Unit 2 · Assessing Your Market · Lesson 2.8
Market dashboard amenities
The amenities section of the Market Dashboard compares how often an amenity appears in a market’s listings against how often it appears in recent bookings, and scores the gap as desirability. It is interesting data with two hard limitations: it covers only the last 30 days, and it cannot prove any booking happened because of an amenity. Treat it as nice-to-know, not as an input to your pricing strategy.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
Common amenities: supply against bookings
Market data tools such as PriceLabs include an amenities section in their Market Dashboard, and it opens with common amenities: the percentage of listings in the market that offer an amenity, set against the percentage of bookings in the last 30 days that were made on a listing with that amenity. The default list can be extended with whatever is relevant to your market; for an island market, waterfront is an obvious addition.
The value of the view is a quick read on which amenities are popular. The catch is what popularity does not tell you. Waterfront listings on an island book strongly, but if your listing is not on the water, there is nothing you can do about it. And if the data says pools are popular, that alone is not a reason to invest $50,000 or more in building one.
Desired amenities: the demand-supply gap
Desired amenities sharpen the same comparison into a single score: demand minus supply, measured in percent. That is the occurrence of an amenity in the last 30 days of bookings set against its occurrence in the market’s listings. A waterfront score of 9.8 means almost 10% more bookings were made on waterfront listings relative to the share of listings offering waterfront: by this measure, clearly desirable. The purpose is the same as with common amenities: a read on which amenities the market favours.
Why it stays nice-to-know
Two limitations keep this data out of the pricing strategy. The first is the window: 30 days is a snapshot, and in a seasonal market you would expect these numbers to shift through the year. The second is deeper: the data shows that bookings and amenities occur together, never that one caused the other. Most listings have a TV, and most bookings are made on listings with a TV. Was the TV the deciding factor? There is no way to know.
Because that conclusion cannot be drawn, both views classify as nice-to-know information rather than as strategy inputs. They are worth a look when assessing a market, and they can flag a pattern worth investigating with better evidence. What they cannot do is prove that an amenity produces bookings, and decisions that cost real money deserve more than a 30-day coincidence.