[00:00:02] This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Karl.
[00:00:16] Hello there, Luke Karl, the Short Term Shop here to talk to you about how to price your short term rental with multiple base prices mbps.
[00:00:26] So it's about two years ago I realized that I just can't get, you know, a beach house, for instance, that rents for $150 a night in January and 11 or $1,200 a night in July. I just can't get the prices to differentiate themselves enough with one base price on your main screen on Price Labs. So I came up with this multiple base price way of doing things.
[00:00:54] And you know, these custom seasonal profiles is how you do that. They were originally created, I think for, you know, Fourth of July, Christmas, Labor Day, etc. Small chunks that needed a big change.
[00:01:08] And it's actually because of that, I think that this, this multiple base price way of doing things has been brought to the attention of Price Labs. And from what we understand, they have said that they don't like this strategy, but it's. I've been doing it for a long time now and it works great for me.
[00:01:24] And we do love Price Labs, by the way. And I'm not gonna give you any sort of affiliate code to sign up for Price Labs or anything like that. Most folks in this business are using Price Labs. It's kind of a universal language. We love them.
[00:01:35] They do a lot of their own pricing webinars and seminars, et cetera. They're very lengthy and detailed and a lot of them are, you know, third party revenue managers teaching those classes and such. And they're great.
[00:01:48] But I gotta tell you, I love the MVP thing, man. It's great. It's a great way to really get the differences you need between less desirable months and more desirable months. All right, so I'm actually going to share screen now and show you exactly what I'm talking about and we'll go ahead and I'll just start with the main page of, of Price Labs which, you know, again, I do want to give you a disclaimer. We're not here today to talk about, you know, overall pricing strategies, how to price your property, et cetera. We're just talking about multiple base prices today, monthly base prices, if you will. Still mbps.
[00:02:32] And I'm telling you, I've been doing it for a long time. It works great. I love it. It is a little bit of extra work to set it up, but it is worth it.
[00:02:43] All right, so Here's a Price Labs dashboard with multi cal showing. I've got some action here that I need to get rid of.
[00:02:50] This needs to go.
[00:02:52] These. These properties are actually out of order right now. I got my tags there. You know, Price Labs takes a little while to refresh, so I don't want to do too much action live here. But in general, I say this is a pretty healthy looking calendar.
[00:03:04] My little tiny properties at the top and they book a lot more last minute, so I'm not too worried about that. This is a. I do this on a major holiday is what that is. And so in general, I'd say this calendar looks very healthy overall. This junk right here could go. Some of this junk down here could get gone at this point. Obviously this would be nice to get rid of. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. Today I want to talk about MBPs, multiple base prices.
[00:03:31] And let's go here to. This is what we call.
[00:03:34] This is the longest running Airbnb in the Smoky Mountains, which I happen to own the two longest running Airbnbs in the Smoky Mountains. And let's take a look at this calendar just briefly. Again, we're not talking about pricing strategies as a whole today, just getting into the monthly base rate thing. Okay? So this would be nice to get rid of right here, but we've got a little time. This is a tiny little house at one and a half bedrooms. Call it a one and a half bedroom. It's a one bedroom downstairs with a open loft bedroom upstairs.
[00:04:04] Very common in the Smoky Mountains, which is where this is.
[00:04:07] May's looking pretty good here. We can get rid of that. I'm gonna leave that black line for Memorial Day just in case somebody cancels. Just doing a little stream of consciousness for you here.
[00:04:18] June is probably a little too booked here for me. I probably left a couple bucks on the table. Let's take a look here. Oh, a little. Couple bucks lower than last year on that one.
[00:04:28] Same there. Let's see what we got here.
[00:04:32] Yeah, couple bucks here and there. That one looks really good.
[00:04:38] That one looks really good.
[00:04:41] That one is much higher. I don't know what happened there, but yeah, maybe left a couple bucks on the table for June. July looks very healthy. Let's see what's doing there. A little low on that one.
[00:04:57] Not too bad.
[00:04:59] Yeah, across the board looks pretty good. I could probably bump my July MBP up a little bit.
[00:05:06] August is where it needs to be. September's probably priced a little high. It's a Perfect example. If I feel like my price on September is a little high, wouldn't it be great to change the price just for the month? Because months do have personalities, right?
[00:05:21] It's much like my video. It's an old school video here at the short term shop called the Circle of Seasonality. If you haven't checked that one out, you have to. It will really help your pricing strategy as a whole. Whole. But what I'm talking about today is custom seasonal profiles.
[00:05:39] And as you can see, I have multiples. So these are basically multiple. I have multiple base prices, one for every month, if you will.
[00:05:49] I do. I did lump January and February in together because they're, you know, they're fairly similar.
[00:05:56] Basically identical. At least on this property. And again, disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer. Your house is going to be different, your market is going to be different, your strategy is going to be different. So this is not a cut and paste deal here. And also another disclaimer. Well, Luke, how do I figure out what prices I need to put in these multiple base prices?
[00:06:14] Patience, experience, time in the market.
[00:06:19] The longer you own the property, the longer you can get a better feel for how it should be priced. It's of course the old school rule of thumb is if you're not booked, your prices are too high. You know, we're looking for guests.
[00:06:35] Are you a professional short term rental property manager?
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[00:06:50] We would love to have you shoot us an email atguest strmshow.com that'sguest strmshow.com so as you can see, my winter is fairly low here. My March is a little high. Actually March is higher than April here because March is over at the recording of this video. So we actually go in here and we bump up the month that just ended. A couple of bucks because it's not gonna come around for another year. You see what I'm saying? So that's why in this case March is a little higher. If we were looking at actual base rates throughout the year, it would be probably something more like this on this property.
