A short note for fellow OwnerRez hosts on a simple weekly habit that's changed how I read my own bookings.

What we did

Every Monday morning, I get a one-page report comparing this year's booking pace to the same week last year. It pulls straight from OwnerRez and tells me three things in plain English: how full we are this week, how full our next month looks, and how many new reservations came in over the past seven days. Each one is compared to the same week last year, side by side, by property location.

It has changed how I run the business. Instead of staring at the OwnerRez calendar trying to feel whether we're up or down, I now know.

The three numbers I track

Most hosts I talk to look at occupancy alone, but occupancy is a lagging indicator — by the time it's low, it's too late to do anything about it. So this report tracks three different angles, each answering a different question:

1. Heads-in-Beds — This Week. How full are we right now compared to the same calendar week last year? This is the rear-view mirror. It tells me whether the season is tracking like last year, ahead, or soft.

2. Future Occupancy — Next 30 Days. How full does our pipeline look for the next month? This is the windshield. If next month is pacing 20% behind last year, I have time to do something about it before it becomes a revenue problem.

3. Sales Pace — New Bookings in the Last 7 Days. How fast are new reservations actually coming in this week? This is the leading indicator. Stays may be months away, but the volume of new bookings tells me whether demand is healthy today. When sales pace softens for two weeks in a row, that's my early warning to push a campaign.

For each metric, I see revenue, booking count, and average daily rate (ADR), broken out by property location and compared year-over-year.

How it works

It's read-only and lives entirely in my Cowork session with Claude. The flow is straightforward:

  1. OwnerRez API token. Generated in OwnerRez under Settings → API Access. Stored securely on my laptop.
  2. A small Python script that pulls confirmed bookings from OwnerRez's GET /bookings and GET /properties endpoints. The script has a hard allowlist — it can only call those read endpoints, so there is zero risk of it accidentally writing to or modifying my OwnerRez data. That guardrail mattered to me.
  3. YoY comparison logic. The script anchors on "today," calculates the same calendar window last year using proper date math (so leap years don't trip it up), and produces side-by-side totals.
  4. Output. An Excel file with summary and detail sheets I can audit against OwnerRez directly, plus a short markdown summary that's phone-readable. Five to ten bullets, not a wall of numbers.
  5. Trigger. I run it on demand ("check bookings") or schedule it to fire automatically every Monday morning.

I also have it logged to Notion automatically so I have a running history to look back on.

How I built it