Are We in a Travel Recession? AirDNA’s Jamie Lane Decodes the 2025 Market

Alex Husner  
Welcome to Alex nanny, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we've got Jamie Lane from air DNA on the show Chief Economist. Jamie, so good to see you today.

Jamie Lane  
Yeah. Thank you guys so much for having me. I've been listening. I feel like for years this podcast is one of my favorite ones, and so excited to finally be here as a guest. Oh

Annie Holcombe  
gosh, it feels like a long time coming. And I feel like we talk to you a lot because we see you at shows, and you're always presenting things. And I know I reach out to you a lot for some insight. We were just talking off camera how your your title's chief economist, and so everything with the economy is up in question. So I would imagine that you are a hot commodity at gatherings with friends, even though you're like a VR person. This is you still you, you look at the numbers that affect everything, right?

Jamie Lane  
Yeah. I mean, we're recording on a Friday. Today was jobs Friday jobs numbers came out. So I'm still, like, digging into all the other sort of economic figures outside of our industry too, because it's, it's so important for like, where the industry is going to help the economy and our consumers, our guests, still going to be booking and coming up this summer. So yeah, there's so much going on right now, absolutely. Well,

Annie Holcombe  
why don't we, before we get started, just kind of give a little background on you. I feel like people know you, but maybe just a little background for those that don't, yeah.

Jamie Lane  
So I've been an economist for the past 15 years. I spent 10 years in the hotel industry, so at a company called PKF hospitality research, which was then acquired by CBRE. And my job was to predict the future of hotel demand, hotel revenues, hotel ADRs at a market and country level, so for the United States. And then at the end of my time at CBRE, I was managing a team of nine economists covering all of the commercial real estate industry. So Office, industrial, multi family, retail and hotels, I realized I really missed the hospitality industry getting to do it every day. So I had been a customer of air DNA at that point for five years. This was in 2020 the founder reached out to me and was like, Hey, Jamie, we'd love for you to come on full time, and we made it work. So now I've been at Air DNA for five years, and it's really my job to dig into the data help sort of explain what we're seeing in the data, how the industry is trending, trending, what's doing well, not what's not doing well, how to think about revenue management going forward, and then really help all the sort of players in the industry figure out how to plan for the days, weeks, months, years ahead. And it's been, it's been a ton of fun being part of the vacation rental industry.

Alex Husner  
I imagine, you know, in your line of work, these last couple years must have just been fascinating too, right? Of like, how much you can predict and how much is how close you get. Or sometimes, you know, obviously there's some things we just we can't totally predict. I mean, you don't have a complete crystal ball, but just out of curiosity and like, what, what has been the biggest surprise to you, maybe in the last couple years of just, you know, nationwide how SCR trends have been after COVID.

Jamie Lane  
I joined at the end of 2020 by the first quarter of 2021 I was putting my first models together to start forecasting industry. And so I presented it internally. I was like, guys, we're at the peak, and things are going down from here. And they're like, Jamie, like your first industry forecast? Yeah, is doom and gloom. I'm like, Guys, this is we're at occupancy levels that the industry has never seen. Like we've seen this total collapse in supply. It's gone down 20% during COVID like things are gonna get better in terms of supply growth, like, the demand is going to not going to keep up, and we're going to see occupancy declines. And they're like, Jamie, we trust you. But like, this is really go out in a limb here, because, like, everyone's saying like that this is the best, and that things are only going to get better. And and it was sort of coming in with a contrarian view, and ended up being right. And we all saw that 2021, ended up being the peak. And like, looking back on it, like it was, and it has been a wild ride, we saw this really compressed cycle, like, typically economic cycles are, like, 10 years long for and where you go from the trough and you grow, you get peak occupancies like, you're able to grow rates like, and then you go through a down cycle like, and we've seen that compressed into the past four years. It's been it's been wild to see in terms of industry performance and sort of how much impact it's had on operators, how much impact it's had on tech companies in the space, how much really impact it's had on people trying to invest in the space of just and usually the best predictor of the future is what happened like in the prior year. But that has not been the case over the past couple of years. You really have to have a forward view on. Where the industry is going to really make correct decisions in this sort of environment,

