Air, DNA is tracking data for over 13 million properties worldwide, and they’ve been doing that since 2012. So that is a lot of data. A lot of data in regards to what amenities you should have with your property, how your supplies doing, how your average booking window is trending, how are different channels performing in your specific market.

I sat down with Jamie Lane, the chief economist for Air, DNA, recently, and we dove into a lot of these topics. Topics that you won’t wanna miss. So stay tuned as we jump into all of the above on the short-term Rental Riches podcast. Welcome to Short-Term Rental Riches. We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short-term rentals, quick actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

Jamie Lane, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. There’s a lot of ways we could take this conversation today because Air DNA has a lot of data. That’s what you guys do. But I’m curious if someone asks you, Jamie, what do you do at Air DNA? Like what do you say to them? I, it probably depends on the day on in terms of what we’re working on, but I lead a couple teams at Air, DNA, one being the research team.

So we’re just trying to understand what are the trends that are happening in the sector? What’s happening with supply? How’s it growing? What type of supply? What markets are people sort of growing inventory in? What’s happening in terms of occupancy levels? Are they going up? Are they going down? Is it because more people are traveling, more people adopting short-term rentals relative to hotels?

How are people pricing those units? Are hosts able to get higher prices or lower prices? What makes most sense for investment today? What are the attributes of. I’m top host, top property managers, things like that. And then I also manage the data science engineering team at aird NA. So we’re very focused on sort of bringing the data in how we model demand, how we’re sort of scraping and collecting the rates, and we’re processing almost a tete of data a day.

Across the global short-term rental industry, so 12 million properties around the world that we’re collecting data on. So it’s a massive data operation. There’s changes being made across Airbnb, vrbo, booking every day that we gotta stay on top of and making sure, I mean, we really understand every data point that we’re collecting off the major OTAs.

And then how to interpret that and how to bring it into our platform to make sure that we’re describing and representing it correctly for people that use their DNA’s platform. So that’s a lot of fun. And then more recently I’ve gotten really involved with the product team, making sure that the products that everyone uses and loves within Air DNA are sort of evolving and they sort of answer the right questions for what people come to Aird for.

Wow. Okay. So. Why don’t we start off maybe on kind of the high level. You mentioned you guys have data from 12 million properties and I know that you’ve been getting this data for a really long time. Mm-hmm. Which means you have a lot of history as well, and you’re able to uncover trends and see a lot of the things that I think maybe the average Joe investors maybe not looking at.

Would you mind high level trends, maybe some things that you guys have been seeing with the data, and then I’d love to jump in. How air DNA can help the investor make smarter decisions. Yeah. One thing that’s really interesting for me to sort of analyze in terms of looking at a long time series of data is just how short-term rentals in general have evolved in terms of, I mean, seeing adoption in sort of the general public.

So if we go back to, we started collecting data on short rentals, 14. So we now have more than 10 years of data, which is pretty crazy to think about now. And ’cause I was one of the first customers of Air DNA, I started as a customer back in 2015, subscribing to the data, and the industry looked a whole lot different.

It was primarily urban, it was primarily sort of people doing private rooms. A bit of rental arbitrage. But if you looked at the inventory back then, it was almost, and half of us inventories was in sort of the large sort of major urban centers across the US And now you fast forward to today, a lot of that urban inventories disappeared.

During the pandemic. There was not people traveling to major urban areas. A lot of the part of people were renting out transitioned back to long-term rentals. A lot of the rental arbitrage companies went out of business. So you think back to big companies in 2019, like Stay, Alfred Lyric Doo all sort of went under.

Then we’ve really seen subsequently the rise of travel outside of urban core, really even outside of traditional vacation rental markets and people just looking to explore the country traveling to small and mid-size cities, really around the world. And it’s really opened up investment opportunities into areas that people would’ve.

