AirDNA Review: Learn How to Price Your Airbnb in 2023
Have you heard of AirDNA? If you are considering making extra side money from renting out your house or room on Airbnb or Vrbo, or even want to invest in a vacation property for short-term rental, then AirDNA is for you. I recently used it to find out how much should I rent out my house for in Sweden.
AirDNA is an online service that helps you analyze and understand the short-term rental market on all the platforms including Airbnb, and Vrbo. It helps you set a fair and competitive price for your property and even identify investment opportunities and market trends. Are you thinking of buying an apartment and putting it on Airbnb or Booking.com? The reports from AirDNA will definitely help you.
AirDNA: Key Takeaways
The pros: Free trial, highly accurate, super easy to use, updated prices.
The cons: A bit pricey if you want to unlock multiple markets (various cities), no mobile app yet, more platforms like Booking.com
What is AirDNA?
AirDNA is one of the most popular sources of short-term rental data. It offers several online tools for investors to find profitable investment properties. The platform provides competitive insights, custom reporting, and interactive dashboards covering over 10 million rentals across 12,000 real estate markets globally.
Who’s AirDNA for? (Why would you use AirDNA)
- If you want to rent out your home or room and you don’t know how to price it.
- If you are looking to invest in a vacation rental property and don’t know where.
- If you are already renting out a property and want to increase your profit and be more competitive (up to 24%)
- If you want to find good short-term rental investment opportunities.
- If you are a real estate agency or administration company that manages short-term rental homes.
AirDNA Free Trial
You can access a free demo version of AirDNA and try some of the features by creating an account below. You can upgrade and unlock market data within the platform, and the pricing depends on the size of the market.
How I used AirDNA (Example)
I have two homes: one in Argentina (my hometown) and one in Sweden, where I live today. After the pandemic, I wanted to be able to travel between both of them and use them freely whenever I wanted, but rent it out the rest of the time to cover the home expenses.
I didn’t know what would be the market value or how to set the price, so after researching a bit I stumbled upon AirDNA MarketMinder. I used the free trial for a couple of days, but then I purchased and unlocked the market in Uppsala to see what was the situation.
Here’s how it looks when you search for a specific market using the free trial.
You will be able to see some metrics such as the average daily rate, occupancy rate, and revenue in the area. Also, how many active rentals there are listed, and that AirDNA is sourcing.
Right next to the area name, there’s a Purchase button that you can use to unlock the full market.
In my case, the whole city plan was $14.95/month if you pay monthly, or you can save 40% by paying annually. The pricing depends on how many listings there are in the area. You can also get the whole country (Sweden) for $299/month, with over 14139 listings and 273 cities.
AirDNA: Top 5 Features
1. Pricing Tool
My favorite feature, and the reason why I signed up for AirDNA: learn how to price your Airbnb or home for short term.
When you are renting out your home, the price fluctuates for many factors. For example, you can charge more on the weekends than on the weekdays and during peak season versus slow season. However, pricing is much more dynamic than that. Seasonality, day of the week, current market demand, booking lead time, and even holidays and events all play into how much you can charge per night.
AirDNA offers a short-term rental pricing tool that does all those calculations for you. They use deep market rate insights and dynamic Smart Rates based on your exact listing and recommend the best prices for your property.
2. Market Research
Running a successful short-term rental (STR) requires really knowing what’s going on in the area. What are high vs low seasons? What are the best locations? How can you make your property more attractive? The more you know, the more successful and profitable your rental will be.
AirDNA provides interactive maps to explore the competition and insightful charts to see past trends and reliable future predictions. Once you log in, you can move around the map, explore properties already listed, and get all the insights you need.
When you are doing market research, you will be able to learn about KPIs and metrics such as
- Average daily rate
- Historical occupancy rate
- Average monthly revenue
- Booking lead time
- Average number of bedrooms/guests
- Rental channel distribution
- Rental growth over time
- Typical Airbnb ratings and cancellation policies
AirDNA will also let you learn about revenue growth, rental demand, seasonality, and investability.
3. Rentalizer: Investment Projections
Do you want to invest in a short-term rental property? Do you have an idea where but don’t know exactly? Data is the best you can have at your hand (yes, you can tell I’m a scientist :). With AirDNA you can see how it would actually perform based on current listings in your market.
Whether it’s a home you own or one you’re considering buying, enter any address, anywhere in the world, and Rentalizer shows you accurate projections for how it would perform as a full-time short-term rental. You will be able to see real annual revenue, occupancy rates, and average daily rates for any property. Plus, see market trends (so you can tell if it’s a popular vacation rental market or if it’s cooling down) and links to live listings already available (aka, your competition).