Annie Holcombe  
it's been crazy. And so I wanted to ask you, like, on that, like, this year, I think that there was a lot of hope. I mean, there's hope whenever a new administration comes in, and there would be this administration was kind of deemed, like, very pro business and, you know, growth and that kind of thing. And just kind of some of the things that have happened in the last, you know, 90 days or so have been really kind of eye opening to people in that nobody could really tell where we were going. So anybody's forecast? I was reading about all the companies that just said, You know what, we just have to throw a forecast out and kind of wait and see what happens. So from your perspective, I mean, what do you, what do you? What are you guiding people to do? Is it really just a wait and see or just kind of hold the line? I mean, what is your recommendation for people right now, given the kind of, I guess, volatility, because it's not just us, it's a kind of a global impact,

Jamie Lane  
yeah, so we came into this year with, and I like to think about it in sort of probabilities, and we came into this year with a profitability recession of about 15% and that's about on average. Like recession happens every seven to eight years. You sort of divide that out. It's about 15% it's just the normal probability recession right now we're probably about 50 or 60% like the uncertainty that sort of evolved over the past three months has been astonishing. So there's different indices that I sort of track, that sort of measure uncertainty the economy. There's forecasters that I sort of track on terms of and what their probability of recession, what their baseline outlook is and essentially most out there have ratcheted up the probability of recession. And there's sort of clear factors out there of like with all this talk about tariffs, with all this talk about sort of changing economic environment, sort of pull back on government spending. It really has a decreased people to build ability to plan. And when you can't plan, a lot of times, you just pause, or you start to pull back. And that's what we've seen a ton of businesses and even consumers out there doing, is, you know what? I'm just going to pause. I'm going to wait to see how things plan out. And a lot of aspects of the economy are really built on growth, and if you don't see people spending, if you don't see them sort of making forward purchases, then and you're going to start seeing and different aspects of our economy start to pull in a recession. We just listened to all the airlines and report earnings about two weeks ago, and they called it. They're like, we are in a travel recession for an aspect of our business. And the aspect of the business that they called out was their sort of main cabin leisure travelers. So those travelers are on the lower end of the income spectrum that are traveling domestically. They're like, we're seeing that down five to 10% and that is and for me, sitting in my seat of like, and being a travel economist and sort of trying to interpret what we're seeing happening in the overall economy, and what that's doing in terms of impacting travel like the canary in the coal mine, for me, is what's happening on airlines. Because if you think of the travel and sort of purchase journey, people always start with their flight, then they book accommodation, and then they book sort of experiences. So the fact that we started to hear from the airlines that they're seeing some real softness in bookings. Now you fast forward two to three weeks. Me looking at our data, like we're looking at sort summer forward booking trends, like we're clearly seeing occupancy pacing down about three to 4% in the budget and economy type rentals out there, and it's really across the board from vacation rental markets to urban markets, much more so though, in the urban markets that we're seeing the softness than right now in the vacation rental markets. But I'm on the lower income, on the lower end of the spectrum for listings like we're clearly seeing some weakness right now.

Alex Husner  
That's interesting. Yeah, I remember seeing a post after your presentation at VR nation last week that you talked about how you were saying that the hotels are still just really killing it in the urban markets over the STRS. But I'm interested in that, because we had these gals from roar in New York City on our show last summer, right when the regulations came down on the city. But are is that looking at, is, are they so much, so much further ahead because of the cities where there are not short term rentals anymore? Or, I mean, is that, like, what, what's happened there? Like, why would people go back to hotels? Do you think?

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, so, when we look at the number. Of nights being stayed in short term rentals in urban areas, we are now below the levels that we saw in 2018

Alex Husner  
almost back because of the regulations, though you think, because they're not a bit a big

Jamie Lane  
part of it is regulation. So there's just been an inability to grow supply in some of these urban corridors, but also many of the business models are really popular for short term rentals in urban areas. So think like rental arbitrage, most of those companies have really gone away, and the ones that are still around, and there's some great examples of Romy Saunders still and in the game, but they've really changed the model from rental arbitrage to more management, and with the management fees, not being able to go and take sort of big chunks of buildings without and it just becomes harder to grow supply. It becomes harder to maintain supply. And yeah, you combine that with regulation, and it's it's really been a tough operating environment, and then that's sort of absent of what's happening on the hotel side and in hotels right now. If you want to finance a new hotel investment, if you're not in some of the largest, like 25 markets, using a Hilton or Marriott sort of branded hotel. No one's going to be financing that new construction. So we're only seeing Overall, about half a percent overall increase in supply in the hotel industry, but that's like entirely concentrated in the urban markets. So supply in the urban markets growing two and a half 3% supply in urban markets for short term rentals was actually down last year. So we're just seeing hotels continue to take back share, and that's all the while every other location, type sort of outside of the urban core, short term rentals are dominating. It's just and there's this sort of idiosyncratic thing than the urban areas where hotels are really just doing well in terms of both getting new regulation enacted that really limits short term rental growth and then able to grow overall inventory.

