Fifty Listings and a Brutal Off-Season
Adam moved to Alaska for a corporate retail job and stayed to build a rental business. Eight years of owning short-term rentals and three years of fast co-hosting growth later, his company managed about 50 listings with an in-house cleaning team on payroll.
The problem was the calendar. Summer cruise season is a hyper peak. Winter barely moves. Adam priced everything himself, and he wanted his larger homes capturing the demand the market was booking months ahead.
He signed in November 2025, wanting better numbers and fewer hours in the business.
“We’re just trying to figure out what’s the best way to maximize revenue for our owners and to make sure we’re giving guests great stays.”
- Adam
Rebuilding the Off-Season
Foundry went live in December 2025, the start of Alaska’s quietest stretch. Bryan, his revenue manager, moved the portfolio onto a new pricing engine and rebuilt the rules underneath it:
- Minimum-stay rules rebuilt to match how the market books, including one-night gap fills on homes up to four bedrooms
- Winter flipped to occupancy first, with aggressive length-of-stay and OTA discounts to fill the calendar and keep Adam’s employed cleaning team working
- Shoulder months marked up to capture demand the calendar showed was there, with peak summer rates protected for the early booking window
Adam also moved his cancellation policy from strict to flexible for those months. That opened the listings to guests who would not have booked before.
What Seven Months Did
The comparison runs January through July 2026 against the same months a year earlier, and the portfolio barely changed, from about 50 listings at onboarding to the 53 PriceLabs tracks today. Whole-portfolio revenue for those seven months grew from $704K to $1.7M, and every single month at least doubled its prior-year revenue, with March at four and a half times.
Alaska’s seasonality makes the strict same-listings cut small here: only 7 listings earned in nearly every month of the off-season baseline, and on those the same seven months grew 22%, $286K to $347K. The broader signals point the same direction:
- Every month, January through July, at least doubled whole-portfolio revenue year over year
- Revenue index up from 104 to 128: from market average to 28% above it
- Occupancy on the listings active in both periods up from 39% to 52%
“January was our second highest booked revenue month we’ve ever had.”
- Adam
Bookings also started arriving earlier, which was the exact problem Adam brought to onboarding.
What’s Next
Adam spent weeks of late winter with his family while pricing ran without him. He is back in growth mode with a target of 75 listings. His direct-booking niche serving Alaska’s tax-exempt organizations keeps compounding, and Foundry prices every new unit from day one.