Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 439. This is a recap of my Facebook live where I talked about how Wheelhouse updated guide 2022.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
00:00 Start
02:10 Amelia from Wheelhouse
02:40 What is Wheelhouse?
03:20 The Wheelhouse Integration Process
05:10 Business Intelligence Tools
06:30 The Wheelhouse pricing tool
10:40 Wheelhouse settings
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Transcript from the Episode
As you know, I am a big fan of everybody paying so much attention to their pricing in 2022. In 2021 so many hosts from around the world are having to delve into pricing strategies more than ever before. And there's so many new companies, so many new facilities and offerings and software that's coming out to help hosts just like you anywhere between sort of one to 100 to 200 properties. It's available, this technology that you're looking at right now used to be reserved for the big, big change. But now, hosts like you have got access to it.
There are a lot of really cool companies out there that do pricing, and I am a massive fan of what Wheelhouse are doing, I reached out to them and just said, Listen, if you've got any updated things that you can share with us, show us help us out. And Amelia from wheelhouse was so cool to put together a little 20-minute video. I've posted this in the private community, but it's so good, I want to give it to everybody as well. So this is the video, I'm going to hand over to Amelia in a second.
Please make sure as you are watching this, you go and get your free account by going to boostly.co.uk/wheel and you'll be able to follow it through as you go in, make sure you've got your phone or your iPad or something nearby, you can watch us on a computer and you can implement it at the same time. But the data in here is great, the services that you have is fantastic. Even if wheelhouse isn't available in your area just yet, please do go get your free account, because the data that they have is the best in the industry better than anybody else. And what you're able to do is even if you're using some other software, price labs beyond or whoever, you can still take this data and put it into practice, you can merge it all up. Because at the end of the day, you don't just look at one set, you can look at a few sets and make the best advantage of it.
Those of you that can put a little bit of time into this, you will see the benefits from it. Just imagine being able to add 10% or 20% or 30% extra revenue extra profit into your business what that would do for you, your family or for your world.
Okay, so take advantage of this data that you have put it into practice, don't just have one set price throughout the year, because that's not going to help you or nobody. See what you can do. Let me know your feedback below. Thank you very much for Amelia and for the team at wheelhouse for doing this. And a flip over. Let me hand it to them.
Amelia from Wheelhouse
Hi, everyone, I am Amelia from the wheelhouse team. And I'm super excited to be showing you all around today, hopefully get you all as excited about wheelhouse as we are about joining forces with the Boostly community.
So today I'm going to walk you through what exactly wheelhouse is, what the integration and onboarding process looks like. We'll go through the pricing tool itself. And I will also touch on some of our business intelligence tools. So let's go ahead and dive in.
What is Wheelhouse?
First of all, wheelhouse is a dynamic pricing software for short-term rental property managers. So the idea is that you put in the different settings and rate limits, things like that, that I'll show you here in a minute. And then our really powerful pricing engine works underneath that to update your prices every single day to work within your parameters.
So I'll be sure to touch on the different models that we use to come up with your pricing recommendations. wheelhouse is big on transparency. So we always want you to know and understand where your rights are coming from and feel comfortable and confident in adjusting them whatever you'd like.
The Wheelhouse Integration Process
So first, let's touch a bit on the integration process and just what it looks like to get set up with wheelhouse, and then we'll dive right into the product.
So first of all, you'll create a free wheelhouse account, I'm within my account now, but you'll just come over here. When you go to use wheelhouse.com create a free account. And then you'll scroll down to this connect to your account section, you'll follow the instructions given whichever PMS or channel manager you're using to connect your listings, they will all automatically come in but pricing will default to turned off. So you don't have to worry about random rates being pushed through to your PMS or channel manager. And then from there, you'll work with my team and I to onboard your listings. I'll touch on some of the critical settings that we suggest putting in before ever turning on pricing. But other than that, it's really straightforward. And you can even just turn on a handful of listings to get familiar and comfortable with the platform and then slowly integrate others to having pricing turned on. So we'll jump into that. And I'll touch on the different critical areas that we'll suggest you spend time on when you're onboarding your listings.
We do recommend spending around five to 10 minutes within each individual listing just to make sure that individual settings and unique situations are settled for every individual listing, whether that's owner rules, different date settings, things like that, just making sure everything is set up on an individual listing basis. And that's really the time investment upfront and then from there, you're going to save a ton of time because you don't have to worry about adjusting settings moving forward, you can put them all in upfront, and then the engine will work within those parameters.
