AirDNA is an Airbnb data and insights platform that, in their own words, “turns industry-savvy, short-term rental data into strategic, actionable analytics.”
If you’re a real estate investor, property manager, or short-term rental host, you’ll know how difficult it is to crunch all the data and make informed decisions to increase your profits.
AirDNA takes some of that work off your hands. This tool tracks the daily performance of more than 10 million listings and analyzes millions of data points every day.
We built Wheelhouse to help professionals & portfolios maximize revenue from their short-term rental listings with dynamic pricing, market reports, and CompSet tools. We put together this review of AirDNA to show you how it works, take a look at some of the key features of this dynamic software, and help you decide which software is the best fit for your needs:
What Is AirDNA?
Founded by Scott Shatford and Will Shatford, at its core, AirDNA is a data company. We say this because data is what drives AirDNA’s products and services.
AirDNA tracks a large amount of market data. In the same vein, they closely monitor the performance of more than 10 million Airbnb and Vrbo vacation rentals in more than 120k global markets.
They then use machine learning algorithms and powerful analytics to deliver actionable insights that make a real difference to rental owners and real estate investors.
Whether you’re doing a market analysis with a view of buying a new rental property or you want to optimize your rental listings better, AirDNA provides the data to help you make informed decisions.
Why Should You Use AirDNA?
Whether you have one or many properties, if you want to ensure you’re getting the highest possible return on them, you need data to work with. Not just any data, but highly relevant, good, accurate data.
That’s what AirDNA does. It collects accurate market data to help you make better decisions.
There are two main ways you can use AirDNA:
Finding the Most Optimal Pricing for Your Rental Properties
Think of it like this; if you have a rental property in Las Vegas, without software, all you can do is look at similar listings and maybe factor in some seasonality to come up with a price, right?
The problem with doing that is that you’re likely to either miss out on bookings or rent your property out at a less than optimal price.
Either way, as the property owner, you’re not going to accurately know whether or not you could have listed your property for more without manually checking similar properties.
There are two problems with doing this; it’s very time consuming, and you’re always working one step behind by looking at historical data.
Now, imagine you had daily data showing you exactly what prices all the other similar properties listed on Airbnb were listed for, their booking lead times, occupancy, how seasonal trends affect prices, some AI-powered insights into forecasts, and more. This is what Wheelhouse does, and what AirDNA is trying to do as well.
This is the kind of data that enables you to set the most optimal price for your listing instantly. Hitting the sweet spot where you’re pricing low enough to attract bookings and high enough to get the maximum per booking cross.
Finding the Best Potential Markets/Areas to Buy a Rental Property In
The same benefits apply to finding a new rental property. Even if you’re buying a property in an area, you’re familiar with. You can’t summarize and crunch all the important data to tell you how profitable your purchase will be.
This is where AirDNA’s MarketMinder tool comes in. Their MarketMinder tool gives you a multi-dimensional view of a local market. This is similar to Wheelhouse’s Free Market Reports tool. Providing data-driven statistics to help you make an informed decision when buying a rental property.
All you have to do is select the area, and MarketMinder will return key metrics like:
Number of active rental properties
The platforms they’re using to list their properties.
A ‘Market Grade’ which lists stats like demand, investability, the potential for revenue growth, and more
Average occupancy and daily rates in the area
Potential revenue,
And more
You’re no longer working in the dark, on guesswork, or spending hours manually piecing together data.
Just a few clicks and detailed insights are presented to you in the form of graphs, color-coded charts, and tables.
While AirDNA isn’t the only data company that provides data-driven insights into the rental market, it is a great tool.
Here is a closer look at the benefits, pros, cons:
Key Features and Benefits of AirDNA
Being given accurate market data is one thing. Being able to use it to your advantage is another.
In summary, here are the key ways you can use AirDNA to get a better ROI on your properties:
Dynamic Pricing – As we touched on above, it’s hard to settle on the best possible price to rent your properties out for. Moreover, AirDNA uses real market data to take that decision off your hands.
Through a combination of monitoring your competitors, using predictive supply and demand, seasonable data, and more. AirDNA displays the optimal nightly rate to list your property for every day of the year.
Smarter Property Investing – Let’s be realistic. It’s hard to get a good understanding of how profitable a market or an individual property will be before purchasing an investment property.
AirDNA gives you an interactive map to scan and compare properties’ revenue potential anywhere in the US. You can plan your potential income and calculate a return on your investment before you even see a property.
Market Insights – Everyone is interested in different metrics and market data. AirDNA presents that data.
You can compare your current portfolio against other properties, ‘spy’ on your competitors’ pricing strategies, get a better understanding of the rental market in certain areas, and much more.
AirDNA Pricing
You can get started for free and get a feel for how AirDNA works. Their free plan is limited, though, and you’ll quickly find you need to upgrade to a paid monthly subscription to delve into the meaningful data.
AirDNA has three paid monthly subscription plans as follows:
$19.95/mo – With this plan, you can analyze an area with less than 100 active listings.
$39.95/mo – With this plan, you can analyze an area with 100-1,000 active listings.
$99.95/mo – With this plan, you can analyze an area with more than 1,000 active listings.
This means you pay an amount per month depending on the area’s size and the number of listings you want to check.
You’ll then get real-time pricing insights, historical market performance, occupancy rates, and all the other data you need for those properties.
AirDNA Pros
Data points that cover a lot of markets.
UI is intuitive and easy to navigate.
The data is presented with clear visual graphs.
Saves you a time.
AirDNA Cons
It can quickly become pricy if you’re managing a large portfolio spanning different markets.
AirDNA Alternative
Wheelhouse helps professionals & portfolios maximize revenue from their short-term rental listings with dynamic pricing, market reports, and CompSet tools.
Built by world-class data scientists, the Wheelhouse Pricing Engine analyzes 10 billion data points every night.
Users report seeing up to a 40% increase in revenue when pricing with Wheelhouse over trying to set prices manually, with some writing online that they increase their revenue 100%!
Wheelhouse has the longest running pricing experiments in the space – having had a team, led by a PhD Data Scientist – that has collaborated together for more than 6 years. That is extremely rare.
Moreover, it is the only platform that has had their algorithm tested & approved by external marketplaces – as they co-developed their pricing with both VRBO & TripAdvisor’s data science team’s inputs & feedback.
In addition to the performance of the model (which in 2020 increased revenue by 22.6% for the average listing), Wheelhouse has some other strengths.
Available free for a limited time, get granular insights into your local market and see how your portfolio performs compared to the competition with Wheelhouse Market Reports.
Wheelhouse is visualizing trends from previous years in your market. As well as sharing predictive analytics for what they expect to see for the upcoming year.
Great for operators who have listings and want to see how the market is performing. With Wheelhouse, they can adjust accordingly, OR those who are interested in investing in a new market and want to see what the competition is like.