Make money out of your property – A HouseTrip success story

How to turn your apartment into a goldmine

After almost 6 months working at HouseTrip, I thought I had seen all possible scenarios when it came to hosts. But as I discovered what I’m going to tell you, I realised how HouseTrip could still surprise me!

In early March we were working on identifying the best hosts for the month of February to be able to promote them on the website.  To do this, we looked at the positive reply rate and the number of bookings for the past month. We came out with a list of 15 to 20 hosts, most of whom were familiar to me; but in the list there was a name I couldn’t remember having seen before, and yet this host was among the best performers of the month of February.

To get a bit more information about this host, I decided to have a look at his profile.  When I did, I saw something that really surprised me; he had only signed up on the 20^th February 2011 – only 3 weeks previously. Seeing this I couldn’t stop thinking “How can someone we never heard of make it to our top performers in only 3 weeks?”.

Looking further into the details, I started to find an explanation to this success story. The host had signed-up by himself and listed one apartment on our website on the 20^th February. He then added another one on the 28^th and a third one on the 7^th March. All of them are small, well decorated and ideally situated studios in the heart of Paris. That already explained part of the success, Paris being one of our most active markets.

But that alone couldn’t explain it all. I then looked further at the description, and I saw the prices for his apartments were very competitive. Actually, his studios ranged among the cheapest accommodation we provide in Paris. It’s not underpriced, just value for money, and it means his studios would always show on top of the search results when people sort them by price.

Finally, he managed to get 4- and 5-star reviews from his guests very quickly, ensuring the potential guests about the quality of his apartments.

So that explains how he gets a lot of requests, but how to turn these into bookings? That’s when the host plays his part. Indeed our host has a positive reply rate of 99%, so as incredible as it might sound, 99% of the requests he gets are answered positively. The fact that he answers so regularly and positively ensures his calendars are always up-to-date, and that reduces the number of requests he would have to reject.

In terms of numbers, he received more than 380 requests for his 3 studios, in only one month, which turned into 67 confirmed bookings. He already welcomed 24 bookings and has still 43 to come.

His three studios have been occupied a total of 51 nights in March and will be occupied 66 nights in April, that’s an occupancy rate of 54.8% in March and 73.3% in April. One of his studios even reached 90% occupancy for the coming month. Only with HouseTrip bookings.

Since the 20^th February, this host has secured for more than 8’800 € of bookings, and he doesn’t seem to be reducing the effort. In only 4 weeks he made it to the “Top 20” hosts in the number of bookings since the launch of the website, and with only 3 apartments.

This is a nice example of how to make the most out of your apartments, and how to make sure you get a lot of requests and turn them into bookings, and we can only wish we get more of these to tell you about in the coming months! Now it’s your turn, if you were still wondering whether you should list your place or not, I hope this convinced you…

To recap, keys to success:

• Great apartment descriptions and nice photos
• Competitive prices
• Positive reviews from past guests
• Quick and positive replies to requests
• Updated availability calendars

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