Welcome back to another installment of Rev Up!
While we’ve spent the past couple of articles spending a lot of time looking at Summer trends, we wanted to shift gears this week and talk a little more about Early Fall and Fall, and how our seasonal rates adjust as we see things slow down.
Whether you’re new to our rental program, or you’ve been with us for 40+ years, we think it’s important to reinforce that Gulf Shores/Orange Beach vacation rental demand and rental revenue trends don’t necessarily follow the traditional “Four Season” structure we typically think of. Our primary guest base is comprised of school-aged families, and thus our demand patterns are much more aligned with school schedules than anything else. What does this mean? Well, it means that while “Spring” is typically March 20 – June 21, and “Summer” is June 21 – September 23, our demand doesn’t necessarily match up with these dates.
Our full-time in-house revenue management team works on maximizing revenue through having the best possible rates based on internal and external demand factors. Our team analyzes the vast amounts of data that we have available to us internally, through neutral third-party data providers, and with very powerful AI-driven tools that analyze over 10 billion data points per day to us to help set rates for each day, for each unit!
Below is an example of an actual three-bedroom condo’s rates for 2024, as of today:
These rates will change on a nearly daily basis even this far out, and will change at least daily as we approach higher demand dates.
If we narrow our focus to May 1 – through the end of October and overlay an occupancy chart from a typical year into the same daily price graph, you’ll see how closely aligned our pricing is to our demand:
The single most important thing to understand from this visualization is that we are tying our pricing very closely to our demand. We are focused on maximizing your rental revenue, and that means ensuring your rates are right for when our rental demand is high, and right for when our rental demand is low. While we would certainly love to charge July 15 rates for August 15, the demand starts to dip dramatically typically after the 2nd weekend in August, which means our rates have to adjust with these demand changes to stay competitive.
Bryant Loy, our Director of Revenue Management will be joining other industry experts on a webinar next Thursday, August 10, 2023 to discuss current trends and pricing strategies. Feel free to register today at https://lnkd.in/eHkTcbBP to hop on to watch live, or we will post a link to the recording here in the next couple of weeks as well!
Our team is here to Rev Up your rental’s revenue through optimized pricing, and perfect alignment with our industry-best Marketing department!