Bed Tax Collections are UP, Business Numbers DOWN

Who said the Summer White Sale wouldn’t work? Well, although I was quite critical of the PCB Summer White Sale, I don’t think I ever said, verbatim, that it flat out would not work. But did it? Well, the answer is actually quite a bit more complex than a simple yes or no. Of course, that’s what makes the answer so much fun.

In a recent article, the News Herald reported that so far this year, compared to the same period last year, the bed tax collections are up 3.5%. This is true, additionally I found from October 2006 to June 2007, the bed tax collections were up to $3,953,245.77 or 11.77%. The 2006 number of $3,537,045.14 is up 3.04% from October 2004 to June 2005, and the 2004 numbers were up 5.94%. And because I always hate reading stuff like this in a paragraph, I’m gonna put it all in a nifty table:

So, the total bed tax dollars are indeed up, but what does that really mean? Well, simply, more money has been generated this year than last year. Maybe it means more bodies visited our beach, maybe it means that some marketing campaigns worked or maybe on average the rental room rates went up enough to garnish the 3.5% increase.

Lets throw another element into the equation. 3,144 new condos came into the rental pool in the last 12 months. Now, I need to be specific and note that the term “last 12 months” wasn’t defined in the information I received. In addition, at least one condo that I know of was described as new but wasn’t – Grand Surf Club – and several others were listed as zero “rentable” that I know for a fact have some rentals, including, but not limited to: Origin, Aqua, Ocean Reef/Ritz/Villas, Laketown Wharf, Seychelles, Splash, Sterling Breeze, and Tidewater. So, using the fantastic SWAG as best I could, I was able to determine approximately a 24% increase in inventory this year over last year.

An interesting analogy was told to me over the weekend:

If you take a tasty swath of Country Crock and spread it over two pieces of Wonder Bread, you have a pretty delicious snack. But if you take that same swath and spread it over three pieces of Wonder Bread, the taste is a lot more bready and a lot less buttery.

What does this mean? This means that we are spreading 3.5% more money across 24% more inventory – i.e. everyone’s numbers are way down.

I talked to a buddy at a local condo (names have not been used to protect the blah blah blah) that said his numbers were down 38% over last year. I was told that Captain Anderson’s was down 20 something % (could not verify, please chime in and correct me!). Talking to another rental agency today, “We’re way down from last year, I don’t know the numbers, but we are much slower than we’ve been in a couple of years.”

So, lets talk about the pcbwhitesale campaign. Cost: $495,000. Cooperating funds contributed: $22,500 (what’s up with that?). We don’t know how much revenue was generated as a direct result of the summer white sale campaign (don’t know that we could ever figure that out anyway), but we do know that this year’s bed tax number is up 3.5% so far from last year, which is an 8.27% decrease from the increase during the same period last year. Following me?

According to YPartnership, the summer white sale campaign generated 68,121 total user sessions and 80,062 total pageviews. That would be at a cost of $7.27 and $6.18 per, respectively. Seems like a lot, since this is basically 7 bucks a click-through, but I guess I don’t know the industry standard, and we are in perilous times.

According to the report, there were a total 19,945 coupon downloads between May 5th to August 7th. Did we get ripped? I wouldn’t be so bold as to say.

It sure is a shame that we can’t figure out the direct revenue generated from the white sale campaign. It would be very interesting to see how much worse we would have fared had we not shelled out $1/2 million for cheap creative, modest discounts and almost no co-op funds.

For you number junkies, and you know who you are, here are some digits to schplatz over:

• 16,013 – approximate number of rentable “beds” on the market right now.
• 3,144 – approximate number of rentable “beds” new for this fiscal year.