Alex Husner  
Do you aggregate timeshare data as well?

Jamie Lane  
No, that's one of the industries that I don't have much visibility. I'm not sure there's a ton of overall visibility out there.

Alex Husner  
Yeah, yeah. I it would be fascinating. Oh, because I, you know, in a lot of these destinations, like we said, there's not new properties being built, but, you know, the flags, yes, but in Myrtle Beach market, most of the new properties, they are their timeshare properties, and they're gorgeous, you know, I mean, and they're a lot of people are staying at them, and it's just, you know, in my experience working with the CVB and the Chamber of Commerce, we never could figure it out, either. But you know, when we're all saying it's slow on an April weekend, but you go downtown and the whole beach is packed Well, I mean, there's a lot of people that they've got coming in on these mini vacs that they're trying to sell them timeshare tours. So I don't know how that compares. But, I mean, it would be fascinating to know. And and a lot of the time timeshare, Vacation Club companies, they're renting that inventory as a short term rental Anyways, on vacation rental OTAs, or on regular hotel OTAs. I mean, they're distributing like we do, but for some reason, they've just got their own kind of gate there I can't get behind. Yeah,

Jamie Lane  
and that's I do have ways of sort of tracking them if they're on the OTAs. So I typically, we typically, sort of pull them out of our core database, because they're not sort of traditional vacation rentals, but we do sort of track them separately the overall inventory of timeshare listings that are showing up on the OTAs, similar to hotels that list on Airbnb, verbo booking.com and we're tracking them. We sort of remove them from the overall inventory that we sort of report on, but they're and clearly like and even on the latest Airbnb earnings call, like Brian Chesky sort of called out like, we don't have enough urban inventory. We see so many eyeballs still coming to our site, like they're going to have to figure out how to get more sort of hotel inventory to sort of and sort of satisfy guests that are coming to the platform, if not, people are going to stop coming. So I do suspect that you'll actually see in the next either a few months to a couple years, and Airbnb actually surfacing more hotel options on their site, especially in areas where they don't have they've been regulated out or they don't have a lot of inventory. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
we've been, I know at next packs, we've been seeing quite a bit of our hotel partners actually list their suites and their larger configuration of rooms on the traditional VR and that's been going on for a while. I think, I think, I think, but now it's more widely accepted, like the brands aren't as there's not as much stigma on doing it that way, as opposed to being on the hotel site. But had a question related to regulations and regulatory Is that something that you. Are constantly tracking. So you know when something is implemented, how that is going to potentially impact a market, so you can forecast it for future.

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, for the markets that we forecast, and we forecast, like the 50 largest sort of vacation rental markets in the United States, we're keeping an eye on regulation, sort of trying to incorporate that, both historically, of like, if a new regulation comes in, being able to track what that impact is and making sure and it's not getting picked up incorrectly in the model. Of like, all right, there's a big supply happening in New York, like, you don't want that get picked up with some other variable and not have the sort of forecast start to work. So you gotta sort of control for those regulations that come in. And then we work very closely with with Verma, with responsibly, with an airb, with verbo, to sort of track regulation as they're being proposed, as they're sort of going through sort of City Council Review, and then ultimately, either shot down or enacted to measure what the impact is going to be, both on the front end and then on the back end, once things have actually been enacted. Gotcha.

