The excitement and terror of moving to a new location :)

Bookings
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Just a random, nonsense post: We’re moving from our existing live/work condo to a new live/work condo in the Arts District. Our current loft is kinda falling apart (some bad construction issues that presented after last year’s earthquakes).

Our old space (that we’re moving out from in a week) is here: https://www.peerspace.com/pages/listings/5b3986006d9f720f0078bab2

The new space is so different (converted factory style building) that we’ve had to sell 80% of everything I own. The paintings and elegant stuff was never really my style, but I had to fill up the blank white walls and create an aesthetic.

Being this is the first time I’ve moved since becoming a Peerspace host, can anyone share what it was like starting all over again with no reviews? How quickly did the new space begin to rent?

I figured we’d do the same thing as when we first began renting and temporarily drop the prices to bring in fresh business and build up reviews.

Any other suggestions?

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Maybe reach out to past guests and let them know you have a new space and send them the link? If they’ve already had an awesome experience at your previous location, they would likely book again for fresh content! Good luck with your move! :smiley:

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Congratulations. Everything happens for a reason.

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@Deacon_T

CHANGE IS GOOD!
Can’t wait to see your location. I have a new location as well nearby the old one. I just opened it and working on getting better pictures/videos etc. It is difficult but we are all here for the long haul.

Good luck to all in the midst of all this craziness.

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Congratulations on the new space, Deacon! I’m sure it will be equally as fantastic as your previous location, if not even more so. Given all of the knowledge and experience you’ve gained from hosting, you’ll know exactly how to curate your space to fit what guests want, need and tend to respond well to from both an aesthetic and functional standpoint.

We’ve been in this position a few times ourselves, having opened up 5 different spaces on the platform over the past few years, so we can definitely relate to the mixed feelings of excitement for a fresh start and anxiety around how to replicate previous success with a brand new product. It can be nerve-wracking for sure!

Here’s something that has worked well for us that I hope can be useful to you or anyone looking to open a subsequent location:

  1. Send a link of your new listing to all previous (good) clients who booked your other location(s) and offer them a loyalty discount to book your new space. It’s advisable to set your actual public listing price to be your true (non-discounted) price so that the promo offer is authentic and you also don’t cut yourself too low. Meaning, let’s say your true price is $100/hr and you’re offering 20% off to these folks, be sure to send these messages with your public listing price reflecting that $100.

  2. Create a sense of urgency by setting a time limit on this offer. We usually end the message by saying something like "Offer valid for bookings made within the next X amount of days (we aim for 30) for any date X number of days from today (we do 60-90 days). Meaning, as long as they create their booking within the next 30 days, they can book for any open date up to 90 days out. The booking itself does not need to occur within the 30 days.

Many folks simply book a full or half day just to reserve the date and lock in the steep discount without even have a project in mind quite yet. They simply see the value and don’t want to miss out!

  1. Send one final follow-up reminder a few days before the offer expires. You’ll see a huge response in the very beginning of the offer period as well as right before the offer expires. It’s kind of dead in the middle, but this is normal.

  2. Be sure to include any contingencies or disclaimers i.e. min hours (ours is 4), max attendees (for this promo, ours is 15), any black out dates (this is esp true for event hosts), your standard hours of availability, cancellation policy etc. Basically, all of our standard rules and restrictions should still apply.

  3. I wouldn’t advise having the instant book feature turned on for this as you’ll want to do your standard vetting.

Overall, this has worked very well for us many times and builds a fantastic sense of rapport with our clients because they ultimately feel appreciated, and in turn, appreciative. From each promo we’ve done for a new space, we average anywhere from 8-20 bookings by doing so, which more than makes up for “$$ lost” bc of the discount offered. Most importantly, it allows our new space to get a running start and rack up those great reviews you mentioned, which we all know are so key with launching a new space.

We realize this current climate is much different due to Covid, so the results will vary given these unfortunately unique circumstances. But, I do hope this helps, now and in the long-term as an overall strategy!

Either way, be sure to drop a link in here as well so that we can all favorite the listing to give it a nice boost.

Cheers to your new pad and continued success!

Ashley

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Glad to hear you’re sticking around, @Deacon_T! I thought maybe you’d moved to a new compound in Idaho. :smile: Congratulations on your new place!

I really like @Ashley_N’s suggestions, especially around creating a sense of urgency. A couple more thoughts FWIW:

  1. Could you keep your listing for your previous space up, and just have it be unavailable on your calendar? That way, you could link to your old listing so they can see your reviews.

2.If option 1 doesn’t work, could you include quotes in your new listing? For example: “I had 1,923 reviews averaging 4.6 stars at a previous listing. Comments include:” And then include stuff about how responsive/easy to work with you were.

I know these options won’t help you in your search ranking, but it’s something to communicate.

Suggestion for the @peerspace-team product team: Can we have reviews of the host separate from reviews of the space? For example, Paul as a host gets 5.0 stars, Paul’s listing gets 4.8 stars. This would help hosts who move or have multiple listings, and it helps guests because they get insight about their host they might not otherwise have.

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That my friend is an AMAZING idea!

Now, I could be completely totally incorrect about this, but I think I had read somewhere that a new listing receives a temporary listing boost to help generate traffic.

I’m hoping that this is the case, as I was going to leverage that rankings boost with a temporary price reduction to get some quick bookings.

Of course, ‘cheap’ spaces often receive a higher quantity of ‘bad’ quality bookings, but by now, everyone knows how tough we are on security; we’re not pushovers and know how to spot a bad client.

The new space alleviates most of the problems we’ve had here. Our current place, while looking luxury and being a relatively new building, is falling apart after some earthquakes we had last year. That, coupled with some housing discrimination we’ve faced (yes, it happens), compelled us to move. You never know how much you need change until you’re forced to sit inside of your home for a couple of months.

The new studio space is a single level (which helps immensely with keeping an eye on people and communicating) in the arts district downtown.

The layout is similar to Brad’s space and I have some really interesting plans for the design and decor.

There are two enclosed ‘bedrooms’ and I’ll easily be able to have my podcasting station (my plans for podcasting were completely derailed by having my three year old son with us 24/7, haha).

I think it’s going to be much easier to host off-sites as well, as we can fit more tables and chairs in more configurations.

Speaking of off-sites (entirely off topic): we had one months back in which a kind guest and I got into a discussion about VR headsets and he recommended my current headset (I have to be vague here for privacy reasons).

About a month ago, I saw his face in the news and it turns out that he was my all time favorite game designer whom I practically worshiped. When I realized this, it suddenly made me miss hosting. I’d pretty much decided to stop hosting before that when the quarantine began, but my heart is open to it once more. Plus, we had a pretty amazing film shoot about a week ago through a different platform.

Sorry, I’m rambling because I’ve had to spend days finding the ‘perfect’ dining table and I’m beginning to procrastinate.

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pretty new to peerspace and we listed our space in December in the Dallas Area and we change out our sets every 3 months and obviously with Covid we haven’t done that too many times but we did do a set refresh recently and I can personally testify to that point! reengaging with old customers has really helped to stimulate more bookings. I also go crazy on tours and inviting everyone to tour and once we are eye to eye I usually can get them to commit on a booking so depending where you are located that could work too.
We started using Flodesk for our email marketing and if you haven’t tried it out, its worth a shot!

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