All Forum Posts by: Ken Boone

 I do the same thing John does. We have projectors in theater rooms and pool rooms and guests have asked on a few occasions if they will have access to watch certain sports games on TV before booking so we provide Xfinity with local channels. You only need to pay for one TV hookup with Xfinity (and it doesn't even have to be connected) in order to stream their Xfinity channel on all your Roku TVs/devices.

I also think having local channels is very helpful when we have emergency situations, we seem to get fires quite a bit in the Smokys and it's nice being able to tell guests, watch this channel for updates kind of thing.

It has gotten much pricier over the years though to do this.

That is very positive. Congrats on the upticks. What does you occupancy look like right now for May and June, larger cabins va smaller cabins?

That is interesting because I am seeing the exact opposite. VRBO is massively losing ground in my market and this was acknowledged to me by my VRBO account manager as well. 

I think the whole thing between both platform is drastically different for each property and largely unexplainable ;)

I have 4 STRs in the Pigeon Forge area market. We have one in the PF city limits, two just outside the city limits (Sevierville) and the 4th in Wears Valley.

When we started several years ago, we were 80/20 across the first 3 cabins VRBO to AirBnb. We much preferred dealing with VRBO for sure. When we bought the Wears Valley cabin, the previous owners told us they only get bookings on AirBnb. When we setup our listing, sure as anything we couldn't get a VRBO booking on that property for 6 months. Several phone calls with VRBO basically went like this: "Well you need to get more bookings to rank higher and be shown in the listings" my resposne "ok but if you don't show me in the listings how am I going to get more bookings?" and we would go back and forth.

We finally got some VRBO bookings on that property after we let several friends stay there very cheap just to get some reviews and bookings on the VRBO side. It took major effort to get VRBO bookings on that property for some reason. VRBO has never been the dominate platform for this particular cabin.

Things have changed in the last 18 months rather drastically across all my properties. VRBO bookings have gone down overall across the board and whereas in times past it was 80/20 VRBO, now only one property has more VRBO bookings than AirBnb and it is nowhere near an 80/20, it is closer to 55/45.

Speaking with my VRBO account manager, they acknowledged that HomeAway has not been advertising in my market like they need to be and AirBnb has dominated in that market and they recognize they need to fix that.

The other thing that has changed in my situation is that I have been focused on growing direct bookings through my website. I just checked and for 2025 my direct bookings represent the following percentage of bookings across my 4 cabins: 5%, 18%, 22%, and 25%. I was extremely happy to realize those numbers after my efforts. It does mean less available time open on VRBO and that could play into the shift as well with lower VRBO bookings.

One last thought, on the cabin that is doing 5% direct bookings, that is in a cabin resort neighborhood. My buddy owns the cabin rest next to me. Same layout, both are indoor pool cabins, same sq footage. Slightly different on some amenities but both are loaded. My cabin has 45% of its bookings from VRBO and 45% of its bookings from AirBnb. Again right next door to mine and he can't get a VRBO booking to save his life. He gets zero VRBO bookings. He used to but now nothing. It really makes no sense at all. He has had calls with his account manager and he gets the same conversation I used to get on the other property.

Would never consider that.  

Uggh.. I just checked all my properties and they are still showing up in chronological order. I hope they are just in a testing phase and will receive enough complaints to pull this back.

It does have that unique look, but I would probably get rid of it because it is right in the middle of that space preventing you from using that space better. But if you do get rid of it make sure you know what you plan is for that space. 

@Collin Hays is right on. Price Labs like anything else uses an algorithm to decide on the best price. Of course this all depends on YOU setting the base rate and all the knobs and triggers most appropriately. It's the old adage of garbage in garbage out. It is is going to calculate the expected price based off what you tell it as well as what Price Labs sees in the local market.

I questioned myself moving to price labs after I had been doing this manually for several years. They have to be tweaked on a regular bases and most of the time it is due to it throwing out some crazy high ridiculous prices for some dates. Having said that, this is ultimately why I keep pricelabs, it gives me a structure to easily adjust prices via seasonality which I did not have before, it also continues my prices beyond the 12 month window - this helps if I forget to adjust future pricing and then the platform goes back to my default base rate kind of thing.

Having said that I am no master or expert of PriceLabs. 

You can use Canva as well. Very easy to make a nice looking guestbook.

Yes I think you are way high if you want it to sell in this market. Based on what you stated initially, your income from the property is 85k. From a 10x perspective that puts your price around 850k sale price. But based on the location and the market I am thinking that is probably still too high. You are competing with Cosby, Sevierville, PF, Gatlinburg.  And right now most stuff is not selling great in those locations either - even when their prices are close to reasonable.