Every new owner asks me the same question in the first week. “What should I charge?”
I used to answer it directly. A number, maybe a range, delivered with confidence because that’s what a new owner wants to hear. It took me a few years of running Planbnb to realize that answering the question directly was actually the wrong move, because the number itself was never the point. The method behind it was.
Here is what we actually do, and why we’ve never laid it out publicly before now.
Why owners keep asking the wrong question
I understand why the question comes out the way it does. An owner has just handed over the keys to a property, sometimes one they’ve lived in for years, sometimes one they’ve never even slept in because they bought it as an investment from Germany or Bulgaria. They want a number because a number feels like control. It’s something concrete in a process that otherwise feels uncertain.
But pricing isn’t a single decision made once at launch. It’s a moving target that shifts with season, with local events, with what competing properties are doing that week, and with how the listing itself is performing. A single number answers the wrong question. What owners actually need is a system that keeps adjusting on their behalf, and that system has to start somewhere. That starting point is what this article is really about.
We don’t guess. We anchor to data first, instinct second.
When a new property comes onto our portfolio, whether it’s in Kavala center, Nea Iraklitsa, Nea Peramos, or Palio, the first thing we do is pull comparable market data through Hosthub. This isn’t a casual glance at what similar listings show on Airbnb’s search page. It’s a structured look at occupancy patterns, seasonal shifts, and what comparable properties in the same micro-area are actually earning, not just what they’re listing at.
Listed price and earned price are two different things, and conflating them is the single most common mistake new owners make when they try to price on their own.
I see this constantly with owners who try to self-manage before coming to us. They’ll open a booking platform, search their own neighborhood, and copy the highest number they see. But that top listing might be sitting empty for weeks, or it might belong to a property with a pool, a rooftop terrace, or a host with three years of five-star reviews behind them. None of that is visible in a quick search. It’s only visible in the underlying performance data, which is exactly what Hosthub gives us access to and what an individual owner searching manually simply doesn’t have.
Why the opening price matters more than owners think
Here’s the part we rarely explain, because it sounds almost too simple to be a strategy. The first price a guest sees on a new listing becomes the reference point for everything that follows. If that number is set too high because an owner wants to “test the market” or too low because an owner is nervous about an empty calendar, it distorts guest expectations in ways that are hard to correct later.
A property that opens too expensive sits empty and picks up no reviews, which makes every future price look harder to justify because there’s no social proof behind it. A property that opens too cheap fills quickly but trains guests, and worse, trains the platform’s algorithm, to associate that listing with a certain guest profile and price band. Moving up from there is slower than most owners expect.
So the opening price isn’t really about what the apartment is worth. It’s about what number will build the right foundation for pricing to move on top of.
This is the piece that’s hardest to explain to a first-time owner, because it asks them to accept a short-term tradeoff for a long-term gain. Nobody wants to hear that the smart move is to earn less in month one. But every owner who has trusted the process long enough to see month three and month four understands why we ask for that patience. The properties that open strong on reviews consistently outearn the ones that open strong on price alone, and the gap widens the longer the listing has been live.
The actual method
Once we have the market data, we layer in three things that Hosthub alone can’t tell us:
Property-specific factors. Floor level, view, distance to the sea or to Kavala’s old town, parking availability, and outdoor space. These push a listing above or below the raw market average.
Onboarding timeline. New listings go through a one to two week setup process before they go live. We use that window to finalize photography, house rules, and the self-check-in system we built in-house, because a rushed listing with an unfinished guest experience will underperform regardless of price.
A deliberate opening window. For the first few bookings, we set a price designed to generate quick, positive reviews rather than maximum nightly revenue. This is the part most owners resist at first, because it feels counterintuitive to price conservatively when you’re eager to see returns. But those first reviews are the foundation the rest of the pricing strategy stands on. Without them, every later price increase has nothing supporting it.
What happens after the opening window closes
Once a listing has built up its first cluster of reviews, usually somewhere between five and ten completed stays, the strategy shifts. This is where the market data we pulled at the very beginning comes back into play. We compare the property’s actual performance against the original projections and start moving the price toward what the data suggested it could support all along.
This is also where owners start to see the value of the conservative opening. Because the listing already has social proof behind it, price increases don’t cause the drop-off in bookings that they would have caused in week one. Guests booking a property with a dozen five-star reviews are far less sensitive to a price increase than guests looking at a listing with none. The trust has already been established, so the price can move to reflect it.
From there, pricing becomes seasonal and event-driven rather than foundational. Kavala’s calendar has real peaks, from summer tourism to specific weekends tied to local events, and the pricing adjusts around those without touching the underlying strategy we set at launch.
Why an owner living abroad needs this more than a local owner does
This matters most for the owners we work with who aren’t in Kavala to see any of it happen in real time. If you own a property in the city and pass by it occasionally, you can sense when something feels off, even if you can’t name exactly why. An owner in Sofia or Munich doesn’t have that. They see a monthly report and a number, and if that number doesn’t match what they expected, the instinct is to assume something has gone wrong.
Explaining the method upfront changes that relationship. An owner who understands why we open conservatively doesn’t panic when the first month’s numbers look modest. They know it’s part of a sequence, not a mistake. That’s the actual reason I’m writing this now instead of just answering the pricing question the way I used to.
Why we’ve never spelled this out before
Most owners don’t ask about the method. They ask about the number. And most agencies are happy to give a number and move on, because explaining the reasoning takes longer and doesn’t change the outcome for that owner in the short term.
But for owners managing a property from abroad, especially the Bulgarian and German owners we work with who can’t see the local market shift in real time, understanding the method matters more than the number itself. It’s what lets them trust the process even when a monthly report shows a price that looks lower than they expected.
That trust is the actual product. The number is just where it shows up first.