Instant Software is pleased to present the vacation rental industry’s first reliable measurement of year-to-year trends.
These reports leverage Instant Software’s status as the provider of reservation software to almost half of the nation’s rental managers.
ISI statistics generate the only reports that accurately measure whether:
- Vacationers are renting more or fewer rental homes (# reservations);
- People are taking longer/shorter vacations (average length of stay); and
- Travelers are paying more/less for a home (average daily rate):
Why You Can Rely on Instant Software Research Reports
Vacation rental home trends are difficult to measure because the industry is fragmented and varies widely from one geographic area to another. While other industry statistics have been published, those are based on small samples and/or focus on just some of the nation’s vacation destinations.
Instant Software’s database embraces all major vacation destinations and is deep enough to maintain reliability after culling out data that commonly distorts specific reports, e.g.
- New clients who do not contribute data over the full term of the reporting period;
- Companies that combine short-term and long-term (residential) rentals;
- Data from clients switching software that omits or changes booking dates;
ISI’s data is sufficiently deep to allow us to measure vacation rentals on two dimensions:
Overall volume: in the aggregate our clients manage the core of the nation’s vacation rental homes. Changes in total bookings, total revenue and total nights stayed are representative of the industry.
“Veteran” Homeowner Perspective: the vacation rental industry is unique in that the inventory is owned by individuals who can move it to another manager or try rent-by-owner when they are unhappy. When the economy was healthy, it was common for management company numbers to be up in double digits (from new growth) while their “veteran” homeowners experienced losses.
Instant Resource Center’s database is deep enough that we can isolate the experience of “Vet” homes who have been in rental programs during the years being compared. This provides a true measure of how managers’ bread-and-butter homeowners (investors) are faring.