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Today, we sit down with Jamie Lane, the Vice President of Research at AirDNA. Jamie originally started tracking data around short-term rentals for the hotel industry to keep track of “the competition” and how they compared to their brands. His interest in vacation rentals was sparked earlier with his CouchSurfing days and a family vacation home that he and 90 of his closest relatives have access to.

Early data grabs were quite rudimentary and over time the techniques and scraping of Airbnb data evolved to what it is today. Today’s blueprint was built on years and years of calculated examination. He worked his way up the ladder to where at one point he had 9 Ph.D. economists working under him creating forecasts for commercial real estate.

We tackle if we’re in or heading into a recession and break down the reasoning behind his answer. The dreaded “R” word.

Lastly, we dive into the importance of analyzing data in our industry and Jamie explains what sets AirDNA apart from the competition.

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It’s All In The Numbers With Jamie Lane

Good morning, Mateo. How are you?

John, I am fantastic. I’m back from Marcus Vineyard.

I know you look refreshed.

I am refreshed, and happy to have internet.

I’m happy that you have internet and we’re all happy that you have internet now. No freezing. It’s good. It’s season 3 episode 8, I’m excited. It’s another week. We have another great guest. I’ll let you go ahead and do the introduction. I want to dive right into this.

On the heels of DARM, shout out to Amy for a wonderful data and revenue management conference. We have someone who I do know, another person that’s here with me in ATL who I have the privilege of hanging out with, having lunch, picking his brain, letting him talk, and me absorbing it. He’s one of the smartest people I know. I side-hustle those conversations a lot of times. Let me get into introducing our new family member, without further ado, let me introduce you to Jamie Lane, the Vice President of Research for AirDNA, a new co-host to the Good Morning Hospitality Show. Shout out to that. Welcome to the network and welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on the show. I was a longtime reader and a first-time guest.

I love it when people say that and I wish I would be cool to say that, but I never am. I’m always behind the eight ball.

It’s that old-school radio when you get in and you’re trying to win a prize on the radio.

We have a first-time caller. This is for the Gen Z-ers and the Millennials. If any of you are reading this, this was a thing where you’d have to call in, be the tenth caller, you’d sit there and you’d be like, “I want to win that user illusion two cassettes and I want that so bad.” You’d sit there and dial. You’re the eleventh caller. I remember those days. Some people are skilled at it and they’d win weekly. They’d go and that was their job. My wife has a friend back in high school. That’s what they did, and she has t-shirts and all this swag from the radio stations because she’d win all this stuff and she’d give some of it to my wife.

We had the auto-dialer. Let’s talk about it. That’s what they did and they consistently redialed. Anyways, let’s dig into this. Jamie, welcome to the show. We are excited to have you. Your title is Vice President of Research, but I’ve given you your title. You’re like a gangster of data. It’s embedded into your background and how you got there the data like a jiu-jitsu type thing.

Anyways, I am fascinated by our conversations because of the way that data is important to our world more than ever. In these conversations, I feel I’m having a conversation about ones and zeros, and I feel you guys see the world in the matrix with data falling and dropping down everywhere and seeing different things.

I say that realistically because the data does paint a picture. The data does paint something for us to see. It gives us these guiding lines in our business now more than ever. The importance of data not just to the professionals, but to everyone within our space is paramount. Welcome to the show. We all know you well.

We were talking a bit before the show about your family history and you have a 100-year-old home that 90 of your family members share. It seems you’ve been exposed to vacation rentals and the vacation rental industry most of your life. How did your journey bring you to where you are now? I’m pretty sure you didn’t wake up and say, “I’m going to be a data analyst for the vacation rental industry.”

