How Wheelhouse dynamically prices events hyper-locally like the Nashville CMA Fest

Wheelhouse’s recent pricing model updates have made recommendations more robust for dates far into the future. This allows hosts and property managers to earn more by getting better rates for the periods where demand is peaking in their particular market.

However, Wheelhouse gets even more personalized within a market, examining a market neighborhood by neighborhood to see which areas are attracting the most attention for those particularly high-demand periods.

Every market has neighborhoods which are generally more popular for hosts to get bookings at higher rates. Whether it’s…

• Traditional downtown areas for major concerts and trade fairs.
• Main attraction areas designed for tourists and visitors.
• Popular neighborhoods on the rise.

Wheelhouse personalizes prices in particular neighborhoods based on the local demand we’re seeing in those areas and generates recommendations based on a combination of local occupancy rates and listing prices in those areas, day-by-day. If the booking pace in a particular area starts increasing, so will our pricing recommendations for those days.

Here’s an example of how Wheelhouse prices a specific event and how our pricing model adapts to these shifts in demand.

The CMA Music Festival was held this past summer in Nashville from June 7 to 10, drawing several hundred country artists and celebrities to the Music City. Nearly 100,000 country music fans end up attending each year, bringing tons of potential vacation rental guests from out-of-town into Nashville.

Below is a day-by-day snapshot of what prices look like for listings vs. the market average in the city of Nashville. The listings with higher prices are shaded blue, lower prices are shaded red, and prices hovering around the average are stuck in grey. The CMA Fest activities are congregated within the downtown Nashville region, with main events taking place around the Nissan Stadium and Music City Center (which you can see right in the center of the image).

In particular, you can see the impact of prices becoming more pronounced the closer you get to downtown Nashville (where you see the most dramatic changes). Before the CMA Fest, on June 5, most listings are closely aligned to market averages, with demand not sharp enough to impact pricing recommendations.

As we reach the start of the CMA Fest, prices begin to significantly adjust to demand in the regions surrounding Nissan Stadium and Music City Center on Wednesday, June 6. They become particularly pronounced on Friday, June 8, when guests are generally reserving at the highest rates for weekend dates.

Hosts should recognize that location plays a big part in how demand correlates to booking prices. Wheelhouse demand spikes are hyper-localized to the specific regions in question where demand is actually pushing upward, since that is where occupancy is making the biggest shifts.

By the end of the weekend (Sunday June 10), demand levels off, and prices revert back to regular averages across the market.

You might notice that at the end of CMA Fest, Wheelhouse doesn’t drop prices uniformly across the board. In the days after the CMA Fest, the Music Row area in the southwest corridor has higher prices compared to the rest of the market. Music Row is the historical district of Nashville and the center of the country music industry, and is on average the most popular area of the city demand-wise.

In other words, Wheelhouse localizes price shifts to the areas within a market where demand is elevated. This behavior occurs not only in the locations in which events are occurring, but also the neighborhoods where demand reaches higher-than-normal levels on a day-to-day basis.

For those who’d like an alternate view of this pricing progression, here is an animated time-lapse of how the prices adjust over time relative to the market averages.

Wheelhouse is always making the most optimal, hyperlocal decisions for a host to maximize their chances at an optimal booking rather than making universal changes across the market in the hopes of securing a high booking. Every pricing decision is made with the best interests of you — the host — in mind.

If you have any feedback about these latest Wheelhouse Pricing Engine updates, please let us know! Reach out to us at hello@usewheelhouse.com or contact us via our chat icon on our site in the bottom-right corner.

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