Show HN: I created an Airbnb/vrbo revenue forecasting and benchmarking platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I created an Airbnb/vrbo revenue forecasting and benchmarking platform

hostology.co

4 pointsacrhost5 comments

Hey everyone, I’m the creator. As a host, we spent several days/weeks parsing through information to figure out the best location, price, and size for our current vacation property. The research paid off, but it was time consuming. After doing that several times for friends and family, we decided it was time to create a simpler approach.

Thus Hostology was born. I’m a self-taught developer, and I decided to give it a shot with what I knew. I used Ruby on Rails with Postgres and Redis for the backend, and Javascript for the front end. I learned a lot about how to efficiently digest json responses, but most importantly the importance of having automated tests early on (and running them often…)

This platform is in its early stages; I’m hoping to add more tools to help us hosts outperform our competition. Feel free to have a look and let me know if you have any questions.

Great idea! At first sight, looks cool and useful for the host.

However, the difference between the Low Medium and High revenue potential seems too big to me. It looks more like guessing than the actual estimate. Moreover, I don't like abbreviations of any kind that I need to lookup. In this case ADR or COMPS.

How do you get occupancy rates?

The high, medium, low is based on the bottom 25%, average, and too 25% occupancy and rates. So yes, the difference can be big. The idea is that with the personalized estimate and based on where your property falls in regards to amenities, you can get a more accurate estimate for your house by adjusting your rate and expected occupancy

Occupancy rates are based on the historical averages for that market segment. So for example if you looked at a 2 bedroom property, its providing the occupancy rate for 2 bedroom homes within that specific market

This looks like fetchmyguest.com

I'd never heard about that site but it certainly looks interesting. It is different though,it seems to be a peer to peer booking platform (without the Airbnb/VRBO fees) and not an analytics site (although they do have some marketing analytics)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com