Websites for Evaluating Vacation Rentals
The arrival and subsequent growth of Airbnb has made people look at vacation property in Ellicottville and elsewhere a little differently. Whereas, historically an Ellicottville ski chalet was primarily for personal use, owners are increasingly using vacation rentals to offset costs and supplement income. Some are even looking to vacation rental properties as an addition to their investment property portfolio.
If you are looking at the possibility of an Ellicottville vacation rental, here are some sites that might be useful for you.
Airbnb.com
This is a great place to start to see what other properties are available and what rates they are charging. By looking at the availability calendar, you can also get some idea of how succesful they are in renting their chalet. Just a word of caution here. A property owner can block off as many nights as they want for personal use so, just because the nights are unavailable, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were all rented.
You can also check the reviews. They will give you an idea of whether people who stayed at the property were happy with their stay. In particular, it’s interesting to see if they thought the property was good value.
AirDNA.co
Airdna is a site that pulls data from Airbnb and VRBO in order to predict various vacation rental indictors such as occupancy rate, average nightly rate and revenue.
“In reporting the active supply of vacation rentals, CBRE found AirDNA data to be 97.5% accurate. For the revenue earned by short-term rental hosts, 96.2% accurate”
Airdna.co provides a free service that allows you to estimate the revenue from an Airbnb almost anywhere in the world. The site asks you to provide an address, the number of bedrooms, the number of bathrooms and the maximum number of guests. It will then give you its best estimate of the rental potential of that property. We should stress that we are in no way affiliated with AirDNA nor do we officially endorse them, but we are a user of their product.
When Airbnb announced their IPO, they were obliged to disclose much of their propreitary data which allowed AirDNA to benchmark their predictions against actual Airbnb data. The results were impressive:
As mentioned previously, we are a user of AirDNA. We subscribe to its full service which provides even more information. It grades Ellicottville against other vacation rental markets. It gives us the top performers in the Ellicottville market. AirDNA also gives us more detailed information on occupancy rates, average nightly rates and how that changes over the course of the year. We can also use it to help with our pricing strategy, when to offer discounts and when to promote our best offers.
Zillow.com
There are many sites where you can find real estate listings and you probably have your favorite already.
We like Zillow because it’s easy to see what’s for sale and also what has already sold. This is important because ultimately what a property actually sells for is more important than what a seller (or their agent) would like it to sell for!
These are a selection of sites that we like. If there are any that you have found useful, please let us know!
Most importantly, while these sites can be useful in doing your own research, they are not a substitute for proper professional advice. You should always consult with the relevant professionals before making any important decision.