Never really thought of using Airbnb for back in 2015 or 2016, and that’s been driving a lot of growth over the past few years. And we classify things like mid-size cities, small city, rural areas, and now there’s more listings now in small city, rural areas. There are in the sort of urban core of major cities when just six or seven years ago, like urban had eight x, the number of listings and sort of these small and midsize city areas.

So it’s areas where hotel investors aren’t going into, a lot of times there’s not other lodging options. And now. People sort of think, oh, if I’m going to this area, like let me check Airbnb, let check vrbo, and it’s really opened up areas to travel and really created new investment opportunities today.

We’re in a couple dozen markets and they’re just spread out all over the place. And I started way back in the day, uh, as well, 2015 was my, my short term rental. And pretty sure I was diving into air DNA back then. But of course, your guys’ platform was way less developed than it is now. I mean, there’s so many ways that someone can go in there and really dissect a market.

Look for what might make the best performing property sector in that market. I mean, all these features that you guys have added, but there are a lot of features there. So what would you say maybe to someone out there that’s either planning on expanding in their local market, or maybe they’re looking for a new investment market, what are maybe two or three of those top data pieces?

Yeah, we’ve created this new section. I like to think about it as like market explore, like air DNA back in the day was all about like, know your city. Go search that city, get the data on that city and you can sort of understand the investment opportunity. It was built around this notion that most people were investing in markets that, that they know, maybe that they used to travel to or the city that they’re in.

And there wasn’t a lot of, I demand for I open to any market in the country. Just show me where to invest. Now we see that so much more today that people don’t know where they wanna invest, but they want a platform to help them uncover those areas. So now that we have this whole section of the site that breaks the entire country up into markets or sub-markets, and there’s roughly, there’s about 317 markets that we divide the country up into.

So the traditional markets, like let’s say in Atlanta where I am today or Denver, but also sort of defining out what is Breckenridge in the market, what is that or Index, what is the lower Hudson Valley? Coachella Valley, sort of these traditional vacation rental areas. But then taking. All these and sort of subdividing them into the submarket.

So in cities, it’s neighborhoods in more destination areas. It’s sort of the beach versus outer areas. And what you can do is sort of hone in on the types of locations you’re looking to invest in and then start. Filtering down to the type of properties that are maybe good investment comps. So I wanna look at just the performance of properties that have, that are maybe operating fulltime more than 270 days throughout the year and have good reviews.

And then you can start ranking markets like I wanna see like the top submarkets in rural Georgia by occupancy. And maybe look at that for just three bedroom or four bedroom or five bedroom type properties. So I can start to see where our pockets of demand, where properties are just really crushing it, then dive deeper and figuring out.

Okay, like Macon or Columbus is, and Georgia is doing really well. And what are the property types that are generating the highest returns? And maybe those are areas that I wanna go and start replicating what I’m seeing top investors doing in that market. Uh, it really lets me uncover hotspots where before just be impossible to click into every city around the country and try to see where there’s performance happening.

Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s, it’s amazing what you guys have set up and the data that we have. Quite a few of our listeners on for this show are, we’re kind of both worlds. We’ve been in the traditional long-term real estate world, and we’ve also been, uh, we’re also in the short term rental world. And sometimes I feel like the data we have now for the shortterm rentals is so much more comprehensive than it is sometimes for long-term rentals even.

I mean, of course there’s, there’s a lot more pieces of data, the reviews and amenities and all these different things that really segment properties out, which is also one of the things that helps. Some properties earn a lot more money than others, and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve liked most about Air DNA recently is really market and seeing the difference between what a top performing property can do versus one that’s not performing well.

You know? And of course management play. Their reviews have a massive on. What would you say to that? You know? Yeah. Let’s say you decide on these markets and you’ve ranked them out. Maybe you have like three markets, but then you know, within each of these markets that there’s just a big gap between the top performers and the.

Yeah, it’s a way I actually think about investing in markets of if there is that disparity between top performers and low performers, that really gives me the opportunity to go in and like actually differentiate my property and where doing things well can generate outsized returns. And then it’s also really important when sort of analyzing.