Annie Holcombe  
And relative to data of curious, do you guys aggregate or use any like real estate data, like Zillow or any of those sites that have are you using that as well and and, I guess more to that, like, do you use that just as a idea of what the real estate costs versus what they should be able to get on a rental? Or is it helping to forecast? Like, I don't even know, like, what you would actually do with it all, but it seems like it takes you multiple different directions, I guess is what my point is, and what, what specific use is it to you on the front end, and then where do you take it from there? Yeah,

Jamie Lane  
it was one of the biggest questions when we first came in and wanted to start forecasting the industry. Is like, how do we forecast supply? It's like, when you're forecasting hotels, you get a construction pipeline. We sort of know when something's sort of in planning, final planning, when it goes under construction and it's scheduled to open and like, essentially, just put in those dates, and you got to forecast the supply. So we had to be a lot more thoughtful in how to do it for short term rentals. And it really comes into All right, what do we think is predictive of new supply? And it's really that ratio of how much you can earn relative to how much it costs to actually buy that asset. So we're looking at home values relative to average annual revenue potential, and tracking that sort of ratio of okay, if you had invested at this time, you generate this much profit for adding a new short term rental in the market, versus if you invest at this time. And what we saw during the pandemic was essentially like interest rates were low, home values were still relatively low, and revenues were going through the roof. So that, to us, sort of predicted we were about to see a big supply boom, and that's what subsequently happened. And now you're a period where home values are very elevated. Interest rates are through the roof. We're still close to 7% and rental revenues have come down pretty substantially over the past three years. Like that to us, tells us that supply growth should be pretty muted, and the average sort of mountain market this past month, we saw supply growth of 1.5% you go back three years ago, it was growing at 20% so we found this actually be and using the combination of housing data and short term rental performance data, and then layering on top of that, interest rates has been very predictive of future supply growth for short term rentals, and that's how we sort of marry the data together.

Annie Holcombe  
Florida has to have been fun to predict with our real estate like it is right now,

Jamie Lane  
yeah, then, and throw into that a few hurricanes, like, yeah,

Annie Holcombe  
insurance is a whole, whole other factor. But, yeah, interesting,

Alex Husner  
yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I don't you're not checking directly other spending within a destination, but one thing we, you know, tend to see, when there is a recession or people are pulling back. They're still going to take a vacation. You know, when everybody still wants to have their family vacation, they might not take as many extra trips. Dad might not get to go on the golf trip, or mom on the girls getaway, but they're going to take their family trip. But when they get to a destination, typically, they also pull back on going out to eat or doing attractions. And you know, this sometimes works out good for companies that have larger inventory because they're pooling more people to come together and stay in one place. But has that been what you've seen this year so far too as far as the larger accommodations? Yeah,

Jamie Lane  
and we actually did a big study on this last summer, and I work very closely with a company called str, which is terrible name, given that it's our report, Star Report. Yeah, the Star Report. So, yeah, travel recently, yeah, they tracked the entire hotel industry

Alex Husner  
before STR was even a term, right, right?

Jamie Lane  
So I'm good for. Ends with their SVP of analytics, and sort of, he came to me, and he was like, Jamie, we're seeing this really weird phenomenon in a lot of these sort of leisure destination markets. We're seeing pretty significant demand declines, and we're in this past couple of years, we've been, I wouldn't say, a really strong economic environment, especially on the lower end, where inflation has really been hurting lower income consumers. And is like, what we want to do is look at and can we see these travelers sort of trading out of hotels and into short term rentals. So what we did is we combined all of our data. We really took a really granular view, and it was exactly what you said, Alex. It was that Lauren consumers were trading, maybe they would have been getting two or three hotel rooms. They were then renting larger vacation rentals to sort of spread out that cost and also be able to save costs on all the ancillary expenses that go along with these trips. Where, when we looked at the total room nights being sold in that market, they were staying essentially even. But we're seeing anywhere from 10 to 15% increase in vacation rental demand and a five to 10% decrease in hotel demand, all within the same market at the same periods. So there's clearly evidence of consumers pulling back, but pulling back by sort of changing how they were spending. And that's one of the things I'm watching very closely in the data now is, do we see this sort of Telltale, sort of symptoms of a recession? And that typically comes with consumers trading down, so where you would have stayed, maybe in an upscale luxury property that you rent a mid scale or a budget, like you're going to take that trip, like everyone's going to take their summer travel this summer, but you're going to start looking for ways to save money. The other ways usually see it show up in the data is that people start to take shorter trips, like, maybe you would have booked for seven days, like, Let's go for five or six days instead, because that can save anywhere from 15 20% on the total cost of the trip. So as we look at the data today, we're not seeing that right now. What it looks like is, especially on the lower end, is that people are delaying their bookings for summer travel. And it's not that they're not going to make those bookings. It's just that they haven't made them yet, compared to the amount of bookings that have been made in prior years, and we're still seeing very strong bookings at the upper tier. So upscale luxury properties booking just as strong as they did last year. So that's where we don't see the signs yet of trade down. We don't see the signs yet of sort of booking shorter trips right now, it's like the higher income folks are feeling great, they're booking and then we've just seen a little bit of pause at the lower end of sort of waiting to see how things play out.

