Potential earnings feature

[Pascal449]

The following link: www.airbnb.com/host/homes used to display the average monthly earnings for a selected town, after we'd entered the type of place listed (whole place or private room) and the number of guests. It was a very useful tool to benchmark towns, for hosts who wish to relocate some place else in the country or overseas, such as I will in a few months' time. Sadly, that function has now disappeared, does anyone have an idea if that was a choice made by airbnb in light of the current corona situation, or just a problem with the site?

[Anonymous]

@Pascal449   I don't have any insight into the behind-the-scenes stuff with Airbnb, but from my own experience and research, it's very clear that they use a lot of imaginary numbers in the features they use for behavior modification. I don't think it was ever a good idea to trust the figures that Airbnb presented, considering how much they radically contradicted themselves when comparing things like the stats they used for Pricing Tips to the ones they presented for Potential Earnings.

You might want to check out sites like AIRDNA , which harvest externally available data to analyze pricing and earning trends at local level. Just be aware that these programs can't  distinguish between blocked dates and booked dates, so their occupancy statistics are often wildly inaccurate. What they're generally good for is identifying the impact of seasonality and median price for a listing type in a given location.

[Pascal449]

Thanks Andrew, that's useful info! I'll check out AIRDNA for ballparl figures on the places I'm looking at relocating to, cheers!

[Pascal449]

ballpark, even 🙂