It wasn’t too far off. It started right after college when I started hosting and traveling on CouchSurfing, funny enough. Do you guys remember that site back in the day? Around the same time, a friend told me about his job where he was working as an economist in the travel and hotel industry. I told him, “If you are ever hiring, that’s the job I want.” I was an Economics undergrad and ended up getting my Master’s in Economics. About a year later, they called, I interviewed, got the job, and told them I could start in two months. I gave my current company two weeks’ notice and went to couch surf through Europe for six weeks.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

I got back and started working at a company called PKF Hospitality Research in 2010. My role there was to study the economy and translate the changes that were happening there, consumer preferences, and industry trends into the forecast for hotel owners and operators in the top markets around the country. I transitioned to hosting and traveling on Airbnb. I was an early host. I started reluctantly in 2012.

Airbnb was stealing the ethos of CouchSurfing. I remember the day in 2009, Airbnb started and what they were doing was, “I’m going to stay true to it,” but eventually my wife and I started hosting in our house, renting out an extra bedroom. I started like that and it became to infiltrate my day job as this was a new upstart quickly growing its inventory and being seen as an emerging threat to traditional hotels.

That’s when it became part of my job to start tracking it and we did some rudimentary things back from 2012 to 2013. I don’t know if you guys remember the Airbnb site back then. If you scrolled over a city, it showed you the number of listings in the top right and corner. We had interns going over each city and writing down the number of listings that were in each city around the world.

I love that. Looking back at that time, taking the data, and realizing early on that this could be a threat. It might not be a threat, but it could be something we’re looking at to have the foresight to go ahead and start getting this data. It says a lot about the company you’re working for and what they’re allowing you to do. Was this your decision or was there a team of people that are working on this?

It was my decision. I managed the models, I introduced new variables into the models. It was my forecast. I saw that we were consistently over-forecasting the performance of hotels in New York. There’s got to be something that’s happening in New York City that’s causing pricing power to erode for traditional hotels. We introduced the Airbnb supply into the model and that’s it.

It was rudimentary. I had found someone I could pay to scrape the entire country in 2014. In 2015, I heard about this upstart company AirDNA that was, in my mind, scraping the right way, tracking every property every day around the world, and using that to estimate demand and ADR revenues. Now that I can go back and look in our CRM, I was one of their first enterprise customers back in the day. They gave me redistribution rights and I was selling the data to the hotel industry. I was involved in the company from the beginning.

Even though you’ve only been with them for two years now, you’ve been working hand-in-hand with AirDNA for many more.

PKF was acquired by CBRE in 2014. We went from a company of 60 to a company of 100,000.

For those that are reading, what is CBRE to the minds that are like mine?

They’re a Fortune 150 company, the world’s largest real estate company. You’ll see their signs on the side of the road. They sell leased office space, retail space, and industrial warehouses. They’ll sell the hotel down the street from you. They’re a big commercial real estate company, global in nature. I was fortunate with the acquisition because growing in my career, I was able to quickly advance through the company.

By the time I left, was leading a team of economists, forecasting all of the commercial real estate, and had nine PhD economists working for me. It was a fun role. The group was started by two professors, one at MIT and one at Harvard. I was able to learn a ton from it. They wrote the book on forecasting commercial real estate.

What happened years ago? Was it always in your blood that, “I’m doing a lot of work for this industrial stuff here and this isn’t my love? We grew up with vacation rentals because I’ve always been forecasting. I’m a CouchSurfing dude that turned into an Airbnb guy.” Did you know that you needed to find an exit at some point or not an exit, but a transition to fully focusing on your love of short-term rentals and vacation rentals?

Even with the other responsibilities, I was analyzing their DNA data and the nights from the weekends putting out reports for the industry, more geared towards the hotel industry to understand what was happening in the sector so they could understand what was going on. Scott Shatford, the CEO at AirDNA, had been recruiting me for a while, and we finally got together, made it work out, and was able to take my weekend job and start doing it full-time which, for me, was exciting.

The interesting thing with that is all the data you’re looking at in the perspective, you’re looking at this data, switching it, and flipping it on its head, and now it’s the same data, but from the other perspective. I don’t want to say anti-vacation rental, the data that’s showing why hotels need to do certain things to go ahead and compete with short-term rentals. Now you’re looking at it from the other perspective saying, “This is where we’re at.” You know the hotel background deeper than the majority of the world.