Annie Holcombe  
Do you think there's been a lot of conversation about the impact of Canadian travelers? I mean, I think that impacts like Florida in the winter. I mean, like, that's, I think people are looking towards winter time already thinking, you know, how is this going to impact. But in general, in generally speaking, just like, for for this year, how do you think international travel is going to impact? I personally, like, think, like, Okay, well, that just means you people in the US are not going to travel outside, so it kind of goes back to the COVID time frame where they couldn't leave the country, or weren't going to leave the country, so they traveled internally in the drive market and that type of thing. But do you think that there is a larger impact that we haven't recognized yet, of kind of the global implication of everybody's economy right now.

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, and we're definitely seeing the impact. It's really a market by market phenomenon in March, like we clear. Clearly saw it in South Florida markets. We clearly saw it in Hawaii markets, where there was a pullback from Canadian travelers overall, they booked about 15 fewer, 15% fewer nights in March than they did in the year prior, which is on the surface, that's a lot, but only about 2% of demand for US stays comes from Canada. So and it can be significant in those sort of Florida Hawaii markets and the winter, it can be significant for markets like Buffalo Niagara Falls area, the Adirondacks, the Cascade Mountains, sort of all those border areas. During the summer, there are a lot of Canadians sort of come down for summer travel, so we're very much sort of watching that, and those like buffalo market, 12% of demand comes from Canadian travelers. So if you you lose that portion more

Alex Husner  
south. I mean, it's not warm in Buffalo,

Annie Holcombe  
it's. Heard of Canada in the summer, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's

Jamie Lane  
a beautiful area to go in the summer, I wouldn't go

Speaker 1  
there. Definitely wouldn't do the winner. And

Jamie Lane  
then you're, you're also seeing a clear pullback from Western European countries. So German travelers to the US in March was down 30% French travelers like and those type of travelers are typically going to the urban markets. So think Miami, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, not necessarily much in the sort of traditional vacation rental market. So I was just looking at the data prior to VR nation and the market with the least exposure to national travelers. It's like the Ozark, Ozark, Ozark Mountains, Ozark lakes, like Branson, Missouri area, they see less than 1% of demand come from international travelers. Like, I've got a vacation rental up in north Georgia. It's about 2% of demand. Like, any sort of impact from international travelers on those markets is going to be immaterial. But if you're in Orlando,

Annie Holcombe  
I was gonna say, What about Orlando? Yeah, like, that's gotta be a pretty significant number, right?

Jamie Lane  
30% of demand comes from international travelers Orlando. So when we're seeing right now and expected, and I wouldn't put out the window, that we see a decline of anywhere from 15 to 20% this summer from international travelers coming into the US like that is going to be a big factor. And what we know about international guests is they typically come and they stay longer. They have a higher propensity to book short term rentals than hotels because they are staying longer. Uh, they're willing to spend more for that sort of international trip. So yeah, it I think we're, we're just at the sort of tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact that we're going to see from international travelers. Because, as you and we've got the pause for 90 days on tariffs, but I don't expect us to see resolution before we really get through that summer booking window, which is just causing and just the perception of sort of this debate is causing international travelers to pull back.

Alex Husner  
Yeah, and especially after the last couple years, I feel like everybody that I know and I'm friends with on Facebook went to Italy or Greece or somewhere in Europe in the last couple years, including Annie and I, we went to Italy last fall. But that and then, you know, just last year, I feel like cruises. Everybody was going on cruises. I mean, as far as the international travel is concerned, I think, you know, just from what we're hearing, there's when Americans are going over to, you know, Europe and stuff like, there's just a lot of, it's not really, there's been some bad experiences, I guess. So I think that's making people kind of shy away from, is this the year to just stick around home and, you know, go to some of the places that maybe we haven't been in a few years because we've been cruising and going all over the world, which should work out well, I would think, for the drive to destinations, but have you been seeing pickup in drive to this year?

