Rates and Revenue Case Study

Year: 2024

Role: Lead UX Researcher

Situation:

  • 2023 was a difficult year for the short term rental industry with a drop in revenue of 13% YoY and down 19% when compared to 2021 figures.

  • Faced with increasing pressure from homeowners to improve revenue, Vacasa was caught between a struggling market and owners with expectations that did not align with the current market conditions.

Problem:

  • Vacasa’s call center was being inundated with revenue related calls and product was tasked with increasing engagement with homeowners to better communicate the nature of their decreased revenue at scale. Users did not trust how Vacasa was pricing their home.

Approach:

  • We leveraged mixed methods to triangulate the best course, combining 1:1 interviews with multiple rounds of surveys to generate ideas and test early concepts.

    • Research led to development of an MVP, a tool which shared nearly realtime pricing data on surrounding comparable homes, relative to each homeowner.

Outcome: 

  • This collaborative effort had a significant impact on engagement and other important metrics: weekly active users increased by a whopping 30% and user submitted revenue tickets decreased by 13%.

Recommendations: 

  • We found that exposing users to data is a pandora’s box: once you expose some data, there is a lot static, from users and from the business, on what would be best to show next.

  • We focused on our foundational learning that users want to understand why their home is priced the way it is, therefore, followup iterations must stay in line with that goal, and our team recommends exploring concepts such as AI generated pricing summaries and options to drill down into comparable home sets, which would let users click to explore to specific competitor listings.