[00:07:33] Maybe even 209, April, maybe even 219, June, July, something like that is, you know, those are healthy base prices for this property. But as these, these months get closer and as they go away, you will adjust the bas based on the time of year it is. You know, March is gone. So we've raised it up a couple of bucks more than what April is. And, and really March is probably right where I want it to be for next year. Maybe a little bit low. I could probably stand and bump that by 10 bucks. But right now I'm just trying to get rid of what's left of April. So you noticed I was a little lower in April. But I know that starts to get really confusing and we're not here today to talk about the actual pricing strategies, etc. I really just want to focus on the multiple base price way of doing things.
[00:08:22] Almost impossible to rely on this base price over here. You know, just your regular old main base price.
[00:08:30] If you're talking about, you know, a house that's got major swings from one month to in the winter to another month in the summertime. If you've got major, major swings, it's very difficult to rely on this. And I understand price labs, you know, they don't really like this multi base rate thing in their brain. That's not what the custom season seasonal profile was designed for. I get it, but it works great for me, man. I've been doing it for almost two years now.
[00:08:55] Another way to get there, by the way, there's a little cheat code here. You can get there right here.
[00:09:00] Okay. So I also wanted to mention that if you have a lot of properties and you're watching this and you're like, oh my goodness, this looks so time consuming and tedious, you can actually, you can, you can do it in bulk, you can download a CSV file and you can make adjustments to the, to the custom seasonal profile right here. And like let's say you want to change may, you can download this change may and then upload it to other properties, right? So if you have lots of two bedrooms and lots of five bedrooms, you could have the same profile for all five bedrooms and download it and upload it to others successfully and, and kind of speed up the process there. And I do feel like as more and more people start using the MBP way of doing things with the multiple base rates or the monthly base price, I think that price labs will become more sophisticated in this manner as well. They've already made a lot of changes. These used to be really big and you couldn't see em all on one page. They actually changed that recently. So I think that good things are coming as more and more people start to kind of rely on this multiple base price way of pricing your short term rental calendar.
[00:10:15] One more thing to note, if you are going to be doing MB mbps, make sure that your seasonality and demand factor are turned down or off. Seasonality factor sensitivity. This needs to be as you can see here, I have it off for all of my properties across the account level, which I do think you, that's where you need to be because this seasonality factor will take your base rate and factor in seasonality and make it so that June is higher than January. It's in other words, Price Labs is saying why do you need these MBPs? We're doing it for you. Yeah, you are, you're doing it for me. Price labs and you do a great job, but I want more control.
[00:11:02] So I turn off the seasonality and I do the mbps. Right. Same thing here for demand factor. As a matter of fact, you can see on this one I have it at conservative.
[00:11:10] You have multiple options here. They do a drop down menu.
[00:11:13] No is basically off recommended by the way is the default.
[00:11:19] So you may come in here and look, it might look like it's off, but it's actually turned on to recommended which is the default, which is actually kind of medium heavy, you know, if you look, look at it that way. So on my properties right now I'm actually going to close out of that and go back to it.
[00:11:36] You can see I have it on conservatives which is one less one, one slightly higher than off, you know. And there is a difference between seasonality factor sensitivity and demand factor. Seasonality is more like, you know, June versus January and demand factors more like Saturday versus Tuesday.
[00:11:53] Does that make sense?
[00:12:01] And another thing I wanted to mention is that you could set up an MVP for you know, 4th of July which is originally what they're intended for these major holidays, big swings in the calendar. You could set another one up in here for 4th of July which would end up giving you three base rates in July. Basically base prices in July.
[00:12:23] You could put one in here for Christmas, New Year's, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc. I used to do that actually. And you end up with you know like 14, 15, 16Mbps.
[00:12:36] I've decided I don't like that way of doing it anymore. It gets too convoluted and difficult. And so basically what I do is I, I rely on, on Price Labs to go ahead and price my 4th of July appropriately based on my June and July base rate.
[00:12:52] But also a lot of times I'll do a manual override or a date specific override on major holidays which is what you saw. If you, if you notice that on my multi cal I had that, that was, I believe that was Memorial Day.
[00:13:09] I had the whole thing. You date specific overrided or Black lined.
[00:13:16] So keep that in mind. You could set up, you know, you could include the major, major holidays in here as separate bps, right? Multiple base rates, mbps, which was, is there the original intention of these custom seasonal profiles, however?
[00:13:35] And I think that, honestly I think that's why I started doing it to begin with because I had those custom seasonal profiles for the major holidays and I just left them in there and added more in there for the base, monthly base rates basically.
[00:13:48] But then over time I got kind of sick of playing with those the fourth of July and Labor Day etc and I just kind of lumped them into monthly. So for me right now, again, we're not here to talk exact strategies. You know, your way of doing things is not wrong. There's a hundred ways to do this and if you're getting, if you're doing it, if you're having success, you're doing it right.
[00:14:11] Right now I just basically have one per month is what I'm looking at for my mbps, my multiple base rates or monthly base prices. Multiple base price or monthly base price. So hopefully you found some value here in this video.
[00:14:27] Loving it. And I know you know price labs. I'm sorry, I think they, they're, they're not super psyched about us doing it this way, but it's working for us. We've been doing it for a couple years now and happy renting to you. If you ever need anything, you can find
[email protected] the shorttermshop.com we would love to earn your business on the purchase of your next vacation property.
[00:14:49] Don't overthink it.