A potential investment. Like let’s say you’re going in and using our rental tool, you’re sort of putting an address in a property you’re interested in investing in, and that tool goes out and selects comps. And as we all know, like every. Comparable property out there is has a different owner, has a different operator, has different reviews, different amenities, and it’s really incumbent upon the investor on the analyst sort of digging into the deal.

And what are all the comps sort of being used to generate that estimate. And then that’s a lot of the sort of changes we’ve made to rental recently are letting you see all those comps, letting you evaluate each of those comps individually and see, okay, is this actually comparable to the investment that I’m gonna be making to the market?

What are the amenities associated with each of these properties? Where is it located? Is it on the beach versus off the beach? Does it have a pool or not? Have a pool? And then the ability to remove comps. The report. And then if you wanna go out and find your own comps that are sort of more representative of the property you’re gonna be investing in, there’s this whole new tool to actually like and filter by amenities.

Filter by sort of pro core property attributes, and then add those new comps. Into your, your report and then be able to save it and access it down the line and then generate a PDF of that report. So we’re really trying to change the way people think about sort of using air DNA to find their investments as our number is sort of a starting point.

And then you really need to. Edit those comps. And then once you get done with that, and depending on the complexity of the market, depending on the complexity of the property, it could take an additional 10 minutes. It could take an event a couple hours to really go through each of those properties. But when you get to the end of that process, now you’re gonna feel really confident.

One with like what are sort of the attributes of high performing versus low performing properties, and then what your investment is. What are the things that it’s gonna cause it to sort of earn the additional revenue that you think it will earn and then go into that investment with much more confidence than just saying, Hey, this is, this is the number that Air DNA spit out, versus like, I actually analyzed, here’s all these properties, here’s what they’re earning.

I think we’re gonna be competitive with them and that as long as I perform well as a manager, then we’re gonna be able to hit those numbers. Points. If we’re comparing apples to oranges instead of apples to apples, then we’re not really, uh, starting from a good place, are we? I get a lot of questions from people asking, should I self-manage or hire a property manager?

It’s a big decision. So to help you out, I put together a free guide that will cover all the pieces you need to help you. Self-manage your Airbnb like a pro. It’s called your STR handbook, walks you through the real numbers, time commitments, pros and cons. It’s also got three really helpful checklists for every step of a guest reservation.

You can grab it for free@sstriches.com or just click the link in our bio. You know, a lot of people, maybe they haven’t used Air DNA for the. Or they’re new to and they’re in this process. They’re in there, they’re looking at, they’re a market where they’re know. I’m not sure if it really makes sense for me to add any property.

What are the things that maybe you guys see people doing incorrectly when they’re comparing other comps? And I’ll just give one example possibility. I see quite a few people sometimes filtering out like negatively reviewed properties and maybe just segmenting like the highest, uh, review properties, which doesn’t really show there.

Thoughts on what people are doing incorrectly or want keep an extra eye out for, yeah. A lot of ways that you can filter down the data in air DNA, and that’s one of the superpowers that we’re trying to give you. This, the ability to slice and dice the data to generate, I mean, alpha or beta are like ways that you can really dig in and find outperforming underperforming, like ways that you can generate outsized returns.

But let’s say you’re analyzing supply and you wanna limit it to just properties that have 20 plus reviews. And then let’s say you’ve applied that filter and now you’re looking at supply and supply’s coming down and you’re like, oh, this is great. I’m gonna be able to get into this market. Where supply’s coming down.

There’s not as much competition, but the sort of notion of looking at reviews, like it takes a long time for a property to get 20 reviews. There’s generally a significant amount of churn happens in.

Then going and looking at supply like you artificially bringing down supply growth.

20 plus reviews. So I always like to start with my supply analysis of getting a sense of how supply is going. And yes, you can use bedroom count filters, you can use property manager versus non-property manager. There’s sort of these notions of property attributes that like, absolutely you can use those and still analyze supply.

