Everbooked debuts new comparative list tool for Airbnb

Everbooked is a provider of pricing and market intelligence for Airbnb hosts

For years, almost all of the travel industry has lived online. You can buy your hotel room and airline tickets on Expedia, checkin for your flight on your mobile phone, and call a cab via an app. Every travel provider watches what the others are doing, and they all price their services competitively.

The short-term rental space, however, has been slower to adapt, for a variety of reasons. With the rise of sites like Airbnb and HomeAway, though, the space is starting to finally enter the 21st century.

A new startup called Everbooked wants toprovide the same type of pricing intelligence that airlines and hotels use, but bring it to the Airbnb market. The company launched a nightly pricing service for Airbnb hosts last November, and on Tuesday is announcing a ‘comp tool’, whichwill make it even easier for those hosts to see how they are faring against others in the same area.

The company's new comparable listings research tool will help Airbnb hosts, and potential hosts, understand their local market. All the host has to do is enter their Airbnb URL and hit 'Compare'. That will bring up the top ten comps, along with pricing recommendations. Users will be able to see the top twenty comps if they register for a free Everbooked account.

Details include the competitor’s average yearly price, their low and high prices from the last year, their forward looking 30 day and 90 day occupancy, and even the amount of monthly revenue that Everbooked estimates they make.

The comps are displayed in list form, with closest matches first, and as geo-pins on a map. Links are also provided for each comparable property.

While all of this information is currently available on Airbnb, David Ordal, founder and CEO of Everbooked, told me, it's extremely hard to aggregate.

"Finding this information on Airbnb would be a really manual process. You would be looking at a list of 1,000 rentals, and even if you put filters in, they’renot all good rentals. There's a lot of junk on Airbnb. Some people are setting too high a price, or not really wanting to list their place, because it's not as a full time thing for them," he said.

"Our tool starts by removing the ones that are junk. We then look at those that remain, and find the best matches for your specific listing. And we include yearly low and high prices, the estimated monthly revenue, and occupancy for each."

Everbooked pulls in this data off of Airbnb every single day, archives it and uses it to keep track of Airbnb properties.

"It's a ton of work to get much of that data. With this tool, you put the URL in, hit ‘Compare’, and it does the math for you and gives you a recommendation," said Ordal.

Access to the tool is free and is available in the top 22 largest Airbnb markets in the US, including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

This is Everbooked's second tool that it is offering; it previously launched a nightly dynamic pricing tool which looks at local events, nightly occupancy at other local Airbnbs and hotels, seasonal travel patterns and many other factors to determine how a rental listing should be priced.

"There are all of these industries that use this type of yield management technology, to price based on demand, for different customers at different times," said Ordal.

While hotels and airlines have been doing this for the last 30 years, the vacation rental space has been slow to adapt. In fact, as recently as 2009, only 70% of vacation rental properties were using an online booking system.

"Only recently has the vacation rental industry, with the rise of Airbnb and HomeAway/VRBO, been able to establish itself online. That gives us the data visibility so we can do a lot of these pricing and comp calculations." said Ordal.

"A big reason for that is the fragmentation of industry. You have much smaller players, who are not always as technically savvy. It takes a significant amount of money to run an airline, but you can start own vacation rental property or business, and manage it yourself. It's much easier to get into this business, so you, consequently, have varying levels of technical sophistication and distribution of rates and prices."

Having been launched in August of 2014, Everbooked is still a very young company, but it is already having an impact on the space. Several hundred people are actively using its nightly pricing service, and it has seen as much as a 40% revenue increase for its hosts. Early interest in the comps tool has also been strong.

“We’ve shown the beta to a few of our customers, and they’re already telling their friends and asking if they can give them access," said Ordal.

Everbooked currently works with Airbnb, but it is looking to expand far beyond just that one platform, to others including HomeAway and Flipkey.

"We also want to expnd our footprint, so we can collect data on these listings all over the country. We have the most US coverage of our competitors, with 22 major metro areas, but that doesn’t cover entire U.S., let alone rest of the world. We want everybody to be able to use it," said Ordal.

"We're really trying to bring pricing and analytics to this space, and we will consider ourselves successful if we can help a lot of these vacation rentals and Airbnb owners gain the same leg up that airlines and hotels have had for years. We want to provide these services, and that intelligence, for those that haven't had the benefit," said Ordal.

The Oakland-based company has previously raised a small round of funding, and is currently looking at whether to raise a larger angel round.