After I toured Rukmani's South Melbourne apartment, we sat down with her listing, her pricing and her operations. She wanted help optimising it and getting ready to scale. A little while after she made the changes, she messaged me: they had got out of a two-week slump with four bookings in three days, and had the first week of September booked the day after the changes went in.
Play the video: Watch Me LIVE Help This $7.5K/Month Airbnb Host Optimize Her Listing
Start with operations
She had stopped cleaning about a month earlier and moved to a small local cleaning company. That matters for her place more than most, because it is full of small details that need to go back exactly where they were. I asked about it first because of everything she already gives guests: bread, a basket, a guest book, croissants and flowers.
Charge for what you already give away
I call this LTV maxing. Lifetime value is what each guest is worth to you, and small personal touches can raise it. She was already doing the work. She just was not charging for it.
Here is how it would run. A booking comes in, you send the confirmation with a short form, a Google Form is fine, asking why they are staying. Birthday, anniversary, even a proposal, because her balcony is perfect for one. Based on the answer, they get offered a matching package. For a birthday that might be a balloon bed for about $200, or candles for $50, plus the snacks she already provides. Her cleaners were already doing this kind of thing, so it is a conversation with them, with a cut for them each time.
To work out what to sell, look at who actually books. She estimated about 40% families, 30% friends and 20% couples. Each group wants different things. They already had an idea of their own for the friends groups: an Amazing Race style experience through South Melbourne Market with a local partner. Partnerships like that help the local economy, give the listing a selling point, and add revenue on the back end. Same bookings, more money per booking.
What the pricing data said
We pulled her listing up in NightlyIQ, the revenue management software we built in-house for our community. Over the next 30 days she was an outperformer:
- Her average booked nightly rate was $395, against $250 for the market.
- Her occupancy was 33%, against about 40% for the market.
- Her forward 30-day booked revenue was $3,953, excluding cleaning, against $3,000 for comparable two-bedrooms in South Melbourne. That is about 31% more.
So her prices were strong and her occupancy was a little low. September sat at about 33% occupancy. Her minimum price was $180, and she had been manually discounting the next seven days to fill them.
I know why people set their floor near their rent. It feels like break-even. But you would rather take a booking that loses a little than have no booking and carry the rent for that night anyway. If you keep having to manually discount the same dates, drop the floor instead. I suggested testing $150.
They pushed back, fairly. The place offers a lot, and they felt it was worth more. I understand that, but pricing is not about what you think the property deserves. It is about how the market and the data react. Once you accept that, it is liberating. You stop guessing, and you price off the bookings and the occupancy.
Why the listing had gone stale
Her average stay was 3.5 nights, in line with the market's three. The red flag was that her last booking had come in 14 days earlier. In July she had long stays of 10 and 14 nights, and August was booked out a month ahead. While you are unavailable, Airbnb does not show you, and after a run like that the algorithm tends to push the listing down.
The other cause was quieter. Bookings from Booking.com were showing on Airbnb as blocked dates, because the calendars do not talk to each other. To Airbnb, a calendar full of blocked dates and no Airbnb bookings looks like a dead listing, and a dead listing is hard to revive.
Her demand also had a clear shape. Over the next 60 days she was 44% filled on weekends and 19% midweek. That is a weekend warrior, and NightlyIQ showed a big Friday premium, so the Friday and Saturday adjustments needed to go up. She had last reviewed those settings in June. I would revisit them every four to six weeks.
The hero photo
Her search-to-listing numbers for the last month were poor, and the biggest driver of that is the hero photo. Hers was a close-up of a bedroom with a lamp in the corner. I asked her what separated it from every other listing nearby. The answer was "nothing".
They had already tested the balcony shots. I suggested the green bedroom. Everyone else has white walls and a grey couch, and anything that does not look like the rest makes a scroller stop. It is worth a test, not a guarantee. I also asked her to run each test for three weeks rather than two, so it gets enough traffic to tell you something. Her July tests probably did not, because of the long stays.
Everything we changed
- Talk to the cleaners about paid upsells, starting with birthday packages.
- Test the green bedroom as the hero photo, for three weeks.
- Switch the cancellation policy from moderate to flexible, unblock dates, and lower the floor towards $150 to get bookings moving. Go back to moderate once the listing is not stale.
- Raise the Friday and Saturday premiums.
- Keep a 15% premium on far-out dates. NightlyIQ normally suggests 10%, and the higher figure told me she was getting bookings well in advance.
- Add the Melbourne event dates from the BNB Success app, so the prices mark up on the right days.
Her biggest lesson was how Airbnb treats a listing that goes quiet. Mine is the one I give every host going into summer: keep your reputation high, because that is when a listing like hers does most of its earning.
If you missed it, here is the tour of her apartment and her numbers. If you want to understand the model before you start, the free training walks through it, and this post covers the rules you need in place first. More about me and the business is here.
