We are currently building a Pricing and Revenue Management application for vacation rental companies that control their property’s daily prices. Our application solves the major pain points of property managers with large portfolios by delivering the optimal pricing, excellent reporting capabilities, and insights into market data.
Current Status
Progress so far has been promising and educational. We currently have 5 customers, and the development of the first phase of the application should be ready for soft rollout by November this year. We have the proof of concept, and we have narrowed down the persona of our customer base.
Market
The most underserved sector in this industry is property managers with 51+ properties, which is Quibble’s target market. These companies make up 12% of the market in quantity. Quibble’s current competitors have targeted the larger market sector, property managers with 50 or fewer properties. Those products are well designed for that market sector but do not suit the larger PMs. Quibble’s market sector has the appropriate budget and requirement for an enterprise-level solution.
Problem or Opportunity
To price a property from scratch is very challenging, managers need to: Collect historical reservation, collect market intelligence on the surrounding neighborhoods, then come up with prices and set them for every day, 365 days into the future. Then they have to continuously update those prices based on market changes. If they do not update them as the market changes, they will start to lose money.
Quibble automates this entire process for the manager. We collect millions of observations daily on the Vacation Rental market. We take all of the reservations and plug them into our demand models. We then update the pricing for every property in real-time, so the prices are always up to date.
The system is self-learning and the more data that comes into the system the better the results.
Solution (product or service)
Property Managers and Owners have several strategies they can deploy when setting the pricing for their properties. A Flat Pricing strategy sets a single price for every night. Clearly, this doesn’t take into account that many guests are willing to pay higher rates on Fridays and Saturdays than they are for weekdays. Other managers use a Premium strategy which puts a pricing premium on weekends to take advantage of this difference in demand. These managers can see significant improvements in their bottom lines, around 7%.
But there are many other factors that influence consumer demand. QuibbleRM takes into account property historical performance, neighborhood performance, booking trends, inventory changes, seasonal patterns, and many more factors. We put all that data into our proprietary algorithm to drive 25% (plus) revenue improvements for our customers.
Competitors
PriceLabs, Beyond Pricing, Wheelhouse
Advantages or differentiators
Some applications call themselves revenue management tools when they are really rule-based pricing apps with scraped data price modeling behind them. Unfortunately for our competitors, we have seen firsthand the problems this can cause to a pricing strategy. For example, we have seen the flaws in data collection from scrapers of vacation rental websites.
We are developing a real revenue management tool from which users can plan, report, and act upon analytics to drive their rental price optimizations.
Finance
Quibble’s customers will be large property management companies managing 100 short-term rental properties or more. Our business consultancy specializes in working with managers that have between 20 and 250 properties under their management.
Business model
Quibble offers both a product and a service to the Short-Term Rental marketplace. We charge on a per-listing basis and we offer tiered pricing with 3 pricing levels. The SaaS subscription gives the property manager access to QuibbleRM, and the consultancy service adds an experienced Revenue Manager to the package.
Money will be spent on
Speed up software development
The marketing push for QubbleRM MVP
Run servers for free analytics offering
Promote brand to increase awareness and lead generation
As with any investment, there are certain risks any investor accepts. A particular risk for Quibble is the market adoption of new technology in revenue management for this industry. We are mitigating this with online and in-person training sessions included with the SaaS subscription. Our user experience is intuitive and allows the analyst to get on board with us quickly and continue to develop once onboard.