4. Benchmark with AirDNA Score
Your vacation rental may be amazing, but how do you know that it is more amazing (or appealing) than your competition?
AirDNA lets you connect your listing to AirDNA directly, and see its Booking Performance Score, which is a quick score that shows you how well you’re performing against your direct competition. The AirDNA score is a great quick way to rank your property against the rest.
You can also curate your list of competitors and see how you stack up based on factors like Future Occupancy, Booked Rates, and Booking Lead Time. Drill deeper to find out their Average Daily Rate, Occupancy Rate, Performance Score, and even their annual revenue.
5. Predict fluctuations
Many short-term rental hosts rely on what happened last year to plan their occupancy and pricing strategies for this year, but that doesn’t work so much anymore. Things now change too quickly to rely on last year’s data. Instead, you should look ahead to real trends from this season and beyond.
AirDNA lets you pace data for your exact market and shows you what dates people are booking, how many listings are available for those dates, how much they’re booking for, median listing pricing, and more. You can make smart, on-the-fly decisions that can mean the difference between maximizing your Airbnb occupancy and an empty calendar.
How accurate is AirDNA?
AirDNA claims that it is the most reliable source for short-term rental data. AirDNA was 96.2% accurate overall based on their own research when predicting the revenue Airbnb owners would make in each city. Measuring year-over-year changes in nights booked, AirDNA’s estimate was 97.1% accurate.
How much does AirDNA cost?
AidDNA costs $14.95, $39 or $99 per month, depending on the size of the market you want to unlock. You can also save 40% on your total price if you pay annually.
- $14.95 per month per market with less than 100 active listings (or $107.95 per year)
- $39.95 per month per market with 100 to 1,000 active listings (or $287.95 per year)
- $99.95 per month per market with more than 1,000 active listings (or $719.95 per year)
AirDNA offers a free trial version where you can try the interface and some of the features. But to access the paid features, you will need to unlock the market you want to research. To do this, search for the city and state where your property is located or where you’re planning to invest and click “Purchase.”
If you want to view any market in the world and compare unlimited markets with one another, that will cost you $999.95 per month (or $599.99 per month billed annually). You can also pay to unlock several markets individually for comparison.
How does AirDNA work?
AirDNA MarketMinder is an integrated platform of tools that gives you access to millions of data points so you can make informed decisions. The following tools are available for members to use. Keep in mind that most tools are only available to paid members — you can unlock one market for a monthly fee or pay for global access.
Without paying to unlock a market, you can still see the average daily rate, occupancy rate, and revenue for a particular city. You’ll also be able to see a score for rental demand, identify which booking site is used most frequently, look at the average rental size, and more.
Where does AirDNA get its data?
AirDNA gets its data directly from Airbnb and Vrbo. Because any data providers solely relying on metrics from Airbnb or property managers are missing up to 50% of listings in most markets.
Who owns AirDNA?
AirDNA is a privately held company. The company was founded in 2015 by Scott Shatford (CEO) who was once an Airbnb owner himself. He had many questions and concerns about the vacation rental industry and decided to take it upon himself to provide solutions to these concerns. AirDNA is not owned by Airbnb.
What is a good AirDNA score?
AirDNA reports that any AirDNA score above 60 indicates a fairly good investment property, but also recommends looking at individual properties and neighborhoods because individual investments can vary widely. AirDNA’s scoring scale ranges from an A+ (94-100) to F (9).
AirDNA Alternatives 2023
Here are other alternatives to AirDNA which could be more suited if you are looking at more advanced use cases. If you are a starter like me, AirDNA is definitely the simplest and most straightforward tool.
Beyond
Beyond provides insights and dynamic pricing, and also comes with expert guidance. You can even build a direct booking website and sync your listing across multiple online travel agencies. Beyond charges 1% of your bookings revenue (or 1.49% if you choose to have the money deducted when the stay occurs). But you get 30 days to try it out for free.
Mashvisor
Mashvisor is more US-based, and helpful if you also have any long-term rental units as well. It pulls data from rental listing websites for traditional comps in addition to Airbnb data. Compared to AirDNA, Mashvisor is cheaper if you want to research multiple markets.
Conclusion
AirDNA is a must-have tool if you want to beat the competition and maximize your profit as a short-term rental owner. Whether you are renting out a room to make some extra money, your entire home, or investing in new properties, you need data to understand the market in a way that is accessible and easy to use. AirDNA is the first tool to provide that, sourcing it directly from Airbnb and Vrbo. I look forward to their integration with more platforms such as Booking.com.
