Analyzing your Rental

Gathering and analyzing your vacation rental data will help you gain a clearer picture of how well your rental is doing and what areas you may need to improve on. This guide will help you to understand your rental business on a deeper level and hopefully give you an idea of how to make your rental even better and more profitable.

Ask your questions

Full disclosure, I’m a bit of a data geek, so I spent several hours playing with both Excel and Tableau before I actually asked myself and others, this question. We came up with:

• “Where do we get the most bookings?”
• “What is our percent of occupancy by year and by suite?”
• “Which suites and properties were the most successful?”
• “How has our pricing changed?”
• “What are the demographics of our guests?”

After figuring out the questions I needed to answer, it was much easier to find the data I needed and put together a display that showed those answers in a clear and concise manner. Be sure to spend some time going coming up with good questions that are important for your rental business.

Make a list

In order to answer the questions you came up with you are going to need some raw data. So make a list of what kind of information you want and from what sources. Of course the most obvious data to gather is information on things like nights and pricing, but consider other data points as well.

Do you want to:

• Know who is a repeat renter?
• If your number of bookings increased?
• Look for date comparisons?
• What service provided the most bookings?
• Pick the data you want to gather and make a list so you know what you need.

Get the data from the Vacation rental service(s) of your choice

VRBO and Airbnb both have an option to scrape reservation data, but they do not give you the same data, so I found it easier to go through and manually enter everything into a Google form. The Google form contained questions for all the data I needed, from the list above, and allowed me to organize it in a way that made sense to me. We also had a number of bookings through direct phone calls or emails from our website and those needed to be entered manually, making the Google form the best option.

Clean up the data

You’re going to have null values, misentered data, and overlapping dates (Pro Tip- search in your spreadsheet for things like “1018” and “3016” – this is where i found the most misentered data). Go through your data and make sure it makes sense. This is a time suck but it will be better for you in the long run, as you need clear data for clear information.

Pick your analysis service:

I started by using excel’s pivot tables and charts but after some playing with those i ended up switching to Tableau, both because it could directly pull data from the google form, and because I wanted to be able to compare multiple spreadsheets easily. Tableau also allowed me to create beautiful and understandable visual aids like this:

This graph showed me that most of our bookings come through VRBO, and that this suite had fewer bookings from 2016 and 2017.

Next Steps

So you’ve gathered, analyzed, and understood your vacation rental data. Now what? Well for starters, keep collecting as much data as possible. Think of more questions that you had but couldn’t answer because you weren’t keeping track of that information before, and start collecting that information with each booking.

Finally, take the analysis you’ve done and apply it! Did you notice that most of your bookings come from Airbnb instead of VRBO? Look at what you can do to boost your VRBO bookings, or focus even more energy on your Airbnb listings and do what you can to improve them. Did you notice that when you post on social media, you get more visits to your website? Post on social media more! Alternately if you noticed that your social media presence has had no discernable difference or correlation with the number of bookings you have, spend less energy on it. All of this information will help you run a better and more efficient vacation rental.