How do you measure the performance of your vacation rental or serviced apartment business? There are many indicators known as KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, that can help measure different aspects of your business performance depending on your business strategy. If you want your short term rental business to endure as a successful organisation which is stable, safe, high performing, and of course fixated on growing, you need to monitor some key performance indicators to maximise profitability. Property management KPIs are the information that you need before making any important decision related to your vacation rentals, serviced apartments, hotels, guesthouses, or your Airbnbs in general.
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Use of Property Management KPIs for Vacation Rental Businesses
The vacation rental market is known as a highly fragmented market, which means there are many competitors of different sizes instead of one big one. This allows everyone to try their chance in the industry; however, it takes a manager to keep an eye on the market and the right property management KPIs. Among the many property management KPIs, you need to identify the ones which give you the best insights into your business growth in a very fragmented market.
As your business grows, you need to make all the revenue sources and all the money leaking visible and accessible to check how your vacation rental business is operating. On the surface, it may seem overwhelming to strike a balance in distributing and channeling your attention. In an industry as fragmented as vacation rentals, tracking the right KPIs can become the vital difference between a growing business and a broken one.
As a property manager, you need to be as critical as possible toward your own business, and property management KPIs help you evaluate your performance over the course of time. To build a growing and healthy business, you need to make operational decisions which are informed and suited to your goals and strategies. That is the reason Zeevou decided to make a list of some of the most vital and common property management KPIs in the vacation rental market in the bigger hospitality industry.
Occupancy Rate
Occupancy rate is a vital property management KPI for a vacation rental or a serviced apartment. You should be aware of the occupancy rate at any given time and check it against the regional average rate of occupancy. In other words, to have a clear insight into your performance, you need to have an overview of your rental occupancy rate in relation to the average rate in your region. If your occupancy is lower than the average, this leads you to check the guest acquisition operations, and if your rate is higher than average, you probably need to make sure if you have chosen the right rates for your listing. High occupancy rates does not necessarily mean you are making profits!
Marketing and Advertising Costs
This property management KPI will show you if the money you are investing in marketing is paying off. It is also important as it indicates the income that each channel manager is offering to you. You may realise that although some channels offer you more reservations, their commission is so high, which will actually have a negative effect on your net income. You will also probably find out that you do not need to invest in acquiring a guest because you are getting reservations from other sources. This now brings us to the next property management KPI, which is Reservation Sources.
Reservation Sources
Where do your reservations mostly come from? Which listing website gives you more visibility? This property management KPI helps you with decisions about which listing websites are worth investing in. You should see whether to make stronger partnerships or to stop wasting time and energy on a website. This is a property management KPI that you need to check first. Assessing reservation sources shows you where most of your income is coming from. It helps in having multiple sources of income as you do not put all your eggs in one basket. Awareness about the diversity of your income sources protects you from losing time and money on too many possibilities, which might not pay off in the end.
Income Per Property
If you are managing more than one property, you need to know how much you are making from each one. Every property has different operational costs, occupancy rate and also local enquiries. This KPI can show you which property is converting more compared to others. It is very valuable to have a realistic idea of the parts of your business that are more beneficial and worth the time and resources you are spending.
Average Daily Rate
This property management KPI is more likely to fluctuate constantly in the vacation rental business. That is why you need to study average daily rate in a period of a month, a season or a year. To take advantage of this indicator, you need to analyse the market and compare it with others in your region. The valuable information this property management KPI yields helps you to make the right decisions, leading to revenue growth. In addition, the indicator lets you take a more informed decision about setting rates and gives you an overview of the amount of money on average you are earning from a property in a given time.
Revenue Growth as One of Property management KPIs
This key indicator gives the most clear insight into the company’s performance through different months and years. While the other indicators provide you with more detailed information to study, showing the parts that needed improvements, this property management KPI gives you a bigger picture to see whether your short term rental business is on the right track or not.
Net Income
Net income is simply the income minus all the operational costs such as cleaning, maintenance, and channels’ commissions, which shows you the actual profit that you are making. This allows you to take actions in optimising your vacation rental business’s performance by lowering your expenses or finding the money leak by checking other property management KPIs.
Renters Satisfaction
This KPI simply clarifies how well you have operated your vacation rental business through the year. High level of renters satisfaction brings in more new renters or encourages the same ones to come back again. This can easily be made possible by online reviews and ratings. Satisfaction shown through online reviews helps with your growth and visibility.
How to Measure Property Management KPIs
Property management KPIs are metrics that you need to calculate yourself, or you can just rely on the automated reporting features of the property management software you choose to use. Zeevou offers a revenue manager and detailed reporting tools that are intended to liberate you from all the calculations and human errors. Zeevou gives you an automated real-time analytics of how well your vacation rentals or serviced apartments are performing.
How to Make the Most Out of Property Management KPIs
KPIs set clear and measurable goals for teams and provide valuable insights for decision-making throughout the organisation. However, having these in one picture will enable the team to better measure performance and calculate profits.
Regarding this, Zeevou’s property deal analyser could be a useful tool that performs a precise analysis of a property’s potential profit by evaluating some KPIs and other relevant metrics.
There are several benefits of using this vacation rental income calculator:
- Accurate data: Our property deal analyser provides accurate and reliable information about your property’s earning potential.
- Time-saving: It eliminates the need for manual calculations, saving you valuable time and energy.
- Error reduction: It reduces the risk of human error, which can lead to inaccurate results and poor decision-making.
- Better decision-making: It allows you to make data-driven decisions about pricing and other aspects of your vacation rental business.
- Optimising earning potential: It can help you identify opportunities to optimise your revenue and increase your earning potential.
- Easy to use: It does not require any technical knowledge to use. It is a web-based and user-friendly tool.
- Downloadable results: It provides downloadable file results, allowing you to keep records and easily share information with others.
A well-featured and highly-integrated PMS is essential for accumulation of data required for KPI reports. Zeevou collects all the data about your own business and the vacation rental market. Zeevou has also some features that help you improve some particular KPIs. For instance, the dynamic pricing integrations of Zeevou gives you real-time information about how the market is changing so that you can alter the rates to increase your average daily revenue. Task management is another feature of Zeevou that lowers your management costs and lets you monitor any detail just as they happen. For more information about the different features, click here.