But once you start getting into sort of performance metrics or listing things like days available price tier, like things that where we have to actually look at the performance, uh, categories of the property. I wouldn’t use those when sort of analyzing supply. And then there’s other sort of great ways that I don’t see people doing enough.

Segmenting, like let’s say you wanna look at occupancy and look at how occupancy is trending in your market, absolutely. Start segmenting that by like price tier because how occupancy might be trending in your market for. Lower priced or budget properties versus upper tier luxury properties can be wildly different, and that’s actually one of the things we see is very differential today in terms of industry performance is budget properties are just getting crushed.

With expectations of higher inflation and people on the lower income spectrums sort of blown through their COVID savings, and they really are pulling back on discretionary spend of which travel is usually one of those discretionary spending items where on the luxury end. People’s got have savings, they’re doing well in their jobs, they’re seeing in continuing to increase, and they’re absolutely continuing to travel.

So you might go in and look at a market and like, oh, occupancy’s down. Like, I don’t wanna be investing in a market where people are pulling back and these sort of segment that to maybe larger homes. On the luxury end, they’re like, these properties are like at six or seven year highs in terms of occupancy, like they’re doing really well.

Maybe this is a segment I can invest into and continue to see outsized growth. Great insights there. Great insights. And it’s interesting to see these things just changing all, they just change with time. Great point with the reviews there. That’s a great point. 20 reviews can take a long time. Especially let’s say you’re in a market where the season’s only half the year, you know, and maybe could average length of stays a week or something like that.

You know, that could take a lot of time. So great point there. Great point with segmenting. Just how this data’s changing. Are there other industry changes that you’ve seen? I know after COVID, you guys had some really interesting data as well, and one of the things we see in our portfolio is shortening booking windows.

Do you have anything to to add to that? Any other insights? Yeah. I think that’s one of the most important sort of things to understand in your, in your property today is how booking windows are changing. There’s a chart within Air DNA, it’s sort of the bottom of the market overview and actually shows within the market and you can like segment it to one bedrooms or five bedrooms or filter it down to see sort of how it differs across different property types.

Is the share of bookings coming in. By booking window. Window. So like what percent is coming in within the week, within two weeks, what percent is getting booked more than 90 days in advance? And sort of how that’s changing and how it’s sort of changed through the seasons. Because if you look at summer pacing today, and we’re sitting here in sort of early June, demand looks.

For July and August and for a lot of properties, July and August, uh, that’s peak season. That’s when you’re making your money and you look at pacing, you’re like, oh, we’re down 2, 3, 4, 5%. And then we sort of look at some of the near term historical data and it’s like, oh, well, demand’s coming in. Like it’s, we’re still growing occupancy sort of flat, slightly positive.

So you look at pacing and so there’s a disconnect there. And what is the disconnect? It’s an extreme shortening of lead times. So guests are just waiting to book and it makes sense with the uncertain times we’re in and we don’t know what tariff rates are gonna be. We don’t know the impact that tariffs are gonna have on inflation.

There’s a lot of people worried about economic prospects for the market. Whether the stock market’s up on any given day or down 10%, and it really volatile. So what do people do if there’s uncertainty in the. They’re waiting to book their summer travel, but so far what we’ve seen is they’re eventually booking.

They’re just waiting a week, waiting two weeks longer than they normally would to book a trip for that same time period. And as an operator, that’s worrying, right? ’cause you’re used to a certain amount of bookings as of a certain amount of time. And if you don’t get that. Then you start to worry like, do I need a discount?

And what are my competitors doing? Are they starting to discount? If they’re starting to discount now we sort of get into. But then if you’re able to have some confidence of knowing, okay, like yes, people are booking, they’re just waiting longer, and I sort of need to hold the line and know that those bookings are coming and that, and we’re gonna get the demand that my market’s used to.

That all takes data, that all takes conviction and knowing that people are booking, they’re just waiting and bringing those data pieces into your strategy and can separate. And sort of operators that are gonna get to the end of the year and like, all right, overall market demand was on par and I was actually able to grow my revenue.

