How Grampian Lettings Prices 60+ Serviced Apartments in Aberdeen With PriceLabs

Grampian Lettings, run by Arturas Narbutis, manages more than 60 serviced apartments, houses and guest houses in Aberdeen, from compact studios to properties with eight or nine bedrooms. Pricing every one of them by hand across the main booking channels was never going to hold, so Arturas moved to PriceLabs in 2022, when the portfolio stood at about 10 properties.

Base and minimum prices, seasonality and local events now do the daily pricing work, and he still prices the portfolio with PriceLabs today. Events and seasons that once slipped past a manual calendar are now priced in automatically, across a portfolio about six times the size it was four years ago.

About Grampian Lettings

Grampian Lettings manages more than 60 properties across Aberdeen, with a handful nearby and one in Arbroath, near Dundee. The mix is wide: studios, two- and three-bedroom flats, houses of up to six bedrooms, and a couple of guest houses with eight or nine bedrooms.

Five of the properties are studios in a single high-rise, The Point, in the centre of Aberdeen. Each is one open room with the bed, kitchen and living area together, five studios of the same type under one roof.

"It's really a big variety of properties we're holding. Starting with the smallest, which would be the studios... then moving further to the most popular property, I would say a two-bedroom flat, then three-bedroom flats and so on." – Arturas Narbutis, Director, Grampian Lettings

Challenges Before PriceLabs

In the early days, with a single property and no property management system, pricing meant opening each booking calendar and setting a rate for every day. That does not stretch to a portfolio.

• Pricing by hand: Arturas set every daily rate himself. Across at least three main booking channels, he says doing it manually stopped being realistic.
• Events slipping past: Manual pricing meant events were missed, and every missed event was revenue left on the table.
• Pricing tools that fell short: By 2022, with about 10 properties and a property management system in place, the team felt a pricing tool was missing. The pricing features they had were workable, with gaps and a few that did not work well.

"It's not just guessing the correct pricing for the specific month over the year. It's also about the events. If we've been missing that when doing it manually, with our hands, it means we're missing on the revenue." – Arturas Narbutis

PriceLabs as a Solution

Arturas looked at the pricing tools on the market, read reviews online and chose PriceLabs in 2022. The core settings he was looking for worked from the start.

"We've been trying to figure out whom to join, checking reviews online, and we decided to go with PriceLabs and see how it works... We figured out that some of the major features we've been looking for really work quite well. So this helped us a lot." – Arturas Narbutis

Key features that made a difference:

• Base and minimum price: The first settings Grampian Lettings used. Arturas sets the base and guardrails for each property, and PriceLabs prices within them.

"The basic stuff, minimum price and base price, is quite good. That's what we really like, because your system is pretty smart to understand what we're telling it to do." – Arturas Narbutis

• Seasonality and local events: PriceLabs adjusts rates for the seasons in his business and picks up local events, so nobody has to track them by hand.

• Minimum stay and orphan night pricing: Minimum-night rules set the shortest stay for each period, and orphan night pricing adjusts rates on one or two night gaps between bookings so they can still be filled.

"The minimum night features and orphan nights are pretty good. I really like how these things work. In our business, a one or two night gap between bookings can sit empty. The minimum night rules protect the length of stays, and orphan night pricing works on those gaps, so I am not chasing them by hand." – Arturas Narbutis

Results

Arturas joined PriceLabs in 2022 with about 10 properties. Today he prices a portfolio of more than 60.

• Headline result: A ~10% increase in revenue in the first year upon joining PriceLabs, driving substantial growth across the expanding portfolio
• Events picked up automatically: PriceLabs finds local events and seasonal shifts on its own, the kind of detail that gets missed when pricing by hand.
• Pricing work that stays off his desk: Seasonality and event pricing are automated, work Arturas says would be unrealistic to do manually across his main booking channels.
• One approach as the portfolio grew: The portfolio went from about 10 properties in 2022 to more than 60, and PriceLabs is still doing the pricing.

"Pricing by hand across all our booking channels is not realistic at this size. With PriceLabs, the seasons and local events are covered, and I can spend my time on the business instead of on calendars." – Arturas Narbutis

Looking Ahead

Arturas already works with Claude for daily routine work and checks, and wants his pricing platform to work the same way: ask a question, get answers and ideas, and have changes made on his behalf.

"I really hope one day I can log into platforms and just speak to them. Check the properties, check the statistics, give me the lowest performing properties, give me some ideas about what it's worth to change to get the revenue up." – Arturas Narbutis

He sees it as a way to skip the hunt through menu tabs as much as a source of ideas.

PriceLabs already offers an AI connector (MCP) that lets Claude connect to a PriceLabs account.