Jamie Lane  
So the problem is, right now, we're seeing international guests not come to the US, and we're still seeing Americans traveling overseas at the sort of same levels, and even a slight uptick than what we've seen in prior years. So, oh, really.

Alex Husner  
Okay, I was wrong. I was thinking that it was like,

Jamie Lane  
so far, we're not seeing sort of a change in us, travel preferences overseas. Now we have, over the past couple weeks, seen the dollar really depreciate relative the euro, which is Europe's been on sale for the past few years, like it's in terms of the exchange rate, and the fact that the dollar has depreciated, that makes it makes that European trip a little bit more expensive, maybe makes you a bit more likely to stay domestic So, and I think that's one of the questions sort of heading into the summer, is, do we see sort of fewer Americans booking oversight overseas trips, as we've seen in the data, and as we've heard from the airlines, when they're reporting they're not seeing any weakness yet in Americans booking trips overseas, and that's showing up in Our data as well. Like European short term rental performance is booming, demand is still growing close to 10% like all the real weakness we see right now is and in the industry is almost entirely focused around us, sort of us bookings and US listing uh, performance.

Annie Holcombe  
So we could talk about all of this data and all of your predictions and all of the economy all day long, but you're here you are with air DNA. So I would love to learn more about what air DNA has going on, maybe some new product lines, developments, things that property managers would be. Team to learn.

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, so one of my favorite things to talk about right now, and it's exciting to talk about, because it's like the biggest complaint that I get from property managers. So talking to property managers like Jamie, they're like, I love your data, but I hate your rentalizer tool. And for those of you that don't know, our rentalizer tools, like our calculator, so like any investor homeowner, can go address, put their address into into their DNA, and it sort of spits out an estimate, and whether it's high or low, like a property manager is going to sort of dispute it. But what we have coming out now is finally the ability to analyze all of those comps going into it and remove comps that aren't actually a good comp for that property. So what we're encourage investors to do, and what we encourage property managers to do, is sort of use that sort of report as an initial conversation to sort of go through those comps. Because what we've been trying to get better and better at is that comp selection process. So what are the homes in that market that are representative of that home that you're looking to buy or that you're looking to list with the property manager? What are the other homes sort of similar to it, that are sort of a good representation of what that home could earn, and then making sure that in all the amenities, the right location, everything sort of aligns with that sort of new property. And if there's one or two that aren't that you can click onto the report, remove them and generate a new number. And so now that becomes a much easier conversation with a property manager of like, oh yeah, I ran your numbers too through the rentalized report. Here's the property that I don't think is good comp. If you click and remove it, that number, like that number actually now lines with what I think you could earn. You can regenerate the report, and then it sort of becomes a conversation piece. And then also, property managers can generate their own reports, sort of with the comps that they think are representative. Print it out and say, here's the air DNA report that I ran for your property. And this reflects on what we think it could earn if it was part of our program. So really excited about that. There's now the ability to save those reports, print them to PDF. And then we're going to be adding some fun stuff on where property managers can add their own branding to the report. It will automatically sort of stamp them with who generated it, so you can know whether someone sort of edited themselves or was sort of system generated. And then we've got some really fun, sort of additional tools and dashboards specifically for vacation rental managers to be able to track their portfolio, their reviews, their ratings, and really dive into how they're performing relative to other property managers in their market. So yeah, lots going on at Air DNA for for vacation managers. Today, it's a

Unknown Speaker  
lot of fun. Yeah, yeah,

Alex Husner  
it definitely is. Do you ever do is there, like, any sort of trying to think of like, you know, as a property manager, you know, the best way to grow inventory is through referrals and working with realtors. I mean, no matter how great a homeowner marketing you have, you know, that's consistently what we see is working the best in these markets. But is there anything, or have you thought of any way that you know the realtors that are using air DNA of like, doing some sort of a partnership where it's like, almost like on Zillow, when you're looking at a house and like, here's some realtors that could help you, but for them, like, this is what we think it should do. But if you really want to be sure, here are some local rental managers like, you could check with

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, yeah. We actually have that program on air DNA with referrals for property managers and referrals for real estate agents. So if you're looking at air DNA, we actually now have every single home in the MLS on our platform. So just like if you're going on Zillow, you can go on air DNA and see every single home available for sale. And we've run each home through our rental calculator to show what we think it could earn as a short term rental. And then you see on that page too, like who the real estate agent is that's sort of selling that property. And it makes it a great way to be able to monitor your market, what homes are coming for sale, which ones seem like they could be good short term rentals. So if you're a vacation rental manager, like, be able to go into there. Like, here are the top 15 homes for sale in my sub market right now. Here's who listen who's listening them. Like, let me proactively reach out to them of like. And these do look like, they'd be great as rentals in my market, and let me go ahead and share with them what I think it could earn relative to their DNA estimate. And that can be, can be a great proactive way to start growing your referral network. Hmm.

