house looks like and how it flows, and any thing you can do to help that is a plus.

For both units, I would also lead with the outside photo of the house with the historical background in the cutline because that's really cool. I would also mention it's a historical home in your main listing headline. I would think that would be more enticing to a lot of guests than "comfy bed."

Just my thoughts. Your place is really nice!

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Now do mine!

https://abnb.me/mvk8HcZ1zsb

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Fantastic! Those drone shots are perfect for setting the location. Lots of great photos; really gives an idea of what the place is like.

My only recommendation -- for any STR owner -- is to use captions with the photos so people know exactly what they are looking at and don't have to guess or play detective to figure it out.

Also, it helps if you label bedrooms and bathrooms in the photos so people can figure out who can sleep where and who will be sharing a bathroom -- i.e. "guest bathroom off the hall for bedrooms 2 and 3."

The Galveston rental company Sand N Sea often includes floorplans of their rentals, which I think is really smart.

Wish more VRBO/AirBnB owners did that.

I also love video walkthroughs or those 3D things. Anything to get a feel for how the house flows.

The only person I know who has made the Lake Limestone rental work is James E. you might want to talk to him about it. Shayne probably has his number if you don't. I've looked at buying on the lake and trying to do short term rentals but I can't make it make sense without crazy high occupancy rates which don't seem possible on Lake Limestone.

IMHO, I do not believe a 1/1 fares well as STRs unless it is is some unique places like the beach or on the lake. You are directly competing against hotels with amenities. At your price point including taxes for a 2 night stay is $280 which is in line with many nice hotels near the river walk that has a pool, gym, front desk, security, restaurant, bar, etc.

Your target population is tiny.

It looks like your top end occupancy rate is about 33%. So even if you can achieve this, your income @$80/nt is $800/mo. If you can even achieve 50%, it ends up being $1200/mo which seems like alot of work vs renting long term.

Although the suggestions so far likely will improve traffic, I don't believe it will increase occupancy much.

I have experience in STR/MTR/LTRs and think for the time and $, STRs are the worse option.

My wife and I have a VRBO unit in Bryan. We decided on a 2/2 because it works for a family or two couples wanting to share a "home" feeling instead of a hotel.
We also have a 50 second video which has been very useful as we communicate with potential renters and brokers whom we have dealt with on a longer than weekend rental.

I think you miss understood my OP and questions. These have been up and running for nearly 3 years now and are quite successful, they did over $60k in gross revenue for us last year.

Last month was actually one of our best months ever but this month is shaping up to be our worst in 18 months and we still have over $2500. My hope is that by understanding the metrics that keep us at the top of searches, we can run this more like a business instead of coasting like we have been.

Mind sharing your video? figtreehomessa at gmail

mwp02ag said:

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Hey Im looking for a family vacation place on the water so I can take my dad fishing from the dock. I wish listed it.

Back to OP, anyone have any insight on the algorithm questions? That's where we need the most help.

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If you let me know when you're coming I'll chum the pier for weeks before your arrival and catch some fresh shad for bait!

kaleb_allison said:

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The only person I know who has made the Lake Limestone rental work is James E. you might want to talk to him about it. Shayne probably has his number if you don't. I've looked at buying on the lake and trying to do short term rentals but I can't make it make sense without crazy high occupancy rates which don't seem possible on Lake Limestone.

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Our neighbor is booked every weekend! Even in December. Ours has done well this summer, grossed 9k in July. Carrying cost are around $4500. We need 9 days a month, and have been getting it fairly easily.

We are adding 2 bathrooms and more beds this winter along with a mini split to keep it ice cold. Going to add kayaks and offer jet ski, pontoon, and wakeboarding. LCR 822 is the only road I would do a STR on the lake because of the size of the lake there + the ease to get to it from land.

I stand corrected then, b/c 60k for both units should generate a good profit.

Yessir, it's been awesome and why I want to keep it rolling. We've seen a lot of new 3/2 SFRs hit the STR market here recently but not many 1/1s.

Our views are up 247 to 643 in the last 7 days but conversion rate was down slightly. We've pretty consistently been hitting ~800 page views a week for the last couple years so we're still off pace. That could be economics and recession.

We're running a 10% promotion on open days for the next couple of weeks. We bump prices down just a bit in fall too. I'd really like to understand the booking conversion part of the algorithm and see if I can focus on improving that. I really have no idea what a good conversion rate is in airBNB, but surely if we can keep getting 600 page views we should be able to increase how many booking we can capture.