Verse, oh man, overall market demand was on par, but I shrunk revenue because I sort of panicked and started discounting. And you can really get to entirely different outcomes based on how you’re reacting to what’s happening in the market. Yeah, great points. And that’s just speaks to the importance of data.

I mean, you basically can’t do revenue management unless you have data, right? You have lots of data. You’ve had it for lots of years. It’s primarily from Airbnb, DRBO data as well. Yeah, so when we scrape data and we’re, we’re collecting data off of the major OTAs, so we’re looking at the calendars on Airbnb, vrbo, booking.com, and when we see calendars change, we’re sort of modeling those calendar movements into a guest’s booking.

Or an owner is sort of blocking that calendar and there’s really important blocks to get. Like if I’m an operator in Cape Cod and we’re getting into October and I’m gonna block my calendar for the winter because I the property down. We gonna make absolutely sure we’re not modeling that block as a booking and we’re modeling lead times length of stay.

All these things cause us to like, okay, this looks like a booking. But what’s really important to understand is because we’re looking at the calendar, if someone’s booking sort of direct, that booking is gonna cause the calendar on Airbnb to go unavailable. We’re gonna see that movement in the calendar and model that as a booking.

So it doesn’t matter what the books act, what channel it’s coming through, whether it’s Airbnb, vrbo, booking.com, as long as you have your calendar synced, and we’re able to see that calendar on one of the OTAs. We’re gonna model that data and sort of capture all the bookings that are coming through those properties.

So it really, yes, and we’re limited to properties on Airbnb, vrbo, booking, but we’re capturing all the bookings that are happening for listings that are on those platforms. One of the things that I find interesting about the different platforms, you know, like Booking and is that they have slightly guest profiles.

They have slightly different booking windows. There’s these differences between the channels. I think it’s left a lot opportunity for someone with a typical vacation rental, for example, that’s been on VRBO and they’ve been on Airbnb and maybe hasn’t been on booking.com. They’ve seen a lot of supply where a lot of other Airbnbs have come on in that market.

I think it leaves more opportunity for some of the other channels sometimes. So I’m curious, do you have any into some of the differences that you guys see with the channels? Absolutely, and it, it’s part of our bet around channel management. That, and channel management listing on multiple channels is the future of the industry.

We just don’t think that people should only be single channel listed. It opens you up to a lot of risk and then addition and the ability to drive direct bookings, drive repeat, bookers. Direct to your platform and saving on platform fees is a real big opportunity for your property. So we bought a property management system about a year and a half ago called Uplifting.

We’ve now have that under the DNA umbrella and are making a lot of improvements to there, but it is. Crazy how different the sort of guests are. That book through the different platforms like booking.com, can actually be a great way to get exposure to international guests because if you go and look at the data and up listings very big in both the UK and the US in terms of hosts that use it.

In the uk, almost 50% of bookings are coming through bookings.

Or 5% of overall demand, but it’s growing. And guests, just like if they’re in Europe, they think of booking.com. Like we think of Airbnb. It’s just the spot that you go to book your vacation rental. So when those guests are now traveling to the us, they’re using booking.com. Just like they would in Europe.

So it can be a great way to attract more international guests to your property. Vrbo guests do tend to be more older generation booking in traditional vacational markets. Like you’re going to the beach, you’re going to the mountains, you’re traveling with your family. You book a vrbo, they’re typically longer stays, five plus stays.

You see a lot more week long booking on VRBO than you see through Airbnb. You see longer lead times and you typically see much higher sort of total checkout value, and a lot of that has to do with the larger homes and sort of beach, mountain markets. Airbnb still trends, shorter booking windows, shorter average length of stays.

Still trends more urban, but has absolutely dominated the small and mid-size rental market. Like VRBO almost has no exposure to those areas. Uh, VRBO has also had almost no inventory in the urban areas, so Airbnb still dominates that and depending. On the type of guest you’re looking to add to your property.

