Hi! Thank you so much for the information you have posted, I'm learning a great deal and it is helping me to work through some difficulties we are facing with our listing.
This year we decided to review our pricing and compare it to similiar properties close by to see how we compared. With the cost of business increasing every year, we wanted to become knowledgeable with market
trends and to have a better grasp on the business. Once we did a complete review we learned
that our listing was one of the lowest priced properties in the area, if not the lowest priced property. We decided to increase our rates for the 2023 year. Our listing has done well in recent years, and we felt like a price increase was needed to cover the rising cost of expenses.
That was three months ago. Since we increased our rates back at the beginning of October 2022 we have not received any bookings. At the same time of the rate increase for this year, we also opted for Instant Booking. At this point, we are not sure exactly what is going on, but after reading this thread, our problems may be coming from the rate increase. We have been worried that maybe Instant Book has not been working properly. We typically are receiving communication from our listing if not everyday, every two to three days someone is always wanting to rent and it usually books up completely from May to September so it has been really concerning these last three months with no bookings, no phone calls or texts or emails.
Maybe we need to look at our rates again and make some changes, I have not problem going back to the rates we had before the increase. Our goals are to rent our property as much as we can, so if we can do that at the lower rate that is good with us. Our listing is a beach cottage and we do not live there, so it is vacation rental property, we would love to have it rented everyday of the year. We do schedule some times during the year when we vacation there, but we would like to rent it as much as possible. Thank you all again for the knowledge! I'm really interested in what others have to say, so please if you have any thoughts please post!