Business Intelligence Tools
So before I dive into the tool itself, we have a number of business intelligence tools that if you reach out, we are happy to walk you through and kind of explain all the different data that you can pull from each of them and how insightful and easy to use they are. But I'll quickly touch on them to see you know, the potential of them.
We have market reports, those give you a good broader overview of your entire market, you can see things like lead time and occupancy trends for your broader market. And then our competitive sets give you a granular look at your individual competitors. We look at your competitors based on who is close in proximity, who has similar features and to have similar booking patterns to determine who your competitors are. And that's just one factor in our pricing engine.
Again, with this, you can see your next-door neighbor's daily pricing every single day, you can see their minimum stay settings, everything like that. So we're happy to walk you through either of those, as well as our bookings tab, which is kind of like a sales tracker, you're able to see not only when your bookings are coming in, but how much revenue you have on the books, you can look at this on a monthly or daily level. So we'll be sure to share some resources that dive into each of those tools, and that more.
The Wheelhouse pricing tool
But let's dive into the pricing tool itself just so you have a feel for all the different aspects of pricing that you're able to automate with wheelhouse, we have a really easy to navigate platform. So once you're integrated all your listings, and you will always come to wheelhouse to adjust your prices and setting. And then you'll do some other things in your channel manager or PMS, like per channel pricing, things like that.
We also have a 24/7 customer success chat. So you can talk to a real person anytime these are our teammates. We have a ton of amazing reviews online about the wheelhouse software, but 90% of them are surrounding our customer success team. So never hesitate to reach out to them or myself, we're always happy to help you accomplish whatever you're looking to do.
So let's dive into the tool. And again, feel free to reach out if you'd like a one on one demo or walkthrough as to what it would look like for your individual listings. I'm just gonna come down here and choose a random listing here.
So there are a number of ways to intervene on the rates that we're pushing out. One of them is on this calendar view, which we'll come back to. But keep in mind, I'm on an individual listing right now, after we go through all these different settings, I'll pop into the portfolio settings and calendar view. And that's where you would make adjustments in bulk to your listing. So if you wanted to filter by two bedrooms, and then do all these settings, to group listings at once, then you're able to easily do that as well. But we'll just step through one listing to show the full functionality of tool.
First, I'm going to pop into this insights tab. Actually, this is another one of our business intelligence tools that I think is really handy. And it shows how both remodels are at work on any given day to come up with your pricing recommendations. And so we'll talk here about how our model works exactly first, and then we'll step into the different settings that you're able to automate. So you can come here and see that this black line is our base price. We recommend a base price for each of your individual listings given factors that don't change much about your listing throughout the year. So number of bedrooms, bathrooms, we'll look at your historical data, we'll look at your exact listing location. So we'll know if one of your listings has an ocean view versus a parking lot view. And then a number of other factors we'll touch on here in a second.
So this is the kickoff point, we'll come up with a recommendation but you're able to very easily customize where you'd like the engine to start. And so from there, you can see here that observed pricing. This is a sample listing, so it's just flat. But if you were to connect your listings, and you'd be able to see your current pricing overlaid on top of what wheelhouse's recommendations would be and how they would differ from what you currently have in place. And then from there, we're happy to have a conversation around if it makes sense to go through our recommendations, where the differences are what we're observing that you might not be seeing and vice versa.
And so once we have this base price settled, we leverage two different models. So one of them is the predictive model here and this is the pricing model and that's looking at historical pricing information in your market as well as current market prices. And then this reactive model is unique to wheelhouse so all pricing tools will use this predictive model, but this reactive model is unique to wheelhouse and this is looking at real-time demand trends.
We're looking at real-time bookings coming in your market. And then we're blending in that transactional data into your pricing every single day for a real source of truth pricing. And so you can see here that the closer you are to a state, the more heavily weighted that reactive model is because we have more booking data to play with and blend into your pricing.
So if you're ever wondering where a spike in our pricing has come from, you can come here and see, is it historically that we're pulling that information? Or are we seeing real-time bookings that are leaning towards a trend taking place in your market? So an interesting tool just to understand where our recommendations are coming from, that you can kind of pop into whenever you'd like.
Wheelhouse settings
So these are the settings. And I'd like to note, we get a lot of questions around where our data is coming from, especially that booking data that I was referring to a minute ago, we partner with key data, they chose wheelhouse as their preferred pricing partner. They are the largest proprietary data provider in the short-term rental space. And so they are what is powering our engine right now. So we recently got worldwide data. If you ever notice that we're not in your markets, you can go ahead and just put in a request. And we are able to easily expand into that market.