Alex Husner  
But there's no like, direct connection for real estate agents or the general public to see potential property managers for them.

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, there is. So if you're on that page, you can actually click like, connect. We with the property manager, and we work with a lot of sort of local property managers to where they're I'm sort of saying what their ideal type of lead is, and we're sort of qualifying those and then connecting them through as lead gen for them, because we've got

Alex Husner  
involved in that, to be honest. Yeah,

Jamie Lane  
they can reach out to my colleague, Sarah Dupree. She's been running that program, and we've got sort of connections to a bunch of different property management companies. We've sort of been running it as a pilot over the past year, just trying to get a sense of how many leads we get. How good are those leads? How are we seeing them, sort of convert to actual leads for them? And I think so far, it's been doing. Well, I haven't kept entirely up to date with how it's doing, but yeah, Sarah Dupree, on my team, is the person that's been running it.

Alex Husner  
Okay, yeah, I bet you're gonna get a lot of people that will hear this and be interested in that. We'll definitely have to maybe add Sarah's contact information into the show notes too.

Annie Holcombe  
Yeah, she might say, she might say uncle after a while? Yeah, I think that's good. I think one of the things that we've heard over time is the frustration from managers in that sometimes Realtors don't necessarily have the right data to make good predictions on what a rental could produce, and they come in with false expectations. And we've seen a lot of it in I think, you know, talk to people in the Tennessee market, the Florida Panhandle struggles with that a lot, because some of these houses sold for ridiculous prices. And, you know, they were forecasting, you know, like, let's face it, right after COVID, people were able to get prices that they'll never get, you know, not only for the sale, but also for the rental. And that that's obviously kind of gone away. So I think being able to aggregate that data, where somebody can access and make good decisions all the way around, is super helpful. So glad that you guys are doing that. I did want to ask you guys at this point, it's data that you're getting from Airbnb and VRBO, but there's potential of getting other OTA data in there. Is that? Am I correct in that? Yeah.

Jamie Lane  
So how we collect, collect the data? We are scraping data off of Airbnb, verbo, booking.com, and then we're looking at sort of movements in the calendar. So the fact that we're picking up sort of a series of dates going unavailable in your calendar, we then model whether that was booked or blocked. So because we're yes, we're collecting the data off of Airbnb, but it's representative of all the bookings that you're getting on the property, not just what comes through Airbnb. So it's collecting data on direct bookings. It's collecting data on bookings coming through any other channel. And we've been making really big strides recently into really refining and improving the accuracy of those estimates of book first block. It has become more difficult, but we still have great accuracy of predicting the revenue that associated with each of those bookings, and now we've got data going back 10 years. So when you think about sort of through cycles and and what happened during COVID, and what's a more representative number, whether it's pre COVID, whether it's last year, like we do, give you the ability to sort of see what was going in the market back in 2017, 1819, what's going in the market now, how does that compare to what was seen in 21 and 22 so it lets you sort of piece together that complete picture of market performance, which I think is I'm given that we've been in the industry now for so long, it's hard to think that air DNA was started Back in 2014 I'm now thinking either few companies now that have been around on the tech side is like, price, labs, guesty, air, DNA, all started like within, like a couple months of each other, and are now all just sort of past their sort of 10 year anniversary. So

Annie Holcombe  
off that, I feel like there had been a challenge with sometimes looking at data and saying, is this a gross revenue number, like a gross rent number, or is are you able to pull fees out? So I imagine that now, because we're going to have to be going to the fees are included in the quotes, that it's a little easier. But does that? Is that going to up and past numbers when you're trying to forecast for future, because everything, it feels like it's going to be cleaner. Now, there's not going to be that question, because you'll know for sure, but I know that was always something that we asked. The question was like, Is this including fees, or is it not? So kind of maybe talk me through that. So