Like I launched a property in North Georgia last year, um, listed on Airbnb, vrbo booking.com Expected that most of my bookings would come through Airbnb, given that it was sort of I near Atlanta. And you’d see a lot of domestic guests sort of booking through there. I’ve been astonished by the amount of bookings I’ve gotten through booking.com, and then the long sort of week or two, long week long bookings I’ve gotten through vrbo have been massive and also coming out of, uh, off peak time.

So layering all those channels in together could really make, like if I looked at my performance and what I’d be doing if I was only on Airbnb, it would not nearly be as successful as if now that I’m on multiple channels. And yeah, again, uh, you wouldn’t know these things. And so really important to be looking at all this.

You’ve brought up some really interesting things, Jamie. Some big industry changes, you know, like economic segment of short-term rentals, kind of really getting crushed, shorter booking lead times. The differences in some of these channels. I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but if anyone did have a crystal ball, I think you would be top of about this.

Can you give us any sort of, and we know the past data doesn’t predict future data, right. But any sort of predicts the coming one, two years? Yeah. I mean, I like to look at a lens of overall travel. I travel is a sector is gonna outperform other sector. We’re seeing really strong domestic travel right now.

I think that’s gonna continue. We’re seeing really strong sort of outbound US international travel, so that’s something that has really exploded post pandemic and we did a lot of travel around and domestically, now people are wanting to explore the world and they’re using short-term rentals for it. So if there’s ever a time that you’ve thought about sort of investing outside the US there are ways to do that and ways to sort of capture that demand and do interesting investments outside the us.

I think that is gonna be a trend that continues, and I get excited every time I sort of see the numbers coming out of India, China, Brazil. Like there’s so many new travelers sort of being created every day. The rise of the sort of global middle class that I.

It’s something that AI can’t replicate and technology I think is only going to enhance of people’s desire to get out, explore. People wanna spend on services. I think they’re tired of spending money on goods, even longer term, like the travel sector’s gonna be one that really continues to outperform in the economy.

And yes, there’s gonna be hiccups here and there and whether or not we go through a recession. And over the next year is still probably 50 50. I’m still on the lower end of 50%. I, I don’t think we’re gonna go through a recession the next year, but I think even that we come out of it probably as an industry stronger.

1. So I’m continuing to invest in the travel sector. I think it’s one that is a long-term good bet. And there’s not new investments being happening in hotels right now with the sort of mm-hmm. Commercials, debt crisis that was happening post pandemic banks just don’t want to finance construction for new hotels.

So if we think long-term travel’s gonna continue to grow, two or 3% like it has over the past 20, 30, 40 years. Hotel development’s only happening at half a percent growth per year. That sort of growth of inventory’s gotta happen somewhere, and if not, it means higher occupancy and ADRs for those existing operators.

So I think we’ve got a lot of great tailwinds in the sector. There might be some sort of near term headwinds, but looking at. Great points and the supply, it’s such an important thing, right? And these things take time to slow down or speed up. And because interest rates are high and things aren’t lending, like you said, to hotels or really to apartment buildings, any of the commercial sector, that whole supply and demand equations really getting, it’s gonna have some big changes coming.

So exciting stuff. I also agree in a lot of international opportunity. A lot of listeners know from the show I spend most of my time. We’re doing some fun stuff down here, but of course we wouldn’t be doing it without good data, and that’s where you guys come in. And so for anyone out there, what’s the easiest way to get started with Air DNA and get good access to data?

And you can go to aird.co. We’ve got data covering every country around the world so you can leverage it. One subscription get you access to every country. So you can start with a free account to just upgrading to pro. We’ve got great annual subscription options, which relatively low cost gives you access to all the data you need to really get going in short-term rental investment.

And then once you buy that property. We’ve got a great property management system for you, up uplifting that can get you listed on all the channels, automate your messaging and get you operating efficiently. So really trying to make this one stop shop for helping you find an investment and then operating long term in the sector.

Awesome. Thanks Jamie. There’s definitely a lot more questions that I would love to.

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