So this is the base price that I mentioned before, what kicks off the algorithm that you can easily customize. These are a few more of those factors I mentioned that don't change much that the year that helped give us your initial base price. So we look at occupancy, number of guests that can be accommodated on the property, so on. But you can always customize this, if you just have a starting point in mind that you'd like for your listings, you can very easily put that in, save it and it'll go straight through.
So again, this is just a starting point. And then from there, you put in more specific parameters that you'd like the wheelhouse engine to work within. So we'll step through a few of them.
We'll start with the ones that we consider the most critical before turning on pricing. So we'll automatically go with a recommended last-minute discount that we feel pretty confident suggesting people stick with. But as far as the future premium goes, this is really handy, especially with volatile lead times since COVID. It's hard to predict when people are going to be booking and what prices will actually be. And so you can go with the recommended setting, which is increasing the prices about a year out. But something that we see works for a lot of people is something like this, you could do 45 days, 75 days 120 40 and 365. And then you could do a 5% increase, kind of percent 15 20 and 50.
So this is just one example that works for usually bedroom or houses with less bedrooms, if you have more bedrooms, and you want to be a little less aggressive because booking Windows tend to be a bit further out. But you can see here that it's reflected in this interface here. So you can always see the strategy that you're putting in place. You can also see how it takes up the pricing further out. And this just really gives the booking engine time to pick up on what's actually transacting in the market, and allows you to keep your calendar open a bit longer than usual.
So these are some of the, you know, more strategic guidance areas that we're able to share during onboarding, if you work closely with us, we're happy to help you with this.
We have the day of the week setting here. So you can customize this if you'd like to tack on a certain percentage increase for any day of the week. And again, this will be dynamic with the market. So this is not a new kind of flat rate you're pushing out it. So whatever we're observing demand-wise, we'll tack on a 10% increase for those days.
Come over here to seasonality. This is one of our we usually recommend people go with our recommended setting because our data science is so strong around it, but you can always customize percentage increases that you'd like to place on individual months. So you could decrease or increase months by percentages here. We usually recommend whatever kind of seasonality strategy that you're trying to put in place, starting with the minimum price setting rather than the seasonality tab just because then you can kind of pick the price for that you're willing to take for each month. But again, these are things we're happy to help input during the onboarding process.
So I'll pop in here to minimum price. So as I mentioned before, during onboarding, we have some critical settings we recommend spending the most time in which is the base price. So just ensuring that your base price is where you'd expect it from. feature premium. So you can protect your further out calendar and it gives you time to adjust your rates accordingly. And then this minimum price and minimum stay settings, these two look similar. And we do recommend spending some time in here, because there's a lot of granularity you're able to achieve within your strategy. So I do recommend kind of getting comfortable with this setting and seeing the scope of what we're able to put in.
So this is basically saying that no matter what we're observing in the market never go below this price. So say, across the board, wherever you don't have any other rule set, you want it to fill in, or default to 200. And then maybe weekends, you're playing a premium price. And then you can adjust this per month. So our summer months are somewhere around here. So maybe on weekends, that minimum price jumps up a bit. But then, you know, maybe around holidays, it could be even higher. So this is saying no matter what we're observing the market, I'm not going to take lower than $350 for these months. So you can specify that for each individual month. You can also do time based minimum prices. So there's a few different ways to approach this and do recommend playing around with it, just to accomplish whatever strategy you are currently doing manually.
But you could do within say two weeks out, you want to drop that down to 175. And then maybe one week out, sort of on 25. You can also specify this on a monthly and daily and week level. So you can get really specific and this is where the time-saver comes in, down the line because you can input all these settings ahead of time and then you don't have to worry about adjusting them. As the year goes on, you can just let the wheelhouse engine work within these parameters I put in.
Date Specific minimum prices, maybe around holidays, we are already going to pick up demand trends for holidays or local events. But if there's just a certain date range, whether it's spring break or around Christmas that you want to put any specific minimum, you can input that and then also have a repeat annually so that you're not having to come back in next year and put that in again.
So you can also do a maximum price, a lot of people leave this blank, but it can help you avoid an overpriced booking and getting a bad review. So you can always put that in. And then minimum stays looks similar to minimum price. So you're able to put in a global minimum stay say it was three nights, if you wanted wheelhouse to be able to pick up on like two-night gaps in between two, three-night bookings, then you could toggle on gap nights here and allow us to open up your calendar for bookings between those days.