It’s a lot of the same trends that are driving performance. People have money, they have jobs, and they’re going to spend it on travel and changing consumer preferences. In the past years, we saw a huge shift away from buying goods, buying services, and travel experiences in the experienced economy. That was a big shift for hotels and even more for short-term rentals, given the experience that was built into that type of travel. Taking in that same history, the same insight, I was building over time and applying it to a similar type of industry.

Over the past 20 years, there is a huge shift away from buying goods and towards buying services. We are in the experience economy. Click To Tweet

You were building these stories for the hotels from an early stage when they were tracking short-term rentals. Publicly saying, this isn’t a threat, but what’s happening to our revenues at the same time? What was the response? Were you in the room when you were getting the responses? What were the discussions? What were they saying when you’re painting these pictures with data, giving them this story with numbers? What were you seeing? How did they react?

At first, it was denial and there was no way that this industry and someone renting out their spare home can be competing with my beautiful hotel. It took helping people understand what the inventory looked like. Was it a couch that someone was renting out in their spare bedroom in their living room? Was it vacation homes, luxury properties, full apartment buildings, and downtown areas? Help them understand that the supply does look like traditional hotels.

There are additional amenities like a kitchen and multiple bedrooms that make it more appealing for certain types of travel, especially if the trip’s going to be longer than 4 or 5 days. The fastest growing section of the hotel industry was service apartments like suites and extended stay hotels. When you look at that type of supply next to each other, it looks similar. In the types of markets where it’s growing, it paints that picture that a portion of this industry is competitive with traditional hotels and it needs to be tracked in the same way that you’re tracking any of your other competitors in the market that you’re in.

NBSR Jamie Lane | Recession
Recession: A portion of this industry is competitive with traditional hotels, and it needs to be tracked in the same way you’re tracking any of your other competition in the market you’re in.

 

It’s fascinating to watch that. From your perspective, it’s been interesting knowing what you know from where you came from and seeing how the industry reacts. This industry keeps this portion. I’m one of the people that don’t like to dissect it. We are all hospitality at the end of the day. I don’t even think we’re fighting for legitimacy. We’re here not going anywhere, anytime soon. It’s interesting to see how that has changed, even the way that hotels are operating now.

What have they learned? What are they learning from us? What are they implementing and what is the effect? I would be interested to know from a data perspective, as they implement the tactics that vacation rentals and short-term rentals have always used in their business, there’s so much they can do. Is what they’re doing having a big effect, especially coming out of this big pandemic? It’s interesting to see what the data are going to show in the next year or two about how they can respond.

We see brands evolving. You have traditional, whether it’s OTAs or hospitality companies pushing into the space. Homes and Villas by Marriott, seeing that their loyalty members were using vacation rentals, but having to go outside of the Marriott family to be able to book those properties. Even Hopper is selling traditional hotels, seeing the demand for vacation rentals, and moving into the space.

We’ve seen a lot of the traditional hotel brands, Core with Onefinestay and Hyatt with Oasis, move into the space choice on their own and build out their inventory to go after their guests. It’s a merging of the industry and having the data point to understand those trends has been important for those types of companies that want to get in there.

Jamie, I got a quick question for you. We talked about not wanting to separate it, but at the same time, my question is during these meetings when leading up years ago when you start bringing attention to the trends and the data that is short-term rentals and vacation rentals, on a scale of comparing it to other threats to the X brand, where are vacation rentals or short-term rentals compared to competitive other brand competition? Are they looking at back in the day? Now it’s overall, but are they looking like, “Do we need to go against Marriott or Hilton?” What is the number one red flag when looking at data? Are vacation rentals up there?

No. It was always a tertiary threat but never one of the main ones. In the OTA landscape, if you’ve asked the CEO of Hilton if he was more concerned about Expedia or Vrbo, he would’ve said Expedia and the impact of traditional OTAs on hotel brands, hotel ownership, and not being able to control their supply and pushing.

