US: Rented, a leading revenue management partner for vacation rental professionals, has announced the launch of Art, an automated rate tool that is designed to help property managers set competitive nightly rates for every property.
Art will provide market-driven pricing recommendations along with a simple interface so that vacation rental managers can make adjustments based on their expert insights. Rates are then synced directly to reservation software and marketing channels.
Initially conceived as an internal product, Art was intended to support the work of Rented’s team of revenue managers who, since 2019, have provided hundreds of vacation rental firms with end-to-end revenue management as a service.
Rented founder and CEO, Andrew McConnell, said: “We’ve always believed that vacation rental pricing requires a blend of art and science. Our full-service clients have hired us because set-it-and-forget-it pricing tools don’t typically work for destination markets, where most properties are unique and relevant pricing data is hard to surface.
“As we built out Art to increase our own revenue managers’ efficiency and performance, we quickly realised there was an opportunity to deliver that same capability to a much wider audience,” he added.
Colorado-based PMI Summit signed on as an early customer, using Art to set rates for 20+ properties.
PMI Summit vice-president Shana Lewis said: “Thus far, it has been one of the best pricing tools I have used, and I’ve played with a lot of them. The product data being produced and used to generate pricing is more realistic—it doesn’t just bottom-out at the lowest dollar.”
Art uses pricing models built around demand and availability, not just historical reservation data, which has proven unexpectedly essential after the global pandemic brought leisure travel to a halt in the spring of 2019—making pricing based on historic data more challenging going forward.
McConnell added: “The last year has been a rough one for our industry, but the silver lining is that more travellers are turning to private, professionally managed vacation rentals than ever before. It’s our great hope that Art empowers more vacation rental managers to optimise their pricing, deliver the best possible return to their homeowners, and see their business flourish in 2021 and beyond.”
