Puerto Rico’s short-term rental community sees revenue growth amid pandemic
Quibble Revenue Management for Vacation Rentals, a company that has designed software that uses science-based optimization and technology to help the island’s short-term rental community set their pricing strategies, has seen an increase in monthly revenue by 24% to 34% since October 2020.
This growth was confirmed by the firm founded in August 2020, which has designed software that provides an algorithm inspired by airlines that ultimately pursues making the market more profitable, said Quibble Co-Founder, Gustavo R. Pecunia, in an interview with News is my Business.
“What we wanted to bring with our business is what we know as ‘pricing eases mind,’ the concept of running a business of rentals is in many ways difficult, because you have to manage marketing, your own customers, and all the efforts of restoring and preparing the property,” Pecunia said.
“One of the things that we identify as a constant problem with property managers is that due to these responsibilities, pricing is often left on the back burner,” he said.
Quibble’s team has about 25 years of experience in pricing and revenue management, short-term rentals, Software as a service (SaaS), and consulting. The company’s CEO, Neal Cyr, worked in a revenue management company for airlines, and used their algorithm as inspiration in modeling their software, Pecunia said.
“We come in and partner with these property managers and take over their current pricing strategy, building a new custom strategy individualized to each of their properties, then we manage those properties day to day. We’ll do this until we can ensure that the property is moving forward,” said Pecunia.
Quibble’s analysis showed that demand for Puerto Rico’s short term rental market has increased during the pandemic — a phenomenon that tourism officials have acknowledged — and could potential help increase tourist traction significantly.
“Even though it was most definitely not the case for all markets in relation to the pandemic, some areas experienced a big rebound. Puerto Rico has been one of those markets that we’ve seen this behavior from in direct relation to short-term rentals,” Pecunia said.
“We want to continue promoting and stimulating this advantaged position. Puerto Rico has been visited by a significant number of American tourists, because it’s become an ideal get-away location,” he said.
Among other projects, Quibble aspires to, in the future, build a customer spacing platform where people can become rightly educated on how to intertwine science and technology to develop the best pricing strategy through there software. This would lead to an increase in employment opportunities, he said.
“We believe that as revenue management and short-term rentals grow more in popularity and people realize how necessary this aspect is when managing a business, these services will become specific career positions where companies will hire an individual who uses our software to generate larger amounts of income,” added Pecunia.