We’ve got the book direct movement in the short-term rental and vacation rental space. It was in 2017 or 2018 that Hilton had did book direct campaign, trying to push guests away from booking through Priceline, Hotels.com, and Expedia and back to the Hilton site so they can maintain the relationship with the guests and not have to pay those who pay the fees associated with that too.

Is that still the same or do you think that every year that goes by, vacation rentals goth at it a bit?

There was a concern during the pandemic with demand shifting away from hotels for short-term rentals and there was a slide that it presented at DARM we did a big study with STR. The hotel data company is confusingly known by Smith Travel Research, where we combined our two data sets and looked at the share of demand going towards short-term rentals as a percent of overall paid accommodation.

How many people are staying in hotels in short-term rentals from 2008 to 2019? Short-term rentals were growing their share at such a great rate but then, we hit the pandemic and it broke the curve. The industry was getting a greater share. In 2021, we went back to pre-pandemic and since then, we’ve almost gained no share of demand from hotels.

It’s plateaued. That’s great research. I appreciate it. Let’s go back to the DARM recap we did on the show. I may or may not have been excited when Amy Hinote talked about your presentation. It’s not that I wasn’t excited about it, it’s because I was tired and I apologize. We’ve gone through this back and forth, but I’m going to publicly apologize to Jamie for not showing my enthusiasm that way. With that said, I have looked at that. You shared that slide deck with me. I appreciate it. If it’s cool, I’d love to go ahead and make the slide deck available to everyone that’s reading. Everyone can go ahead and download it.

If you missed the presentation like I did because we are busy running around doing things, there’s also a recording of it. They have that available. If you do have access, and for those of you that were at DARM and may have missed it too, you want to go back and check out this presentation. It was an excellent one.

The slide that Amy maybe not necessarily got excited about that, but maybe piqued her interest. It was when you were talking about how well professional hosts were doing. Broadly, the industry’s doing well and we’re down a bit off the highs of 2021, how I’m describing that it’s worked more in a correction, not a recession. 2021 was an anomaly.

We’re never going to meet those performance metrics again. The industry’s doing well compared to pre-pandemic, and I suspect we’re going to be on an upward trajectory again after this year. When you look at review scores, these are average review scores for properties listed on Airbnb, and we broke them out by the number of properties that each host has, those with 1 property, 2 to 5, and 20-plus. Since then, I’ve done it, broken it down a few different ways, and essentially as you get larger, your reviews are getting worse, so you’re getting lower overall review scores.

NBSR Jamie Lane | Recession
Recession: 2021 was an anomaly. We’re never going to meet those performance metrics again, but the industry’s still doing really well compared to pre-pandemic.

 

What was interesting though, when we broke it down by year, everyone saw a bump in all types of posts during the pandemic. People were excited to travel, overall leaving better review scores. Since then, scores over the past year, professional hosts are now well below 2019 average review scores where everyone else is still above, and there’s a bunch above things happening there, but my conversations with people, it’s labor.

That’s the first thing I was going to do the bandwidth of teams and burnout the ability to go ahead, screw it, it’s hard.

It’s hard. We also have to be honest about the review culture in our industry, too. There are a lot of times when it’s held over people’s heads. The stay might have been middle of the road, but one thing might have pissed somebody off and they’re going to be like, “You didn’t credit me this extra night, so I’m not giving you anything.” Again, when we look at all of the factors that go into that, it’s going to be interesting to see what fed into that because it is the human capital component and it is hard to hire and hire well. Hire people that can do the job and do the job well.

Anyone who was in that space and I know this personally because I’ve pilfered some talent from other places to work at the hotel. You had to pay more, so people moved. I digress about that. It’s interesting though. I do want to put a point on the 2019 numbers and us getting back to that. We knew there was going to be a correction coming. Nobody thought this was going to be sustainable.

