Nightly price suggester for rental hosts
Inspired by publicly reported work at Airbnb
Suggest a nightly price for a listing from its location, size, reviews and season.
The brief
Airbnb's engineering team has written about Smart Pricing, which suggests prices to hosts from demand and listing details. Build a simpler version on public listing data for one city: predict a fair nightly price, and explain to a host why their suggestion is what it is. Good looks like: a model that clearly beats "average price in the area", explanations per listing, and a one-page host report.
Read the case first
What Airbnb has said in public about this kind of work, on its own pages:
Make it your own
Price something nearby instead: PG rooms near a college, homestays in a hill town or co-working desks. Collect a small sample of your own listings (with permission) and compare them with what the model learned from the public data.
AITeky has no link with Airbnb, which has not reviewed or endorsed this brief. The brief only draws on what the company has published, uses open data rather than its data, and is a learning exercise: don't present your project as Airbnb's work or system.
What you will build
- Clean listings and calendar data for one city
- Engineer location, size, amenity and review features
- Train regression models and compare with an area-average baseline
- Explain each suggestion with SHAP
- Write a host-facing price report
Free, open data to build it with
Sign up free to get the data and links
It takes a minute with your email. AiTeky Pass (₹999/month or ₹9,999/year) is free for your first 30 days.