First let me say I was never really a fan of market maker. I tried it a few times but I guess I never really got the jist of it. I also noticed that the pricing tool found in market maker was always out of wack.

So for years I never really paid attention to market maker… until our VRBO account manager used market maker to show us how to read the VRBO tea leaves so to speak.

After that I felt I needed to share this little tidbit of VRBO gold. It’s now our go to when we need to determine where we should do when we have openings in our calendar.

First Check This Before Market Maker

Do yourself a favor and make sure your minimum stay for those dates is what you expect it to be.

Sadly, it’s happened to us before. We had a month were we weren’t getting bookings and it just seemed weird.

When we looked at the minimum stay for that month it was way higher than what we normally have. Not sure if it was a goof on our part or a glitch in the matrix, but either way the minimum stay was different… it was very different.

In fact it was way too long. Once we lowered the minimum stay bookings for that month started coming in.

If you don’t see anything unusual then it may be market maker time!

What is VRBO Market Maker

Market Maker is a tool that VRBO came out with several years ago to provide hosts insights into their listing’s performance.

It gives you a comp set, percentage of booked vs. projected booked properties, the booked rates vs. unbooked rates, and the search volume compared to a year ago.

Market Maker came out at about the same time VRBO came up with boosts.

Boosts are like VRBO points you accrue from past VRBO bookings. You can apply the boosts to the dates you’d like to increase your search ranking for.

How To Use VRBO Market Maker To Increase Bookings

The Market Maker Layout

On the left of the graph are the toggles along with the respective legend for each. We’ll go over each of the toggles and what they do in more detail in the following sections.

Above the graph are a bunch of rows of data. The first row of course is the date.

The row under the dates shows the status of those dates. In our example below you can see that June 24 – July 1 is open. Open dates show as white space, VRBO bookings are green and say reserved and non-VRBO bookings are red and say Booked.

Under the status row is your current rate.

And finally the last row above the graph is your current search position for each date. I believe when you see a green little arrow on top of the search position, it means you’ve applied boosts to that date to increase your search ranking for that date.

Now that you know the lay of the Market Maker land, lets go over how we use it!

1 – Market Rates

The Market Rates toggle is the first toggle displayed. This graph displays your rates compared to the booked and unbooked rates for properties in your comp set.

Below is what our graph looked like. We’re looking at the June 24  – Jul 1 dates. Looking at this graph you can see that our nightly rate is way higher than the avg. booked and avg. unbooked rates.

In this case, that’s okay, if you look at our rates for the dates that are booked we were way higher for those too.

This data point alone isn’t enough to make a decision, but it does tell us we are priced higher than our competition. 

2 – Searches For Your Market

On to the second toggle, Searches for your market. This will show you how many searches were done for those dates in your market this year compared to last year.

What a huge difference! Ours has half the amount of search volume compared to the same time last year. Wowza! 

Now we know that we’re prices higher than our comp set, and there are half as many people looking for those dates compared to the year before.

Let’s take a look at the next toggle’s data.

3 – Occupancy

The final toggle displays occupancy. The two data points are Current Occupancy and Forecasted Occupancy.

Looks like VRBO thinks each of our available dates have roughly 10% more bookings coming. Subtracting the current occupancy from the forecasted occupancy, gives us more or less 10%.

The Picture Market Maker Created For Us

Based on the three toggles we learned:

1. We are priced higher than our comp set
2. There are roughly half as many searches for those dates this year compared to last year
3. VRBO expects about 10% more bookings for those dates.

Now, everyone is different, but for me when I see that I’m priced waaaay higher than my comp set, there is almost half the amount of search volume compared to the same time last year, AND VRBO only expects another 10% of the properties to be booked for those dates, the picture it paints tells me I need to change something if I want to be in that 10% of those additional booked properties.

Okay, Now What Do We Do?

Sometimes the data is all you need to make a decision, other times it just make you say now what?! The data can clearly spell out that we need to change something, in our case that’s what the data definitely told us. Well great, we know we need to do something…. but what?

The answer to that question can be paralyzing.

But there are always things you can do, and sometimes simply spelling them out is all you need to help you figure out the next step.

 Here’s some of the possible next steps for us:

1 – We could do nothing and see if you get booked at our current rate, it happens all the time but based on the search volume and forecasted occupancy, that seems like a large gamble at this point.

2 – We could leave the rates as is and do some marketing to see if we can find a new guest interested in booking those dates at our price.

3 – We could leave the rates where they’re at and offer a discount to past guests, maybe someone would be interested in booking those dates at a percentage discount.

4 – We could lower the price closer to our competitors’ price point to make it more appealing to VRBO users.

5 – We could lower the price AND market the house and pull a new guest to our property.

Final Thoughts

I hope this was insightful for your vacation rental business! Our data was pretty clearly telling us that something needs to be changed to get those dates booked.

Using the three data points this way allows you to see what you need to change. Each one individually doesn’t give enough data to make a decision, but together they paint a pretty clear picture of where your listing stands.

We used Market Maker to see what was going on with a gap in our calendar, you could also use it to determine rates for future months.

Using the three data points to figure out where time frames you can raise rates or lower them and promote.

For the future dates however, we would definitely recommend using a pricing tool instead. It takes a lot of the burden off your shoulders and will get your higher rates than you would probably set on your own. 

We use Beyond Pricing, but you can use any of them really and they will probably be better than you setting the prices manually.

Check out this post for more info on Setting Up Beyond Pricing,

Was that helpful? What do you do differently?

Are you going to use Market Maker to make decisions on your available dates? What would you do different?

I’d love to know! Leave your thoughts in your comments below. 🙂

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Would you like to know how to book your orphaned nights? Great! We’ll go over it in this post, but first let’s go over what an orphaned night is. There are a couple of other terms used for them.

We call them orphaned nights, but I’ve also seen them called orphaned days, gap days, unbookable days, orphan gaps, small gap days and booking gaps.

In short, orphans are the available days between your bookings that are less than your minimum stay.

Let’s say you have a minimum stay on your vacation rental calendar set to 5 days. That means any gaps in your calendar that are less than that number of days will not be available for someone to book.

There are a couple of ways you can get those days booked while minimizing your risks. Let’s cover what suggestions others offer and what we do with our orphaned nights.

What Others Recommend For Orphaned Nights

What We Do With Orphaned Nights

Here’s the strategy we use for our orphaned nights. We think the best people to rent the orphaned dates to are the guests that we have already vetted.

 The guests most likely to want to book those days are the guests staying before and after the orphaned dates!

 Ask them if they would like to extend their stay at a discount. 

We keep a 2 or 3 night minimum through the year and when there are gaps of 1 or two nights we offer them at a discount to the guests on either side of the available dates.

This strategy increases your income without adding any additional risk.

Another thing you could do is send a message to past guests offering the orphaned dates at a discount. You may have past guests interested in a short getaway at a discount. Past guests that you already had a positive experience with are also in the no risk pool in our eyes.

When To Offer The Orphaned Night Discount

We offer them the discounted nights as soon as we see them and we received everything we need from them (things like drivers license and rental agreement).

That way it gives them enough time to change flights, rearrange their schedule, get more time off from work, etc…

How Much Of A Discount?

To determine the discount we look at the rates for those dates and determine a rate that would feel like a discount compared to what is listed. It makes sense to offer them a rate that will get them to book, heck it’s all free money anyway – if they don’t book the dates then you get $0. 🙂

Now Go Out There And Book Those Orphaned Nights!

Was that helpful? What do you do differently?

Are you going to try this method to fill in the small gaps in your calendar? What are you doing for the small gaps currently?

Let me know in you the comments below!!

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