My question to you is, where are we going from here? One of the big things we talked about, I heard, and came across a conversation at DARM about was the R-word. What metrics are fueling that talk? We think about it in the broader economy. What are the indicators for our industry? What are the indicators looking for us specifically in terms of hospitality?

When you hear that R word, the first thing people do is cinch up. Everyone’s going to tighten up their purse strings. No one’s going to be traveling. No business travel is happening. While we’re at a conference that’s full of people who are traveling for business in a city that has back-to-back conferences, where are we going with this? Is the R-word something that should be top of mind for us?

I like to simplify the definition of recession, so it can have different definitions, but it’s too much supply, and too little demand. That can mean the overall economy. Generally, a recession happens when people pull back from spending. There are too many employees for the jobs that are available and the figures start turning negative. For the industry as a whole, it could also mean too many rentals and no up demand for those rentals.

Recession is too much supply and too little demand. Click To Tweet

Now both in the economy and in our industry, I do not think we’re in a recession. Given the strength of the overall economy of the US, we added 5 over 500,000 new jobs and unemployment at 3.5%, we can tick down the economic indicators. We’re not in a recession, but could we be in a recession in 2023?

Yes, and it’s more than likely we will be given how consistently high inflation’s been in the Fed’s determination to bring that down by slowing economic growth to do that. It’s going to be very tough to get what ACOM calls a soft landing to bring inflation down without pushing the economy into a flip recession. Most economists I listen to are about 50/50 on whether or not we’d go into recession or not.

That means any external thing that might happen, an uptick in the war in Ukraine or some shock to gas prices, there could be a litany of things that push us over the edge. In my head, that pushes the risk up above 50%. When you look specifically at our industry, demand is continuing to grow. We had 18% more nights booked and stayed in July of 2022 than we did in 2021.

Unfortunately, we had 25% more supply coming too, so everyone’s occupancy was down. If you look at it on a unit-by-unit basis, you’re seeing some weakness in your performance, but as an industry, more people are staying in short-term rentals than ever before and we’re continuing to grow off of 2021’s highs for total demand that the industry is accommodating in and I believe we’re still undersupplied. There are not enough units for the number of people that want to travel and especially travel during peak periods to the most popular destinations that our industry is good at accommodating people in.

We're still undersupplied. There are not enough units for the number of people that want to travel. Click To Tweet

Atlanta is one of them.

The interesting thing with that too is when you talk about peak season and I agree wholeheartedly that there isn’t enough inventory to meet the demand of peak season. Overall as an industry, we need to do better marketing and showcasing shoulder seasons. The way the world is with remote travel and remote work, the ability to go ahead and do these things, we have to change the mindset overall of what a family vacation is.

What is a vacation and when do you have to take it? We can make this more of twelve months of the year for the majority of the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast is harder for year-round vacation destinations. If we change the mindset, we’re going to be able to go ahead and open up more of this inventory. That’s going to take time and the alignment of what are we trying to go ahead and push out here.

Seasonality has different thoughts there in terms of its day-of-week seasonality. The biggest growth we’ve seen in demand has been that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday traffic, and we’ve been able to maintain a lot of that. We’ve turned weekend trips into five-day trips and that helped increase occupancy overall for the industry. Many destinations have been able to maintain the games that they had gotten during the pandemic. My parents have four vacation rentals in Maine and traditionally, there was a two-month season. It was essentially July and August and you sold as much as you can during July and August at the highest rate possible.

In 2022, the season starts in May and doesn’t end until October. We’re seeing more demand in May than we used to in July. If we’re able to maintain that, and so far, this season we were, that changes the dynamic in that destination. We’re able to support more local businesses. More restaurants are busy for 6 months of the year instead of 2 months of the year. Local things make it much more sustainable and our industry is a big part of that.

Flip that around too. On top of that, the interesting thing with this is taking a 2-month season and making it 5 or 6 months. These property managers, whether small or large, hosts or not hosts, are getting more revenue and, in turn, they’re able to take that revenue and invest in tech that is comparable or on par with what the twelve months of the year, year-round, property managers have access to.

