Jamie Lane
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[00:00:00] I'm back to SEO for the best. I'm your host, Michael Chang. It's my pleasure to welcome Jamie Lane to the show today. Jamie, thank you for spending time with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Michael. Jamie is a senior vice president and chief economist at AirDNA. My go to platform for data. So I'm really excited about this conversation.
We're going to dig into the details on what makes AirDNA different and great. So that for folks that use it or thinking about using it, you really understand what happens behind the scenes. So you have confidence in the product. Before we start, I always ask my question, you're a host. What's a memorable guest story that comes to mind?
First thought, best thought. Yeah. First thought is I hosted this woman from Germany. She was at my place. It was when I was hosting in a private room in my house and I was taking a trip out to Oktoberfest. And didn't have lodging, remembered she was from Munich, reached out, asked if she knew of anywhere I could stay.
And she actually was moving apartments and had a [00:01:00] whole empty apartment in Munich. The weekend I was coming that she set up for me a free place for the entire weekend during Oktoberfest and being an awesome experience and like really neat to like, I got her, I was able to share my spot with her and she was able to share that great spot.
With me. Oh man, you got a free, you got a free spot to stay last minute in Munich during Oktoberfest. And it's the, the ethos of the home sharing thing actually really is. Well, I share my home, you share my home. We can experience different places. That's really neat, man. That's really cool. I love that story.
You have, not only do you work at RDNA kind of full time and have a big role there, but you also. Have short term rentals, correct? Growing up, I was very lucky where my great grandfather bought a spot up in Maine and built a home on the coast there back in like the 1920s. This house has been in the family for going on a hundred years now.
And we share it now with the extended family. So there's probably like a hundred family members now that I'll share [00:02:00] it, like in this like big trust. And when my parents retired, they wanted to buy a house near there. So we didn't have the money to go out and buy another house on the coast. But they wanted a house they could use during the summer.
So we bought a house about five minutes away near the coast, but not like no ocean views. They started hosting in their house. They had an upstairs apartment and then really loved it. And we decided to go out and buy a few more. So they ended up getting a spot down the street, literally a two minute walk from their house that was an old converted schoolhouse that had four units in it, as well as a retail space.
Today we run those as four or three long, or three short term rentals, one longterm rental. And then my mom's built out an art gallery in the retail space. That's so cool. So it's like a whole sort of family thing. And we run it from May to October sort of peak season up in Maine. At Arcadia National Park.
Oh, wow. That's really neat. I never knew about Arcadia actually. And then I have this [00:03:00] little kid's book for my daughter. It has all the national parks. And I was like, we're flipping through that. And it's Arcadia and it's close by. We should go visit it. That's really cool. So coastal spot in Maine. Are you guys like the Bush family or something?
Like next to the Bush compound in kind of Buckport? No. I quite like that, but it's further up the coast. It's, and we actually rent out the family house and on Airbnb in Burbo too. And we've been doing that for 30, 40 years. Oh my God. Really? Okay. So we take about six weeks where the family can use it. And then the rest of the summer we rent it out.
And renting it out covers the expense for the property and it has allowed it to continue to be in the family for all these years where the money it makes as a rental sort of sustains it as a property. That's so cool. That's so cool. You really like going back to the basics. Now I get the home share with the woman from Munich and then having renting out Airbnb and or on Airbnb Verbo to be able to keep it in the family.
I'm sure it's hard, like a hundred people. How do you divide the responsibilities financially, operationally, but if you can make money from it. Sorry. Yeah, we've got family committees. It's my mom [00:04:00] and I do the rental for the property. I help them price it. Like it's, I'm, it's funny. I was on one of the family committee meetings and like offering to help run the pricing and they're like, what gives you confidence that you think you can price this thing?
I was like, do you guys know what I do for a living? And I'm like, that's the perfect segue. That's actually really like, you're like probably you're like one or two people that are like the best people in the world to do this. That's really funny. So we're lucky to have you. I need you on my, I need, I need you on my family pricing committee, but it's perfect.
Segway. I'll talk about your role at AirDNA. I've been following you for a long time on Twitter. I really enjoy the content. I'm actually really, this is when I first started a podcast, you were like third name on my list of people that I wanted to have on. So I'm going to be like. This is like a proud, personal proud moment for me to have you on the show because your, your content's excellent.
