Comp Set Analysis: How to Compare STR Performance

Key Takeaways

• Comp sets allow you to compare your vacation rental property against a targeted selection of similar rentals.
• Regularly update and use comp sets to better adapt to market changes and refine your marketing and pricing strategies.
• AirDNA’s custom comp set tool allows you to look at competitors on an individual listing or aggregate level.

What, or who, am I up against? This is an age-old, industry-spanning question that every savvy business person must ask. In the world of short-term rentals, you’ll likely never have one primary competitor. If there are 400+ rentals in your area, where do you begin?

The more data you have, the less likely it's going to be relevant to your unique short-term rental property. While analyzing the hundreds of rentals in your area will provide a high-level understanding of how your market behaves, there are probably only a handful of properties that really matter. The rest tend to introduce noise that can make it difficult to determine what information is personally relevant and actionable.

For example: Should a downtown penthouse with a pool and ocean views take into account the budget-friendly listings nearby? Is the new Airbnb host with zero reviews really competing for the same guests as you?

Comp sets address these issues by allowing you to compare your property against a curated selection of similar rentals. This targeted approach helps you gain actionable insights by focusing on properties that share key characteristics with your own listings. The result is more accurate and relevant market analysis, which can help maximize your success on short-term vacation rental platforms.

What Is a Competitive Set?

A competitive set (commonly known as a comp set) is a list of properties with features and characteristics similar to your own. STR hosts and property managers use comp sets to benchmark their listings against the true competition, as well as to the market as a whole.
STR comp sets are an invaluable tool for sizing up the competition and extracting personalized insights for your specific properties. 

Components of a Comp Set

Here are the 6 major components to consider when creating a comp set for your property:

1. Amenities: Amenities comprise the true makeup of a vacation rental. When building your custom comp set, hone in on properties that offer similar amenities as yours. You can also find out which amenities might be worth adding to your own property by analyzing your competitors and their offerings.
2. Size and Guest Capacity: Conduct an apples-to-apples comparison by aligning your property with others of a similar size. Assess vacation rental properties with a similar bedroom count and guest capacity.
3. Distance and Location: Location is the #1 factor guests consider when booking a vacation rental. The closer a rival property is to yours, the more competition it’s offering.
4. Performance Metrics: Revenue, average daily rate (ADR), occupancy rate—these metrics are the numbers by which you compare yourself and they’re crucial to building an accurate competitive set.
5. Experience: How professional is your competition? Factoring in the number of reviews for a competitive property is key. 
6. Property Quality: The final aspects of a comp set are property ratings and Superhost status. Use these metrics to filter out properties that don't compete with yours.

Benefits of Custom Comp Sets

Custom comp sets offer short-term rental hosts precise market insights by comparing their properties to only the most similar listings. This approach helps hosts to price accurately, target their marketing, and benchmark themselves better. 

More Relevant Market Research

Custom comp sets only provide the most relevant data by focusing on properties that are similar to yours in location, amenities, and guest ratings. For instance, a downtown penthouse with 360-degree city views will benefit more from comparing itself to similar high-end properties rather than budget-friendly listings in the same area.

Accurate Pricing

Custom comps help you develop a competitive pricing strategy and optimize your pricing. For example, if your property is a lakeside cabin with a hot tub, comparing it to other lakeside cabins ensures your pricing is in line with direct competitors rather than general market rates. If your direct competitors tend to raise their rents by a certain percentage on weekends, you can accurately match that.

Targeted Marketing Insights

Understanding what similar properties offer can help refine your marketing strategy. If your comp set shows a trend of high bookings for properties with outdoor fire pits, highlighting this feature in your listing can attract more guests.

Performance Benchmarking

Regularly comparing your property's performance with that of your comp set empowers you to identify your strengths and areas for improvement. For example, if your occupancy rates are lower than similar listings, you might consider adjusting your amenities or pricing.

Adaptation to Market Changes

You can quickly adapt to market trends by monitoring your comp set, such as seasonal demand fluctuations or emerging guest preferences. For instance, if your comp set shows an increase in bookings for properties with work-from-home amenities, adding a dedicated workspace can make your property more attractive.