Until a few years ago, property managers up in Maine were still running on spreadsheets. Everything was archaic in legacy systems. Now because they have more revenue coming in, they could buy the newer tech, stay and be comparable, and compete with these property managers that have been doing tech forward for years.

I still haven’t convinced my mom to get off of her spreadsheet and we’ve got revenue management software. AirDNA has, but I can’t get her to use it. She needs to raise her prices.

You can’t get your mom to use AirDNA. That’s sad, but awesome.

They’re booked solid for the year in April.

That’s crazy. You think about it too from an operations standpoint. You need more of that talent. A lot of the people working here are coming in seasonal. They’ll be there. Now that’s more attractive. Instead of 2 months now you have a 6-month opportunity.

They could be working there instead of raking blueberries.

It still is a tough labor environment. One stat I saw was around our labor recovery. We now have more people employed than pre-pandemic, but if trends would’ve continued without the pandemic, we would’ve added 2 million more people to the labor pool in the US and that would’ve come from immigration with closed borders, we weren’t pulling in. You think of the type of workers that get their start in the hospitality industry.

A lot of them are 1st or 2nd-generation immigrants and that feeds the labor pool for our industry that did not have the opportunity to come over the past two years for obvious reasons with the shutdown of borders, and a lack of global travel. That specifically hurt both the hotel, short-term rental industry, and the vacation rental industry of being able to get and attract new workers.

It’s interesting, I saw that in Martha’s Vineyard when I had a Croatian server. I had two Jamaican servers within the space. When you look at the people in the demographics on the island, that was the culture of the people that were working there. There was one student that was there working in a summer program, but it seems these are places for students, interns, and people studying hospitality.

I don’t know if the industry is looking at that, but that’s also a great place to build this talent up, and these lines of succession of people that are going to be able to come through the industry that has tangible experience in the space. The international thing was eye-opening. I was not expecting to have a waitress from Croatia, seriously. It was cool.

Jamie, I got a question for you. You eloquently called it the R-word, and you mentioned that we’re not in one and there’s a 50/50 chance we’re going to go into an economic downturn. I want to talk worst the case scenario here and what happens to the industry in your mind if the 50% puts us in a recession and that’s where we’re sitting at the beginning of 2023 or whenever it hits. What does that do for us and how long will it take us to get out of it?

AirDNA has only been tracking data since 2015, so we don’t have any recessions in our dataset. Being a travel economist, I’ve gone back and looked through past recessions for the hotel industry, specifically at what’s happened in more destination resort areas and hotels that compete for guests with short-term rentals, and we can see what happened during prior recessions.

The hotel data sets go back to the late 1880s or 1980s. That does provide us with a view. What’s clear is each recession different. The ’08-‘09 recession was bad for the industry. It took five years to recover from that one. The recession after 9/11 was tough for the travel industry. For obvious reasons, people were afraid to travel after 9/11. That one took 3 years to get back to pre-recession levels.

The recessions of 1990-1991 one was much milder, not having a huge impact on jobs and income and didn’t specifically target the travel and tourism industry. In that one, it was about a year and a half to get back to pre-recession levels. As we’re forecasting now, it’s a recession that looks more like the 1990-1991 recessions than anything like the ’08-‘09, or the one after 9/11.

We have unemployment go up to 5% or 6%. We see a pullback for 1 year maybe 2 and travel spending is caused by a 5% decline in revenue per available listing. We see some discounting and high-growth areas. That’s high growth for supply. That’s the big thing. Market and industry-specific, we’re going to see a pause on the growth of new demand or a slight decline.

Generally, there’s a trade-down. People that were staying in luxury properties are now staying in upscale, and upscale people are now staying in the economy. People still want to take their trips. They only go for 5 days instead of 7 days and things like that. It is travel discretionary. We do see a pullback at the highest end. Markets that are seeing supply growth now are at-risk for bigger declines in their performance and there are the headwinds of you competing with more people for the same number of guests.