Enough about me giving you flower in a language. Tell us about what you do at Erdunia, at Erdunia. As you mentioned at the start, I'm SVP of analytics and chief economist. So my job is to make sense of the data that we're [00:05:00] producing. On the overall industry and give our clients, investors, really anyone with an interest in the industry, just a good sense of what's happening.
And we do that through written content, video content, podcasts. We do tons of meetings with clients to help them understand how they use the data within their own business. And then we've actually been creating products within the research team of we find. Of new needs within the data sets and try to morph the data and create a different products to meet those needs for people.
That's really cool. For those that don't follow Jamie on Twitter, how they recommend it. If you are interested in short terms, uh, it's a wealth of great content. Let's talk about the data. Right. I, I'm a big fan of something that you guys just recently published. So this was, this is recorded end of Jan, 2024.
You guys put out a big report on your Outlook for 24, maybe talk a little bit about that. And it's really easy to find on internet. Just search, search for the report, but maybe give us a quick summary of. Summary of the findings. I'm sure you were, you had a big part in [00:06:00] publishing the article. Yeah. And maybe I'll step back of, so before I joined AirDNA, I spent 10 years as a economist covering the hotel industry.
And I was at CBR, which is world's largest commercial real estate company. And I was head of forecasting analytics for CBRE for forecasting all commercial real estate, but specialized in hotels. And we found that forecasts. As a forward view of what's going to happen in the industry, given sort of current expectations of the economy.
So do we expect expansion, construction, what's going on in a home values, what's going on in consumer spending, all these factors that are going on in the economy and boil that down. To an outlook of what we for back then, what we thought would happen in the hotel industry. And I wanted to bring that to the short term rental industry.
So when I joined AirDNA back in 2020, the goal was to start producing regular outlook reports to really give the industry confidence in what's going to be happening. In the years and months [00:07:00] ahead so that they can better plan and react to the current environment So we launched the first one in 2021 That was a highs and if you go back you can go back and read that first one and we were talking about we're going to Seek two consecutive years of occupancy declines and it's going to be pretty steep and then fast forward two years we've seen two consecutive years of occupancy declines that have been Pretty impactful to the overall industry, but going forward.
So now the outlook for 2024, we do expect to see the year to be more. I'm really the first one of equilibrium where there's been a lot of disequilibrium over the past four years of supply dropping, demand surging, supply coming back, growing faster than demand. And now we very much expect demand and supply growth to be roughly in line over the next sort of 12 to 18 months.
So that's a lot to unpack, right? But I think that's, no, that's great. And I love, you know, I love nerding out in the numbers and the data, I would say like a big part of. Our success in the industry so far as we been [00:08:00] able to parse the data in a way that's been some actual insights, not to say that we've done everything right, but I think we at least have a framework how we look at the data and it's helped us well, it's treated as well, but just want to pull, so I want to pull out, I just want, just one key point from what you said, and we'll talk about what's happened in the last 21, 20, 2024.
Your expectation is if we, if the economy grows and it's now going through 3. 1 percent in 2023, if it grows like a 2, 3 percent nominal rate, like we'll see the supply even out, the supply and demand growth even out. I think you have projected. 4. 9 percent red part growth in 24, 1. 9, 1. 9, 1. 9, 1. 9%. So better than the 4.
9%, it was 4. 9 percent drop right in three. And now it's reversing out. So we're hopefully getting out the other side of that now. I mean, 2 percent is meaningful on a red part basis. That's really meaningful. So let's just rewind to COVID, right? Like. COVID happened, everything shut down, travel shut down, the world was on hold.
And then when it opened up back up, we had to work from home. We had all the, we had the pandemic [00:09:00] stimulus. We had all these things. Let's talk, I just want to go through it very quickly. 21, we saw the surge in demand, right? Surge in demand because of. Everyone had the ability to travel and the money to travel and the supply lag.
They didn't have enough time to catch up with this huge demand. So we had big increase in ADRs in pricing. And then the last, then the 22 and 23, that's even now, is that the right way to think about, or how would you frame that? Yeah, I think the thing that's maybe misunderstood in terms of the supply, demand and balance that happened in 2021 was the major.
