Earlier this year, we released RU Data Studio Property Health Cards, a game-changing tool that gives you insights into your property data to help you maximise conversions.
In the first few months following the launch, we received a lot of great feedback. We realised that property managers needed more help to make sense of the property data insights in their RU Data Studio dashboard.
So, we’ve added two new metrics to RU Data Studio that will help you understand your property data and take action to boost your conversion potential: Listings Quality Score and Unsellable Nights.
These new metrics are free to use for all Rentals United customers and will make a huge difference in your vacation rental portfolio’s performance.
Let’s discover what they are and how they can help you:
What is the Listings Quality Score and how is it calculated?
To make our Property Health Cards more useful, we added a Quality Score to all listings, expressed as a percentage. This is similar to the property page quality scores that OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia have, but we are the first ones to give you a globalised score of your listings’ quality across all your sales channels.
The Listing Quality Score is calculated from a number of different factors that we know to influence your listings’ potential for conversion. We weighted each of these factors according to their importance.
Here are the 5 major components of the Listing Quality Score in order of weighting:
- Revenue Outlook (55%). What’s your revenue outlook for the next 30, 60, 90 days? This is based on your listing’s Occupancy and Blocked Nights this month, next month and two months out.
- Amenities (25%). How many of the top-converting amenities does your vacation rental have? Note that not all amenities are weighted equally. For example, Internet & Wifi are weighted more heavily than Air Conditioning or Parking. In addition, we excluded Pool and Pets Allowed from this figure because not all properties are able to provide these amenities.
- Days since last booking (10%). How many days have passed since someone last booked your listing?
- Photo count (5%). How many photos does your listing have?
- Property occupancy (5%). How many guests does your property sleep?
In the top left corner of your RU Data Studio dashboard, you’ll find the Listings Quality Score metric. This is an extremely useful tool because it tells you how your account is performing for all of your listings’ Quality Scores at a glance.
You can also filter by Country, City, Bed Type and Property Name to narrow down the results. Your Listings Quality Score will change dynamically depending on the filters you have turned on and the properties you have included in/excluded from your search.
If your Listings Quality Score is 80% or more, congratulations! You’re doing well. If your overall score is 60-70%, there’s room for improvement. And, if it’s less than 60%, there are some serious issues that need to be fixed.
Furthermore, you can see what each individual listing’s overall quality score is on the Property Health Cards. There’s an emoji next to each data point: thumbs up, thumbs down, or yellow dot. These indicate whether you’re doing well on that specific data point or if you need to improve.
For example, to get a thumbs up on your Photo Count, your listing should have at least 25 photos. To get a thumbs up on your Property Occupancy, your rental needs to sleep at least 2 people per bedroom.
What are Unsellable Nights and why do they matter?
When it comes to distribution, we tend to forget about checking our listings’ availability.
And yet, availability is the first thing you should look at because too many blocked nights severely constrain your revenue potential.
You can have the best vacation rental property in the world but if you don’t have availability, it’s not going to get booked. You can have a Listing Quality Score of 100% but if you have too many blocked nights, your listing won’t show up in search results on sales channels and you won’t receive many bookings.
To solve this problem and provide our clients with an easy way of checking their portfolio’s availability, we created the Unsellable Nights metric. It tells you what percentage of the calendar nights in the next 30, 60 and 90 days are blocked.
This way, you can see your property’s “availability health” at a glance. If your Unsellable Nights are less than 5% of the calendar nights, that’s excellent. If your Unsellable Nights are at 5-16%, you should consider releasing some of your blocked nights. And, if your Unsellable Nights are more than 16% of the calendar nights, you need to take action immediately and release as many blocked nights as you possibly can to impact your revenue potential.
On the Property Health Cards, you can see the percentage of blocked nights for each individual listing. The emojis (thumbs up or thumbs down) tell you whether you need to take action.
Boost your vacation rental portfolio’s performance now
All in all, the new Listing Quality Score and Unsellable Nights will help you take immediate action when you see that your property is underperforming.
By getting your Quality Score up and reducing your Unsellable Nights, you’ll instantly increase your property’s potential for conversions.
At Rentals United, our main goal is to help property managers get more bookings and increase their revenue – and the new additions to the RU Data Studio Property Health Cards will help you do just that! And as part of the Data Studio Basic package, they’re free to use for all Rental United Customers.
If you need more help, don’t hesitate to book a live demo of our platform or contact me at doug.truitt@rentalsunited.com.
