Midterm rentals are rental periods that run anywhere from one month to one year.

Overview Video

Three steps on setting up your midterm rental in PriceLabs

1. Set up your flat minimum stay requirement of 30-nights

1. If you can book your listing for a fewer number of days, use minstay rules for orphan gaps to try to fill the gaps between reservations.
   

1. Use the minimum stay settings for adjacent days after a booking to prevent or limit gaps from being generated in your calendar. Learn how to here.
   

2. Set up your minimum, base, and maximum prices.

1. Think of your monthly minimum and divide it by 30 days. Use that value as your minimum price.
   
2. Think of your monthly maximum price and divide it by 30 days. Use the result as your maximum price.
   
3. Set up your base price between the minimum and maximum price.
   

3. Set up monthly discounts.

1. Depending on your PMS/Channel, you might need to set this up on PriceLabs, or directly on your PMS/Channel.
   

If you're providing a monthly discount, do calculate the impact it will have on the final price and income, you can adjust your minimum, base, and maximum prices to account for this discount.

Using the Neighborhood Data to compare against other midterm rentals

In the listing's Neighborhood Data, you can compare your future prices and occupancy vs. competitors in your same area. By default, we show the data of the nearest 350 listings. But, to make it more relevant for your use case, you can now compare with a custom comp-set from the Market Dashboards as the data source instead of the default nearby listings. That allows you to compare with other midterm rentals in your market!

First, note that the Market Dashboards are reports you can create on any market worldwide. The dashboards will show all the booking data in easy-to-digest charts, from the main KPIs (revenue, occupancy, average price, etc.), cancellation policies, and much more! Find out how to create a Market Dashboard here.

Once you explore the dashboard, you can filter the listings and create a comp-set with those more relevant to you. Check out this video to learn how to create comp-sets in the Market Dashboards.

In the chart below, listings are being filtered by their minimum stay and bedroom count to create a comp set for a three-bedroom unit that requires a stay of 28 days or longer. 

After creating the comp-set, you can select it as the data source in the Neighborhood Data feature, easily compare your future prices and availability, check the listings on the map, and even compare daily rates for the next year.

Advanced customizations:

Market Factors: Seasonality and Demand

You can let the prices fluctuate between your minimum and maximum price based on the seasonality and demand factors. But, if you are an advanced user knowledgeable of your market, you can also fine-tune these factors. Learn more about Setting seasonal prices with PriceLabs.

1. If you're setting seasonal minimum, base, and maximum prices, you might want to turn OFF the PriceLabs seasonality factor. Reach out to support@pricelabs.co to request to have this feature enabled for your account. 
   

1. Fine-tune the Demand Factor Aggressiveness in your 'Advanced Customizations', to increase or reduce the price fluctuations based on market's demand.

Other customizations

1. Think about your Orphan Day Prices, and Occupancy Based Adjustments. If you're allowed to take shorter reservations between midterm bookings, you could apply a discount for gaps longer than the 2-night default, and adjust the day ranges in the Occupancy Based Adjustments matrix to work for your longer stay lengths. If you never want to take reservations for less than 28/30 days, you can disable both.
   

1. Use the Last Minute Prices customization to increase the chances of getting bookings in close-in dates. Consider extending the last-minute discount to 'within the last 30 days' instead of 'last 15 days' if your booking window allows for it. 
   

1. Disable Far-out premium: By default, our algorithm has a 'Far-Out Premium' feature, increasing rates for dates as they get farther out. If your longer bookings tend to be made well in advance of check-in, disable this feature so that your monthly rates are within the desirable range for your market. Learn more about this here. 

1. Adjacent Factor: You can discount the adjacent days to a booking to increase the possibility of having back-to-back reservations and help to ensure higher occupancy rates by encouraging back-to-back reservations.
   

Create a Market Dashboard to get insights on your midterm rental market.

1. Length of stay vs Booking window chart: This is super useful to see how many confirmed bookings there are for each future date based on the length of the stay and what the average prices look like for each type of booking.
   

You can move the bar at the bottom to check these metrics for the past 15 months!

1. Lead time/ booking window is the number of days in advance bookings are made.
   
2. Length of stay is the duration of the reservation.
   

1. See pricing and occupancy metrics, cancellation policies, and much more!  

We hope these ideas are helpful. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to us at support@pricelabs.co.