Piece of it was that supply dropped by 20 percent in 2020. So yes, demand surge back and, but it essentially got back to pre COVID levels in 2020 it's not like demand was surging where there's like all these people traveling that had never traveled before. And we're going to see this big reversion back in terms of demands, like all these trips happened that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
And then people are going to start cutting back on travel. That's not what was happening. That [00:10:00] was not what. Like we saw a recovery and travel in 2021. We saw more people maybe choosing short term rentals over hotels than any other time in history. And then throughout 2020, rest of 2021 into 2020, we saw very much expansion in overall.
Listings available for short terminals and people traveling and continuing to travel in short terminals. 2022 was very much an expansion here in terms of supply up. And that essentially got us back to pre covid levels of overall supply. And then 2023 was a year of continued growth. And we still saw 15 percent growth and overall supply, but demand only grew by about seven, which led to a pretty steep occupancy decline down about 5 percent for the year.
And then that supply growth and demand, it wasn't, it's not, I think one thing that people get misled is like, we're not misled, but the nuance of it is like, it's not evenly distributed, right? It's not [00:11:00] like all the nights are in one place and all the supply grows in one place, all the demand grows in one place.
So. Maybe you could peel it back a little bit. Like where was most of the supply and let's talk about supply, right? Where was most of the supply that 20 percent decline in COVID. So it sounds like what you're saying is supply dropped a ton, demand recovered, demand recovered, but it really only, we got a lot of the ADR growth because.
The supply went down 20 percent and it's caught up now in 2020 and it overshot in 23, which is why we saw the red part declines. And now they, so that supply is going to even out. Plus you have probably more demand growth. And when you say demand growth, do you, I think we'll sort of be clear. We're talking about short term rentals, right?
Like we're talking about this travel, not like an overall hotel spend, not overall travel spend. Yeah. When I talk about demand, it's a overall night stayed in that period. Okay. And how do you like. Where do you get that? Sorry, go ahead. And I was just going to say on the supply side and 2020, it was really across the board that we saw the decline, but it was really two different reasons.
One in coastal mountain sort of destination markets. A whole, [00:12:00] a lot of the supply disappeared because people that had second homes all of a sudden wanted to use those second homes and brought it out of the rental pool. You look at a lot of the major cities though, where that was Airbnb big presence, was in all these major markets.
It was a lot of people just getting out, converting the units to long-term rentals or other use cases. 'cause demand had essentially disappeared. So that when you look at the differing trends like. Occupancy really surged in the coastal and mountain markets because, and the supply disappeared and demand came back really strong.
You look at the urban areas, like the five has disappeared. The demand's still not back. Demand's still not back to 2019 levels in these urban areas. So there's been a long recovery still to this day in urban areas that has led to a slower return of supply in those areas. Yeah. And the sort of supply surge that happened in 2022, 2023 was primarily in the coastal [00:13:00] mountain, small city, rural areas where demand had just been so great during the pandemic.
Yeah. And this is where we talk about the unevenness of that, right? So we're like, just for, we're in Philadelphia and again, every market's a little different, but we saw that supply decline dramatically in 2020. Right. We had a lot of big operators were there. They stay Alfred and some of the others, they cease business.
And we saw a tremendous, when the travel came back, there was in the hotel, the things are hotels were closed too, and they had all the coding people forget that too. Like they had a COVID restriction. So people didn't, who actually didn't really want to stay in hotels at that time, because it just wasn't that same experience that they were used to.
And so there were much more open to Airbnb's we had our best year in 22. 21 was great. 22 was even better. 23, we're off a little bit from the year before, but I always say we're off from some pretty lofty levels, so no one's complaining, but I want to hit back to, I want to hit back to that point where you talk about the unevenness of the recovery and the growth and supply.
Like when we look at AirDNA, is there a way for us to [00:14:00] tease that out? Or maybe said differently as an investor looking for a market to invest in, what is your. Best, what are some best practices to, to identify some of these supply and demand imbalances. One to avoid investing in locations with more supply and demand.
And then obviously vice versa to, to lean into areas where there's a need for supply. Yeah. One. And I'm, this is maybe an obvious one is, and the ability now to sort by occupancy. So with the relaunch of AirDNA back in last September, the old market minder tool, it's always just. You log in and it brings you into Santa Monica, right?