Does that make sense?

I'll play… here is our STR in Port Aransas:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/47704447?source_impression_id=p3_1661221329_75qjWW8QDgK4VrBK

Does really well May thru Aug, then hit or miss in Fall/Winter… but that's when we enjoy it more anyway.

We use a property management company and I am happy with them, but I feel like I could market better via Facebook and encourage people to "like" or "check in" at our page. Any tips on that?

Any of you use PM for these, especially if they are a decent distance away? Does PM haven't cleaning, etc?

STR sounds a lot less passive but curious how y'all operate

What is PM?

Mind sharing who you use and what the cost is?

property management

AgsMyDude said:

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Mind sharing who you use and what the cost is?

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We use Life in Paradise. They are local to Port A. They take 20% but it's money we'll spent in my opinion. They are very responsive, have a great office staff, and I don't have time to deal with it.

thirty-two said:

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AgsMyDude said:

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Mind sharing who you use and what the cost is?

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We use Life in Paradise. They are local to Port A. They take 20% but it's money we'll spent in my opinion. They are very responsive, have a great office staff, and I don't have time to deal with it.

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Thanks, that's not too bad. Does that include cleaning, stocking with soap, coffee, etc etc?

AgsMyDude said:

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thirty-two said:

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AgsMyDude said:

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Mind sharing who you use and what the cost is?

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We use Life in Paradise. They are local to Port A. They take 20% but it's money we'll spent in my opinion. They are very responsive, have a great office staff, and I don't have time to deal with it.

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Thanks, that's not too bad. Does that include cleaning, stocking with soap, coffee, etc etc?

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Yes, they handle it all. Bookings, positing on Airbnb, VRBO, etc. Maintenance stuff basically at cost and they reach out if there are any bigger expenses.

Nice place man, I gave you a save. Apparently the more saves you get the higher the algorithm will place your listing in the search cue. Is that on Park Place? We have access to a Dr.'s house there and this one looks real familiar. Do you have access to your listing back end? I'm curious if you can see your page views and your conversion rate?

As far as management goes, we manage it all ourselves, except cleaning, but that has been easy while we lived there. Between Costco trips, cleaning schedule and app work we (mostly my wife) spends about 5 hours a week working in this business. It's silly easy and we generally enjoy it. Biggest complaint would be that you really can't make your check in instructions dumb enough for everyone to understand apparently. We're thinking about making videos of the check in process to share.

We've had a couple of bad stays here and there but the overwhelming majority have been awesome. Worst one was the 17 yo girl who's mom left alone there without our knowledge. Turns out is was chicks birthday and mom rented the apartment for her kid, showed up at check in and left sometime after. The girls friends came over and had a hell of a party that we never heard a peep out of. The chick OD'ed on opiates and they had to call an ambulance who gave her two doses of Narcan to bring her back.

You also can't please everyone which used to annoy us, now we laugh at the insaneness of the average person. We get all kinds of suggestions in private comments of things we should do to improve the place. Some of them are even good and actionable, but the majority are not. One weekend we had one person staying who griped that we only provide a pour over coffee maker, they informed us it was too much work to use the pour over and they wanted us to buy a drip machine. The same weekend the person staying in the other apartment raved and raved about the delicious and easy coffee.

I just checked our stats out for the last week. The changes we made doubled our conversion rate for two days and then trickled down a bit but remains higher than it was. Something interesting I just saw. Apartment 3 currently has 7 Wishlist additions. Apartment 2 has 29! Wishlist additions are temporary but really help drive your placement in the algorithm, higher the better. That a monster difference.

I'm going to have new pics and a video walkthrough of apt 3 and see if that helps drive my Wishlist and conversion rate up. I can't help that one is an open concept and the other is much more closed off, but maybe I can showcase it better.

thirty-two said:

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I'll play… here is our STR in Port Aransas:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/47704447?source_impression_id=p3_1661221329_75qjWW8QDgK4VrBK

Does really well May thru Aug, then hit or miss in Fall/Winter… but that's when we enjoy it more anyway.

We use a property management company and I am happy with them, but I feel like I could market better via Facebook and encourage people to "like" or "check in" at our page. Any tips on that?

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It's been a few years, but I used Facebook/IG a lot to promote our house. Both organic and some paid advertising. I created videos, posted pics of new stuff, promoted certain weekends and holidays, etc.