Maybe if they're coming in on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, they're staying five nights. And then you can specify this. So maybe summer months, it's a really popular time in your market and you want them to stay for a full week, you can do that, as well as time-based minimum stays. So within 14 days, maybe you're dropping that down to two nights just to increase your occupancy. And similarly with the monthly and day of week settings.
I think I forgot to mention this on the minimum price. But you can also set this for after. So if you wanted to do if someone's booking after, you know, around three months out, and then you can increase that to longer length of stay. If you're going to have something who books that long. You can also do that for minimum price. And then of course, stay-specific minimum stays maybe around Christmas, they have to stay a full week, whatever the strategy is, there's usually a way to put it within wheelhouse so you're not having to come down, come into your platform around the holidays and adjust it, you can just set this up ahead of time.
Lastly, we have last-minute discount or long term discounts Excuse me. And so seven or 20 minutes or longer if you want to tack on a specific discount, you're able to do that here. You can do more specific discounting and couponing within your channel manager or PMS still. But you can also accomplish seven or 20 days, so longer discounts.
So those are the different settings that you're able to automate throughout onboarding will help you put in whatever you're trying to accomplish strategy-wise. But then once all of this is up and running, then you'll spend a lot of time in the portfolio over here to this portfolio settings view. This is where you can do everything I just showed you in bulk across a subset of listings. And you're able to put in nicknames if you'd like to filter by that. Or you can just simply filter by whatever range of rooms you're looking to find.
So if I just wanted to look at two bedrooms, then I could select act all of these and adjust the minimum stays. I can adjust the minimum price things like that. These two distinctions between add new and replace all add new is when you have existing customizations in place, and you'd like to join it with whatever you're putting in down below, or you can replace all which will override any existing settings. So you can always choose if you'd like to add or replace all of them.
You can also do pricing adjustments across your portfolio here. And so we'll jump back into an individual listing to show how you can adjust pricing on one listing. But this is also how you can do it across the board. So either again, if you wanted to filter by bedrooms, so maybe you wanted to adjust prices for all of these bedrooms for a specific date range, you just filter, you can select all. And then you come over here and you can either do a custom override, which will push a flat rate through, and that whatever price you put in will show up on your calendar. Or you can do an automated adjustment, which means it'll tack on maybe a 10% increase to whatever we're observing demand-wise for that market. So you can either override it with a flat rate, if you know exactly what you want to push, or you can just increase for 10%. Maybe you saw a spike in demand that you want to capitalize on. You can also specify the date range. So if you wanted to do this for maybe all of April. So if you wanted to do this for maybe all of April, do that. Or you can just do one individual day. So if you just saw this and you wanted to adjust pricing for that one day for this one listing, you can do it the exact same way, just for a smaller date range for one listing.
You can also again, go back to the strategy, or the calendar for one individual listing. And from here, you're able to click on days you can drag across. And then it's the same concept, you can either put an a custom flat rate, or you can do an automated increase or decrease. So you could do negative 10%, if you wanted for those days, so whatever we're observing for pricing will dock off an extra 10%. But it'll never go below your minimum price that you have in place.
So those are the different ways that you can adjust pricing, adjust settings. And overview, you can either do it all on an individual listing basis, or you can go through the Portfolio tab and do it to multiple listings at once. You can also copy and paste from one listing to another. So see, we have custom settings in here. If I wanted to copy those, I just select the listing that I want to copy from. I come over here to copy settings, I select which ones I want to apply to a different listing. So I want to put the same minimum prices and minimum stays on a different listing. I select those, and then I hit Next. And then you select the listing you want to paste it onto. And then you hit next and it all and then you hit Apply Settings and it automatically copy those over.
So those are different ways to adjust settings and prices. There are tons to explore and discover. And we get a lot of amazing feedback on how easy the platform is to navigate. So once you play around a bit, you'll get the hang of it. And you'll just be kind of skimming through your calendar here and there to see where you might want to intervene on rates. Once all of your onboarding and everything is set up. That's really the big time saver. And we're happy to help you know, make sure that you're comfortable adjusting rates and settings.
So feel free to reach out, we're happy to talk. I know Mark from Boostly was putting together a list of markets that we'd like covered. So those are all covered to date. Feel free to send over any other requests that you'd like. You can always just come to the C markets. Enter in and see if we cover it and if not, then hit us up in the chat and we will build that over.
So thank you so much for spending some time with me. We're really excited to meet a few of you and hope you do reach out. I'm sure you'll have our contact information on hand so we really look forward to hearing from you soon. Let us know if you have any questions and I will talk to you soon. Thanks
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