Like a free market. I love Santa Monica, that was a big change for me, logging in and I didn't see Santa Monica anymore. Yeah. But that's where AirDNA was founded and Garage and Santa Monica. So it was a fun little Easter egg for people that Santa Monica was always the market that was free and where everyone got brought into.
But in reality, like people really wanted to be able to compare markets. [00:15:00] Find the next market to invest in. And we didn't have a great tool for doing that. So a lot of what customers would do, clients would do was just go around and click on different markets. Like we did have a pretty simple market comparison tool, but it was just looking at year over year changes.
So my thought and our thoughts internally was we need to create a new way for market discovery. And that's what that pulls that takes you into now is a sort of list view. So we have these, all these tiles of every city in the country that you go into. And then all those cities are now sortable and filterable.
So you can sort by occupancy, by RDNA market grade. You can filter to markets that are just coastal, greater than 500 listings, less than a thousand listings. You can filter, we show the main metrics. So occupancy, ADR, annual revenue, and you can then go in and filter the data that sits behind those markets.
So let's say I'm looking to invest in a three [00:16:00] bedroom, entire home property. And I want to see the ones with the, or the markets with the highest occupancy that meet that criteria. And with a few clicks, I can then go in and do that, sort it, filter it to the types of markets that I'm interested in investing in and get a really dialed in list of what might be the best market for you to.
Invest in today. Okay. So I got to ask you, so you open yourself up to this. So I got to ask you the question now, then you're the head of data for Ernie and you've gone to this, what are the, some of the best markets to invest in 2020 in 2024? That's funny you say that. Cause we are launching our 2024 best.
Places to invest report, I think it's next week or the week after. So depending on when this goes out, it'll already be released or are scheduled to the release. And since the results are under embargo, I can't say them right now, but there's some different markets in the real estate mix of small and midsize cities.
And a big piece of that was, and this sort of traditional vacation rental markets, home values increased [00:17:00] substantially. Like it, and they rocketed up 30, 40, 50, 60 percent from pre COVID levels. Revenues have not kept up with that. Many of those areas we're actually seeing pretty steep revenue declines right now.
So when we calculate the best market to invest, a lot of the areas that are showing up are ones that have done decent in terms of ADRs. But the big piece of it is that the home values haven't increased as much in those areas and it's still relatively affordable to invest. Interesting. Okay. So it's more, it's more of a property value, the property valuation equation or affordability really versus the overall performance.
That's really interesting. I think for folks listening, that's a really important nugget to tease out like the market still, depending on which market that you're looking at. I would term it were like, I'm into Smokies. I don't think we've hit the bottom. Yet for Smokey's occupancy, I think there's, there's still markets where you got to really pay attention to the supply growth and the occupancy numbers don't continue to grow down or come down, especially with some of the demand numbers.
So it really is a function of making [00:18:00] sure you're underwriting these properties properly, making sure that you have your expenses properly dialed in. You have your financing costs dialed in because that revenue number is not going to say that revenue number is unlikely to save you. You're COVID surprise of 21.
And that's why I was like. It's been really hard, like we've looked for a year and a half now to buy property to expand. We have six and the Smokies, we want to keep buying, but I just, we can't. I've been under contract for a few, one recently, I love the property. You would love it. It's like this eight bedroom, this top tier had a pool, had a hot tub, had all the right amenities.
And it was only trading for, it was trading at five times revenue too. So it was like a really nice valuation too. But then. There's some issues there, but it's, there's those deals are so hard to find. I remember looking at deals that were 30 percent cash on cash and passing on them in 2020. Obviously should have bought every single one of them, but I guess like, how do you think about for an investor right now, you really just looking for stuff that just hasn't appreciated or.
Like how, how do they use your product? How do we use the product to better, there's going to be the list, but then [00:19:00] everyone's going to have access to the list. How do you like do your own homework? Yeah. And that's where I said, like that list is like really high level. And I actually hate that list. I have to do it.
Like it's our most read article that we produce. It is. I, and. Why I don't like the list though, is because every person sort of investment strategy is different. Like everyone has a different type of market that they're investing in, a different price point that they're going after in a different region that they're comfortable investing in.
So like when you actually get down to it, like the list isn't that helpful for very many people. And it's, so that's where we wanted to recreate the product, allow people to essentially generate their own list. How can you, Michael, go in and essentially input your investment strategy and get the list of that would be best for you to invest in.
