How We Helped a Leading Rental Management Company Increase Revenue and Occupancy Through Custom Data-Driven Software

LocalVR, a full-service rental management company, oversees hundreds of short term rentals across the country. As they grew, they began outpacing their systems and needed to search for a new technology solution to match their ambitions. As the short term rental space became more crowded, they knew leveraging custom-built technology was the answer to remaining competitive.

LocalVR approached us to help them modernize their property management systems. With our help, LocalVR became one of the premier property managers across several markets including Breckenridge, Park City, Lake Tahoe, Vail, Telluride, Aspen, and Chicago. They helped their clients increase occupancy and revenue all while automating their property management and financial reporting.

Here’s how we helped them achieve their goals:

We built a data-driven dynamic pricing model, increasing revenue by nearly 25 percent

LocalVR struggled with their strategy to find the optimal daily price for hundreds of properties across a calendar year. Their existing software did not allow them to implement customized or market-based pricing, thus leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

1. We set up a data feed to analyze live data sets across their markets that determined an optimal daily price for every single property on the platform. This allowed LocalVR to compare and adjust rates on a daily basis across the entire market and for the next 365 days to ensure they remain price-competitive.
2. We created a dynamic pricing model to account for daily adjustments to supply and demand. This gave LocalVR more control over how conservative or aggressive they wanted to be with their prices for each property.
3. We update pricing on multiple booking platforms for 365 days all at once, every single day. We eliminated the frequent headaches of manually setting prices and adjusting rates across their hundreds of properties. With automation, LocalVR can determine the strategy and never worry about the daily manual hours required to adjust their rates. We integrated directly with Guesty, Rentals United, Airbnb, HomeAway, and Booking.com among other platforms.

We increased occupancy by implementing smart and flexible booking rules

Increasing occupancy is a goal for any short term real estate owner, but is really difficult to monitor across a large portfolio of properties. Inevitably, the bottom performers start feeling left behind.

Flexible, personalized configuration — We put the power back into LocalVR’s hands by letting them configure their own dynamic rules. Each property can be configured to a different pricing and availability strategy.

Dynamic booking windows — Other software solutions allow owners to set static minimum stays across their entire calendar. We changed that by implementing several new features, all customizable by LocalVR, including the following:

• Dynamic availability depending on the season and holiday schedule. LocalVR can require higher minimum night stays for in demand dates, and allow one night stays over slower seasons.
• Rules to dynamically modify minimum nights as dates approach. If LocalVR could not secure a 5-night stay over Christmas break, their tool now allows them to reduce those restrictions to ensure occupancy still remains high.
• Adjustable “gap rules” to allow LocalVR to sell nights they wouldn’t normally sell. Even if a range of dates has a 5-night minimum, and two reservations have a gap of 3 nights in between, our tool recognizes the inefficiency and assigns a 3-night minimum accordingly. Yay for back-to-back bookings!

We automated customized financials and accounting

If you’ve ever tried to produce a monthly financial report for a single property, you know how difficult it is. Now, imagine managing hundreds of properties and clients alongside thousands of reservations, adjustments, property expenses, and refunds. Simply put, a simple accounting software for Property Managers does not exist.

LocalVR’s finance team handles this manually, which causes quite a bit of inconsistency. Here’s how we made the process easier for them:

• Increased accuracy — Previous reports were consistently inaccurate due to the nature of up to 20 reservations each month for each property with several listings across several different platforms with different commissions, sales tax, and payout rules. We streamlined this process and built safety checks along the way to ensure the accuracy of every single reservation.
• Reduced hundreds of spreadsheets to one single click — The finance team was producing each accounting report individually and manually. Our engine instantly generates and emails reports for any month and any owner with a single click of a button. We saved hundreds of hours and a lot of Tylenol.
• Automated the distribution of payments monthly — As part of the streamlined generation of reports, the system automatically sends monthly ACH payouts to each owner. We used Stripe Connect to facilitate secure and reliable payouts with less development effort. Reducing banking pains and delays, allowing owners to receive their money sooner!

In the end, we took a traditional rental management company and empowered them with modern tools to compete with the emerging tech players in the market. We continue to help them grow their tools with our strong engineering team.

If you enjoyed this case study and you’re looking for a product development agency that can help you the same way we helped LocalVR, feel free to reach out.

Tech Stack

• Stripe Connect
• Docker & Kubernetes on Digital Ocean
• Guesty
• Vercel
• NextJS
• Django
• Python
• React
• TypeScript
• Postmark
• Sentry