NBSR Jamie Lane | Recession
Recession: Those markets that are seeing the most supply growth now are probably the most at risk for bigger declines in their own performance.

 

How does this digital nomad concept play into this? It’s interesting when you think of discretionary stand, spending on travel, being pulled back, part of it is the leisure side of it. The other part is business corporate travel. In this new landscape, I can’t tell you how many people are digital nomads that I didn’t even think knew what the word is.

They got rid of their places over the past four months, have been living in four different countries, and still don’t own a place when they are in town. They’re renting for a month. How does that play in? That’s not going away? They keep their jobs. They’re not going into offices. They’re still on the move as long as they can afford to. How does that play into what the industry would see in a recession?

It insulates the downside scenario of there being a certain amount of people that are traveling and in our data, we see it. Globally, it’s about 20% of nights booked are for a month or longer stays. Most of that is isolated around the major cities around the world. We’re not seeing a big uptick in long-term stays in Destin or Breckenridge.

It’s more of an urban airport hub.

Overall, the length of stay is longer in beach and mountain markets. People go to the beach for a week and the average length of stay is 5 or 6 days in those markets, but they’re only seeing maybe 3% or 4% of their nights booked being for a month or longer. It depends on the type of location and type of demand that you’re able to accommodate.

Here in Atlanta, there’s much demand for longer-term stays. We’ve got many hospitals, the film industry, and all these types of colleges and universities where short-term rentals are attractive for people staying. It’s opened up a whole new category of demand for this space that I do expect is going to be around for a while.

It’s awesome. We’re getting to the end here, but I want to give you a chance to talk about AirDNA briefly. We’ve talked about data and we appreciate it. I have a question and I wanted you to let everyone know what you offer. My question is, you’re not the only game in town. You have competition and talking about what AirDNA has to offer, I also want to know why you’re better. In your humble opinion.

There is a couple of things. One is time series of history. We were the first ones there starting to track the data on our site. We’ve got a website. You can go see a history going back a few years. Not many other groups are going to be able to do that. Another is the accuracy of the data. Being a company that acquires our data through scraping, the accuracy of the modeling to get to what is a booked or blocked night and what’s available or not, and how much revenue is coming into these properties so that we can have a time series of accurate, believable, actionable data is important. We track 10 million listings around the world. We’re estimating daily demand for those.

Importantly, we get a direct feed of data from about 1.5 million listings. Through channel managers, property management systems, and big VRMs that are giving us their data, we can then track the accuracy and get comfortable that our data is the most accurate out there. That’s representative of the entire industry. I present it in a way. One of the important factors is that when you see the data and you understand what it is, you can make the right decisions from what you’re of learning from our data set.

When you see the data and understand what it is, then you can make the right decisions from what you're sort of learning from the data set. Click To Tweet

The presentation of the data is, in your opinion, easier to digest than other options out there.

That’s been a big part of our adoption. AirDNA has been profitable from year one and we’ve grown from two ends. One is the individual hosts, those with 1 to 20 properties. When they’re getting and trying to understand the market they want to go into and what that opportunity looks like. Once they have the property to be able to benchmark themselves against their competition and understand how they should price their units and how they should operate them efficiently going forward. That’s been a key customer base for us. On the other side, the largest property managers around the world use our raw data sets to then build off their revenue management systems and their data systems to allow them to grow and understand where the opportunities are.

We’re using it. We’re using AirDNA where Hopper is a client. I look at your data every other day and understand who, how, when, where, and what I need to be doing to make educated decisions from Hopper’s home standpoint. It’s fantastic. Jamie, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us.

It’s been a blast. I appreciate you having me on.

Jamie, AirDNA has been a huge help to Atlanta and the regulatory fight. I know we didn’t get into this, but in these regulatory fights, data is a huge component in being able to control the narrative in our space with truth and with actual figures. Talking about all the factors that are going into the industry, that’s a huge one that is affecting the business. I appreciate what AirDNA has stepped up and done in that space. I hope that it continues. You’ve been a great partner for us. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

 

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