So I'll tell you, I'll tell you ours. And now that we have this forum, I'll tell you ours. Like we go in and we'll identify like a market. We like to say like upstate New York, that's where we've been looking now. And I'll regret [00:20:00] saying that since. I'm going to have a bunch of competition right now, but it's okay.
If you're listening to it, then consider that a freebie. Where AirDNA is most helpful is where I can go and look at the gross revenue, where I can find the revenue. Right. And that's the most important part. I go in, I look for the comps that look, that are similar to what I'm looking at. I look, I try to find the gross revenue and I try to make sure that that listing is.
A real listing, right? Cause sometimes there's like dead listings or listings from like property management companies that just, the numbers are completely off. Right. So you have to really, that's, I think that's the real work actually is there's this fancy UI, UX UI there. Right. But what actually is the most helpful would be just to download everything and be able to just sort it and manipulate the numbers with.
Real gross revenue and review count. If I had those two things and I could figure it all out myself. And that was the, one of the big features around the relaunch is like now, instead of just proper top properties, we give you the full list of every single property in our database based on [00:21:00] whatever city region you've gone into, you can then go in and filter and some of the new filters are you can filter by recruit view count.
So I only want to find properties that show up on the list that have more than 20 reviews. In a 20 or in a four season market, like upstate New York, like I want to find properties that are only available more than 270 days over the past year. I want to find properties that were not managed by professional managers.
And you can go in now, run that, work the list by occupancy ADR revenue, and then. I need in a table, Jamie. I need it in a table. I, I don't need, I don't wanna write everything down myself. I just need a table. I know that's probably, it's probably the enterprise product I don't have access to, but no. Like, but that, and that is the functionality for the advanced tier in a table and you can export the whole thing.
Ah, man, one day I'll, one day I'll graduate to that level. But no, look, but I think that's, so that's my method and I think that's what a lot of people. Kind of variations of that. I think that's the power of every day. You really get a sense of, you can build your own comp set and it's not perfect to be fair, right?
There are still [00:22:00] listings there that like, shouldn't be there. Like they're dead listings or like, they're so out of, they're just so out of whack from what You would normally expect, I wish the review, I wish there was more granularity and maybe with AI or more software, there's more granularity within how you can sort by reviews, because that's the biggest work actually is to go and actually see the density to reviews and how recent they are.
If you can get, if that's sortable, that actually would be a huge win for the consumer to be able to do that. And I mean, a lot of people struggle with that, but it's still the best tool out there. And I think for me personally, I caught my own listings against. They're needing data just to see if I'm, if it's right on.
And out of everyone that I looked at, it's actually the most consistent. So kudos to you and the data team for everyone there at ARDNA for getting that hard part. I do want to ask that question though. Like what, I think a lot of people are like, how do you guys get the data? Like, how do I trust, right?
I've been doing it for a long time. So I trust it because I've shown itself to be right. But like for someone new coming in, how do I trust that you guys are doing the right thing? Like, where do you get your data? How do you clean it? And how do you make it? Actual for people like me. Yeah. And it starts [00:23:00] with a lot of scraping.
So we collect data off of Airbnb and Burbo right now. We've started collecting data off of booking. com too, but it's not integrated into the dataset yet. So we're really scraping three different endpoints on the site. One is status. So is the property available or not on any given night out in the future?
We were scraping those statuses every day. So we're looking for changes in the status. So was that property available? When did it go unavailable? And then we take those block of nights that all went unavailable at the same time, and then run that through a machine learning algorithm that we've developed to discern whether that was a booked or blocked night.
So if it's a week during the summer with a two week lead time for a property, that's got lots of reviews, like. Our model is going to say, yes, this was a booking. If it's six months in the winter in Cape Cod, it's going to say that was a block. And those sorts of statuses, that sort of accuracy check we have is we also collect the statuses for properties that connect their property through our [00:24:00] ICAL integrations.
So we can see without a doubt, whether someone's getting booked or not. And then we're checking those against our model. To make sure that our model, like our model is actually doing a good job of discerning whether something's a booked or a block night. Actually now this actually gives me a thought. So is this why you guys bought up listing is that now you have like more data to go in and like now you can, you're, you get better, you get first party data and now you can go and more people connect to your pricing software.