Jamie Lane  
our estimates of revenue is a gross revenue number. It is inclusive of. Cleaning fees. And actually now when you click on any rentalizer report in the calculator, you can actually see the breakout of cleaning fees. We're still collecting cleaning fees and breaking those out in our data set. So so far, we haven't lost that ability to see it, sort of in the scrapes, but what it does not include is any additional service fees, any additional taxes, and it's sort of that gross number before any management fees are taken out. So our definition has been sort of consistent over time. Absolutely, we can probably do a better job of letting people know, like what it includes, what it doesn't include, but it is sort of that nightly rate, tack on top of that, and the cleaning fee associated with the reservations, and any additional fees on top of that, extra guest fees, additional management fees, anything like that, aren't included in that overall number.

Alex Husner  
Gotcha, well, I mean, we're almost at the midpoint of the year, Jamie, so any last minute predictions for 2025

Unknown Speaker  
what stock should I buy?

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, I'll say I think the theme of the summer is going to be continuing, shortened booking windows, like we already started to hear it at VR nation. I think you're going to hear it from more and more people that last minute bookings are coming in, but the ability to plan has and sort of expect those further out bookings has just really been reduced given all the uncertainty in the market out there. I think the good thing for operators and is that I think supply growth is going to continue to be sustained constrained. We're not going to see any magic happen on home values. We're not going to see interest rates magically come back down. And I think the sort of further market uncertainty is going to really cause investors sort of pull back, not adding new supply into that market. And so for all of us out there that are managing now, I'm hoping that we don't see a whole lot of new competition coming out there. I think there's, there's going to be some good news. But for those, maybe property managers sort of hoping for a whole lot of new home sales, a lot of referrals, sort of potential to grow inventory through new homes getting bought and sold like that's not going to be out there. It's going to be more of what inventory is already out there, and how much you can sort of convince maybe smaller, mid sized operators, owners, sort of using small and midsize operators, to sort of convert over to you. And it's going to be sort of a fixed pie out there. And how can you take a greater share of that pie,

Annie Holcombe  
lot of stuff going on. Yeah, gonna be a bumpy summer. I think

Jamie Lane  
that's a great way to describe it. A bumpy summer. I'm still not predicting recession. I wouldn't say very confident, but I'm feeling pretty good that we're going to be able to sort of get through this. Q1 was was weak. Q2 is not looking super strong, but it's not looking so bad that I feel I'm confident that we're going to recession, and if we sort of skate through it, kind of like what we did in 2023 like we we could all like, feel the weakness, but it wasn't so much weakness that that we were seeing a big pullback in consumer demand, I think most of us are going to be able to get through this. And you're in a tight belt, we're going to have to really manage expenses carefully. But and once we get through this, like travel is one of these industries, like it's up into the right and short term rentals, vacation rentals are are still getting adopted by more and more consumers. We're overall, stealing share back from hotels. And I think this category is still the category that I think is going to be the long term winner for accommodations and and super excited to be I'm part of it and tracking it. Yeah,

Alex Husner  
definitely the year to sharpen your pencil. Try and find new ways to grow revenue diversify, you know? I mean, I got to get creative again. It isn't just going to come come to us like we've had in years past. So a little bit more difficult business climate, I guess. But so good to have you, Jamie, always insightful to listen to you and kind of follow your predictions, which seem to be pretty spot on, as far as what we've heard over the years. If anybody wants to get in touch with you. What's the best way for them to contact

Jamie Lane  
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter search Jamie lane, and you'll find it. I do host a podcast called the STR Data Lab, where we sort of dig into the weekly trends. And then me and my team write a free blog on the Edirne website where we sort of track industry performance. So if you want some great free data, sort of check that out. We put it out every month, and it can sort of give you that sort of high level breakdown what we're seeing in different types of markets, and making sure you're staying on top of the trends, because it is going to be, I think, a very interesting. Summer in terms of how performance evolves. Well,

Annie Holcombe  
we'll have you back in the fall to have a hopefully it's not a post mortem. Hopefully it's

Speaker 1  
just way better than we thought. Yeah, something wasn't

Alex Husner  
something that like went great and everybody did, did well,

Jamie Lane  
absolutely that'd be fun. If anybody wants

Alex Husner  
to get in touch with Annie now you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai