To better serve our government customers to achieve 100% compliance, Harmari STR now crawls over 80 short term rental websites, which is 33% more than our closest competitor. It’s true that most of the short term rentals advertised online today are either aggregating or affiliates of the “Big 4” main platforms; AirBnB, Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Booking. However, Harmari STR takes a holistic view of the online marketplace specific to your town, city or county.
After crawling these websites, Harmari has found other websites that make up the “long tail” of short term rental organic, and locally popular inventory operated by local property management companies. It takes a bit more experience, a bit more effort, but Harmari is able to dig deeper to find organic, local inventory.
One particular trend we have noticed is that major property management companies follow certain techniques to eventually “wean off” the main platforms. The process is as follows (1) the property manager lists a new property on one of the Big 4 STR platforms (2) gathers a following on that property and collecting contact information for guest stays (3) after a steady revenue is obtained, it is de-listed from the Big 4 and finds its way on the property manager’s “book direct” website as an “exclusive” property not available elsewhere. Also, many high profile short term rental hosts have expressed their frustration with AirBnB due to its handling of pandemic restrictions, and have gone out to setup their own book direct websites.
Another important factor is Foreign-Language websites. Many of our competitors crawl through English language websites, but many foreign property owners and hosts will list on French, Spanish, German, Asian or UK websites. Harmari’s trained staff and analysts speak over 10 different languages, giving you extra reassurance that every Dollar, Euro, Pound or Yuan of Lodging Tax due to your city or county is being collected.
Below is an example inventory of a major tourist destination in the Southern United States, which shows that the market share is more segmented than originally perceived. Over 15% of the total inventory found by our experienced team was not found on the 80+ websites, but on locally popular property management websites. Of course, Harmari STR does a full assessment that our competitors may not go through.
Contact us today to get a better idea where new short term rental inventory may lie in your municipality.