You don't know exactly, you have the first party data now versus scraping. Yeah, that, that was a, I can tell you, our data team is ecstatic to have the 40, 000 properties of upload, build additional data checks off and continue to make the data more accurate. That's great. That's great. You guys should just buy, you guys should buy it back to my, where my M& A banker had, you guys just buy key data too.
And then really build all out. You'll get all that, you get all their good first party data over there. That's really cool. Okay, cool. Got it. And then, sorry, go ahead. And so that's the status scraper, the others, other property scrapes. So all the property attributes of that property. So [00:25:00] bedroom, bathroom, lat long, property manager, just all the things that sort of feed into the filters.
And then the third one is the price scrape. So what price are those nights available on any given night out into the future? So when we say something's a booking, we know the price that it is available at. What the cleaning fee is, we could amortize that cleaning fee over the length of the reservation and then any discount.
So if there's a month or week long discount that we can apply that and get a, I'm not a perfect view of the revenue earned obviously, but I'm, cause I'm a lot of times people have different prices on Airbnb or Verbo or booking direct, but. And if it's on Airbnb and Burbo, we're going to take the price that was available there and assume that price for the revenue for that property for that reservation.
Because we're looking at the calendars though, we are tracking all reservations that happen, regardless of whether it's a direct booking at that property or through any other channel, as even if someone's calling and making that reservation. [00:26:00] Because as soon as that reservation is made, It's getting blocked off the calendar on Airbnb.
And we're going to model that as a reservation, just like any other reservation. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Like I think you highlight a few points and more just for more of an advanced user. Like everyone does charge different prices according to OTAs based on a commission. So like mybooking. com reservation.
Price is 20 percent higher just because they're commissioned. So it's good. I don't know, but I assume that's factored in somehow, some way, just given that. I know you're just starting with booking. com. I think most people, but they're verbal as well. And I'm just saying this too. I think this is where a lot of people that use it.
We're aware of these things. So we know that again, no estimate's perfect. You can build a range between high and low and. Am I going to make my mortgage or my rent on my low? And if I hit my high, then I'm going to go hang out with Jamie in his, you can build your range on that way. But in full transparency, there's some things that we just absolutely do not capture, like extra people fee, like extra people fees are.
Like they're in our database. We do not [00:27:00] know when someone goes and needs to collect that charge. Additional pet fees. We do not capture a pool heating fee. There's all sorts of these extra charges that happen that we do not have visibility in. The other difference that we have to call it a lot is we're going to be capturing gross revenue, not what sort of net to the owner.
So if there's a 20, 30 percent property management fee, and you've got to take that into account too, of. I mean, the check that you get at the end of the year or every month, maybe I think the percent less than the number we're tracking, because we're tracking what the property manager is getting before they take their fee.
That's the absolute most important thing is like just knowing exactly what that number represents. So it is. Rent, it's room rent, room rates, excuse me, plus cleaning fee, right? That it doesn't include taxes. It doesn't include every, the service charge from the OTAs. So folks listening, it's basically what you get in your pocket or what you as the owner are being paid for by the guests.[00:28:00]
That should go into your pocket. And then that's before all the other fees are taken out. But I think for folks to remember, like even Airbnb, it's a 3 percent fee that Airbnb takes from that. So your net from that is not going to be say 100, 000. It's going to be 97, 000 because the owner has to, the host pays the 3 percent that's netted out for Airbnb.
And then if you have a property manager or anyone else that you're using, just make sure when you're building your models that you're keeping that in account. I can talk forever on this, but I want it for a lot of people are going to be not power users are going to be first time. They're just poking around the platform.
I think it's actually really cool that you guys have modified the pricing now to make it more accessible. I think it's actually a really good thing, opening your top of your funnel, but what are give I'm a brand new user, Jamie, what's the best, I'm a brand new user, I got a week off from work. I want to learn how to use this.
I want to be like, I want to be good. I want to be good at this. What do you, what's your recommendation? How do I start? Yeah, and one is we've got some training videos on our YouTube site, so watch some of those. And then for a market that you're interested in and start running through the different tabs on the [00:29:00] platform.
So on the overview page, we have the occupancy ADR rev par revenue sections. And within that, there's five or 10 different charts on each section. And with those, you can go in and look at multiple years of data. So like you can look at, and my favorite one is like the occupancy chart. So I can see monthly occupancy and then I can go back and say, all right, I want to see two or three years of prior year occupancy.