How to Use a Comp Set

Now you understand why you should build an STR comp set…but how do you actually use it to your advantage? How often should you revisit your comp set?

Initial Listing

Start using your comp set from the get-go, as early as when you first list a property on a vacation rental platform. When first listing your property, use a comp set to determine competitive pricing and identify key features to highlight. 

Regular Monitoring

Regularly analyze your comp set to stay updated on market trends, pricing adjustments, and new competitive listings. Set a regular cadence of monitoring your comp set, whether that’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. 

Use Your Comp Set to Plan for Events

Before major local events or peak seasons, use your comp set to adjust your pricing and availability. For example, if there's a local festival, see how your comp set adjusts their rates and availability and follow suit to maximize occupancy and revenue.

Set Up Performance Reviews

Conduct quarterly or bi-annual reviews using your comp set to benchmark your performance on a long-term basis. If your comp set shows higher occupancy rates during off-peak seasons, investigate their strategies and consider adopting similar practices. You should also assess whether you need to add or remove properties from your competitive set during this review.

Get Granular to Optimize Your Pricing

Closely assess your direct competitors’ calendars and daily pricing to optimize your own pricing on a given day, week, or month.

AirDNA’s suggested pricing feature is a great way to compare your calendar to a competitor’s and see how much they’re charging. The tool also shows which days your competitor is booked, and provides a useful suggested price that is optimized to keep your listing competitive. 

Updating Your Comp Set

Creating a comp set isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. It’s crucial that you regularly update your comp set to only include relevant properties.

Think about it: your STR business and your competitors’ are always evolving. From performing maintenance improvements to adding amenities to earning more positive reviews, your listing— and your competitors’—changes often.  

You should update the filters that you use to narrow down your competitors to account for such changes. Make it a point to refresh your comp set quarterly or bi-annually. Assess whether you need to add or remove properties from your competitive set to keep it current and reflective of the latest market trends.

How to Make a Custom Comp Set with AirDNA

AirDNA’s custom comp set tool was built specifically to help short-term rental hosts identify and analyze their most relevant competitors. This section will guide you through the specific steps to effectively use the custom comp tool in AirDNA. 

Step 1. Connect Your Property

From the Host Tools dashboard in AirDNA, click the “View & Manage Listings” tab. From there, click “Connect Account” and either connect your listing through Airbnb, or connect it manually by copy and pasting the appropriate listing link. 

That’s it! You’ll now see your property as an active listing within the “My Listings” tab.

Step 2. Navigate to the Custom Comp Set Tool

The next step is to leverage AirDNA data to create a list of properties that accurately match your own. Return to the Host Tools dashboard, and click on the Comp Sets tab.

When you land on the Comp Sets page, note that you’ll start off with an auto-generated list of up to 100 potential comps all within a 31 mile (50 km) radius. These are nearby properties that best match your listing’s attributes.

The Comp Set Metrics banner along the top displays the average metrics for your selected comp set. Note that this data is dynamic. As you check and uncheck properties, the averages will change accordingly.

The Comp Set Match score is AirDNA’s proprietary metric that provides a quick glance into the comparability of other listings. The higher the score, the more similar it is to your property.

Step 3. Customize Your Comp Set

The next step is to hand-pick the properties that you’d like to include in your comp set. 

Sort the columns by distance, occupancy, ADR, revenue, and match score to find the competitors you’re most interested in.

Need more information on a specific property? Simply click its title and you’ll be directed to a deeper dive into that listing where you can swipe through photos, assess its future pricing, see which key amenities it offers, and view its historical performance in terms of occupancy, daily rate, and revenue.

Pro Tip: The larger the comp set, the better the data. While you only need 5 properties to save a comp set, we recommend including at least 20 properties. A large, diversified sample size will help minimize any erratic outliers and provide spot-on analytics.

Another powerful way to optimize your comp set is by using filters. Click the “Filters” button towards the top right to prompt the pop-up.

Here you’ll be able to fine-tune your comp set by creating filters for:

• Bedroom count
• Bathroom count 
• Number of guests accommodated
• Min and max distance
• Host rating
• Number of reviews
• Amenities included or excluded

For best results, choose your filters wisely to make sure the resulting comp set options are as similar as possible to your property. There’s no use comparing your 1-bedroom loft for solo travelers and couples with a 6-bedroom house marketed for families. Additionally, note that excluding amenities is just as important as including them. For example, if you don’t allow pets in your rental, your comp set should consist of properties that also don’t allow pets.

Once you’re done applying filters and finalizing your comp set, click “Save Comp Set” in the bottom right. 

Keep in mind that:

• You can analyze subsets within your comp set by checking or unchecking properties in the far right column by the listing name. The Comp Set Metrics banner at the top of the page will synthesize performance data for selected listings only.
• Data refreshes daily, so check back frequently to make tweaks.
• Our suggested comps include both professionally and privately managed properties.

Step 4. Compare Key Performance Metrics Against Your Comp Set

Once you’ve created your STR comp set, head back to your Host Tools dashboard and click on “Pacing Data.” 

On this page, you’ll see three Key Performance Metrics and a Performance Score that help gauge the health of your property’s future performance. For each radial bar chart described and pictured at the top of the page below, the dark blue bar represents your property and the light blue bar represents your competition.

• Performance Score: This 1-100 score reflects how well-optimized your future bookings are against your comp set. It combines future booked rates, occupancy, and booking lead-time to help you forecast RevPAR against competitors.
• Future Occupancy: How many nights is your property booked over the next 6 months — and how does that compare to the average of your comp set? Future Occupancy measures the difference.
• Booked Rate: Are your listings getting booked at higher or lower rates than those of your competitors? Booked Rate shows the percentage difference in ADR between your property and your comp set average.
• Lead Time: Do you tend to pick up last-minute reservations or get booked months in advance? How does that trend compare to your competitors? Lead Time shows the number of days between when a guest makes a reservation and when they check-in.

Step 5. View Pacing Data

From the Pacing Data page, you can also closely examine pacing for your unique comp set. Pacing is a category of analytics that looks at projected performance

For all of the graphs on the Pacing Data page, you can choose to select 30, 60, or 180 days as the performance timeframe from the drop-down menu below each graph title.

The charts on this page will help you analyze the following:

Future Demand

The first chart on the Pacing Data page allows you to hover over any date in the future and:

• Analyze your competition’s median booked rate
• See how many listings are booked
• Check occupancy rates for that day

Rates

Get a pulse on how your property’s rates compare to competitors. Compare your rates with average market rates, your comp set’s average rates, and Smart Rates™, which are AirDNA’s custom recommended rates for your listing.  

You can also assess whether your listing’s pricing is in line with what people are willing to pay. The second rate chart displays your rate compared to available listings in your comp set, booked listings in your comp set, and last year’s average rates.

Booking Trends

Get a sense for how far in advance guests are booking. Booking lead time is the period of time between when a guest makes a reservation and the actual check-in date. Booking lead time can vary over the course of the year due to normal seasonality, annually recurring events, or special one-time city-wide celebrations, for instance.

We categorize booking lead time into 3 categories: within the last 7 days, last 30 days, last 60 days, and all time.  ‘All time’ is the total number of bookings for that date thus far, and includes bookings that were made more than 60 days in advance. In the example below, you can see that June 25th has 31 bookings so far. Bookings in the last 7-60 days account for 28 of those reservations. 

Analyzing booking lead time can help you make smart pricing decisions. For example, knowing that bookings spike right after an event is announced and then again right before the event might help a savvy host maintain a higher rate during a midway lull. A host without access to booking lead time insights might panic and drop their rate, losing out on a last-minute booking at a higher price.

Leverage Your Competition

Navigating the competitive landscape of short-term rentals doesn't have to be a solo expedition. In fact, treating it as such might mean missing out on crucial opportunities for growth and optimization. Think of your competitors not as adversaries but as unwitting mentors. By carefully observing and analyzing their successes and missteps through custom comp sets, you can allow them to do the heavy lifting of market experimentation for you.

This approach transforms the traditionally antagonistic view of competition. Instead of tirelessly trying to outpace your competitors, you can let them test the waters on various strategies, saving you the risks and resources. Whether it's tweaking pricing, adding amenities, or adjusting marketing techniques, your competitors' experiences provide a valuable blueprint.