We got hundreds of likes, but I don't know that any of them actually ever booked our house.

As far as check-ins ... wow. I don't really know why, but in eight years we only had one actual renter check in to our house, despite all kinds of prompts and encouragement to do so.

It still baffles and frustrates me to this day.

The only thing I can think of is that our renters tended to be slightly older ... people who just didn't think about checking in or even posting from the house. Plus, the whole "Instagram your whole life" thing wasn't quite as embedded in society.

At the same time, we did get some check-ins from people who weren't actually at our house. LOL. I think Facebook would autofill with our name when people clicked the location tag and the posters either just didn't realize the name of the house they were in or were too drunk to change it.

When we sold, I offered the Facebook/IG handles to the new owner, but she didn't want to mess with it.

thirty-two said:

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AgsMyDude said:

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thirty-two said:

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AgsMyDude said:

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Mind sharing who you use and what the cost is?

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We use Life in Paradise. They are local to Port A. They take 20% but it's money we'll spent in my opinion. They are very responsive, have a great office staff, and I don't have time to deal with it.

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Thanks, that's not too bad. Does that include cleaning, stocking with soap, coffee, etc etc?

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Yes, they handle it all. Bookings, positing on Airbnb, VRBO, etc. Maintenance stuff basically at cost and they reach out if there are any bigger expenses.

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20% isn't bad at all in that case! Did you use AirDna or anything else for market analysis? and if so how are you doing compared to those numbers?

mwp02ag said:

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Biggest complaint would be that you really can't make your check in instructions dumb enough for everyone to understand apparently.

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This cracks me up because while I consider myself somewhat intelligent, I always get anxiety checking in to a VRBO/AirBnB. I don't know if it's the excitement of finally arriving or fear that the place will suck, but I always struggle.

The worst ones are those with the tumbler-style lock boxes. I always fumble around trying to get the code in right and then figuring out how to pry open the stupid box.

And then there are the houses with escape-room-style instructions to find the key. "Go up the stairs, look to the second post on the left, turn around twice, you'll see a small red box. Open it, then chant these lines in unison ..."

The newer electronic locks are so much better and easier. But I've had two different owners send us the wrong code. Fortunately, both times we were able to get in touch with a management company person who got us in.

I'm in too!

Port Aransas as well, in town. We are usually booked May 15- Aug 31. Thanksgiving, Spring Break and Sandfest. Going to to a hard push for younger Winter Texans(remote workers) this year. We use a management company as well and there is a virtual tour there. I am a little below airdna numbers but airdna assumes you will lower your rate to take any income over no income which is not our strategy. We want to keep it over 250 a night in the off season to keep out the riff raft. PM also has their own security force

https://abnb.me/K9wBB5kkJsb

thirty-two said:

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I'll play… here is our STR in Port Aransas:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/47704447?source_impression_id=p3_1661221329_75qjWW8QDgK4VrBK

Does really well May thru Aug, then hit or miss in Fall/Winter… but that's when we enjoy it more anyway.

We use a property management company and I am happy with them, but I feel like I could market better via Facebook and encourage people to "like" or "check in" at our page. Any tips on that?

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Your listing is not accurate. The pictures show a bedroom with 4 bunk beds, but that doesn't agree with the verbal description. It's a beautiful place. Hope you got it before the recent run-up in prices.

Here's my place in Crystal Beach (Bolivar). A number of people on the Houston Board have rented from me directly. I'm happy to do direct bookings. One thing I've added is the overhead shot that shows how close we are to the water. I've also created a simplified link (see below) for sharing. I have a small management company, 2 people, that shares Superhost duties. One of them is local and handles cleaning, maintenance, and guest issues. The other one is remote and manages the listing. They make around 20% total. I save some of their fees and the platform fees when I direct book, and I pass those to the customer. I only do that for Facebook friends, church friends, work friends, and Tex-Agers.

https://airbnb.com/h/seahorse-ranch-crystal-beach-tx

Bookings have maybe been a little slower this year. It's hard for me to say, as it was only my second season. One thing I'd love to get is non-weekend people during Oct/Nov and Apr/May. The weather is beautiful - perfect for the empty nesters, work-from-homers, etc.

I also have an RV rental down there. I made business cards with links to my properties. STR isn't exactly passive, is it? At the end of the day, cash flow neutral is the goal, and we make money on the real estate side (equity and appreciation), and having a place that we can use as well.