And there's layers on, and I can see it for any given month in that market. Okay. It earned 50 percent in December, 2023. And that's down from 53 percent December, 2022 and 57 percent from December. So I can get a real sense of how the market has evolved over the past few years. We can look at sort of average revenue of those different time periods.
We can look at length of stays. We can look at the seasonality of the market. So that's another great view of. Yeah. I love the, I love that calendar feature. No, it's great. You can see over the past 365 days, what days we're earning the highest rep par and lowest rep par. So you can get a real sense of the seasonality of that market.
So [00:30:00] I'm going through and just getting, it's so hidden though. You guys, it's like all the way down the screen and it's like the second dropdown menu and it's like, I couldn't find it for when you guys did a refresh, I couldn't, I was like, I thought, first I thought you guys got rid of it. I was like, Oh man, like this sucks.
And then I found it eventually. It's like, there's a lot of data going on. I'm sure your UX team is. It's trying their best, but it's all the way hidden in the very bottom there, though. Yeah, no. And we're playing with different ways to make charts different and discoverable, more discoverable than they were.
But we really felt that we just had to rip off the bandaid on the relaunch of get it out there, get people using it, get feedback. And as you may have seen, we've been iterating and constantly on the feedback that we've been getting and making changes and getting stuff back in that maybe had been removed or that just needed more time to redevelop.
So there's a lot of additions happening. And then the other tabs of going through the listing sort. So. Do some fun sorts, like you can filter to unique listings. So find the tree houses and yurts and like fun listings in your market. Sort by revenue. [00:31:00] What are the highest earning yurts? And then because the platform works globally, like I'm with the 15 or 20 a month, a dollar a month subscription.
You get access not only to the U S but any market around the world and you can do these same sort of filters. And then we just released in October, we now have for sale data. So you can see every property available for sale in the U S and what it could earn as a short term rental. And we've got lots of filters around that.
So you can set your buy box and find properties that meet your sort of investment criteria. Yeah. And then we've launched a whole bunch of new host tools too. Pushing in heavy on revenue management in 2024. So we've got our smart rates functionality where you can find how we're pricing your unit on a given night We got forward pacing you can see how your market's booked down to the future And then and it doesn't even scratch the surface of what's going to be coming with the uplisting Um, acquisition.
So we just announced a couple of weeks ago that we had acquired uplisting, which is really a premier property [00:32:00] management service software. And so we're going to have multi channel connectivity, unified inboxes, unified calendar, all this stuff to really help you manage your listing effectively. Now you guys, I think after the Alpine acquisition or investment, it's, I've seen a lot of really good changes on your guys side and building out, yeah.
Building a revenue manager product. Oh, the smart race. I thought I was thinking about Airbnb. Candidly, not the best connotation because it was always like way too low. But anyways, I used up a listing in 2018. So like long, a long time user of that platform. So I'm really excited to see more of what you guys do.
Like Irene has been a huge help in my journey and I really appreciate you coming on today, show you, sharing your insights and as the. Platform continues to evolve. I look forward to our next conversation, a lot more questions, and we'll see uh, how the predictions on that 1. 9 percent RepFar, how to, we'll look back in 25 and see how, if we hit the, if we hit the 2 percent RepFar growth, I'm hoping it does.
What's the best way, as we run down, like what's the best way for people to, [00:33:00] to get ahold of you to find your best content? Yeah. So I'm two call outs on the research that we do for you. One is our blog. And I would suggest that everyone just goes in and keeps, and once a month, we put out our US review free report, where you can get a sense of what's happening overall in the US short term rental industry.
We, I have a podcast, STR Data Lab, where we overview, do interviews, run through a performance, and then I'm active on both Twitter, Jamie underscore lane and on LinkedIn, and feel free to add me. I answer all my DMs. So shoot me the message and happy to answer any questions. For folks, I just, Jamie's not paying me to say this.
If he really is like one of the ads that you have to, if you're on a Twitter X, it's definitely, if you want to learn about short term rentals, he's definitely one of the guys to add on there. Jamie, and I'll drop Jamie's Twitter handle on the show notes here. Click on that and repeat the content. Jamie, thanks so much for spending time with me today.
Uh, I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot and look forward to having you on again soon. Thanks for having me, Michael.[00:34:00]