Prepared for Roman and Aleksey Sunset Grove July 30, 2026

You told us you have no data. You have had it the whole time.

Roman, on our call you said you have no idea where your guests come from or why. Then you emailed us your guest database. It has 214 bookings in it, going back to December 2023, with the reason for every single stay, the party size, where they flew in from, and what each one earned. Nobody has ever read it. We did. This proposal is built on your numbers, not on our opinions.

Bookings on file
214
Revenue recorded
$165K
Out of state
82%
Analytics today
0

Every number here traces to something you already own: your Guest Database sheet, your Meta ad tracking sheet, Airbnb's published fee schedule, and live keyword data. Where we are inferring rather than measuring, we say so on the line.

What your numbers say

The combined unit is not your weak listing. It is your most valuable one

You said Sunset Grove has very poor occupancy and that is why you are breaking even. The occupancy part is right. The conclusion is backwards.

Your three listings, from your own sheet
ListingBookingsNights soldRevenuePer nightAvg party
Sunset Grove
7BR, sleeps 13
38121$59,084$4889.9
Julianne
4BR, sleeps 7
76294$54,789$1865.1
Tessa
3BR, sleeps 6
58354$51,760$1464.1
Sunset Grove nights121
Julianne nights294
Tessa nights354

Sunset Grove sold 121 nights, Julianne 294, Tessa 354, over the same period.

Airbnb bookings, December 2023 to April 2026. Sunset Grove earns $488 a night, which is 3.3 times what Tessa earns, and it is still your single biggest revenue line at 36% of the total. It does not have a quality problem or a pricing problem. It has a volume problem.
$488

That is what one more night in the combined unit is worth. Tessa sold 354 nights in the same window. Sunset Grove sold 121.

We are not going to hand you a projection, because we would be making it up. We will just leave the two numbers next to each other. That gap, at $488 a night, is the entire business case for everything below.

Why this matters more than it looks. Tessa and Julianne are normal size rentals. There are hundreds of them near Raleigh and Airbnb fills them without any help. The combined unit is the one thing in your market that almost nobody else has, and it is the one that needs a marketing engine, because a 13 person luxury stay is not something people stumble into. It is something they go looking for.

Everything we would build points at that one gap.

Your guests

Your guests already told you why they come. In their own words

The Reason for Stay column in your sheet is the most valuable marketing asset you own, and it has never been used. Here is what 214 guests wrote.

Why people book the combined unit
Family and reunions28%
Work and retreats24%
Weddings15%
Milestone birthdays13%
Events and festivals13%
Church and faith groups9%

Combined unit bookings by reason: family 28 percent, work 24 percent, weddings 15 percent, birthdays 13 percent, events 13 percent, church 9 percent.

46 combined unit bookings. 37 of them were parties of 8 or more. Percentages add past 100 because some stays are two things at once, like a family reunion built around a graduation.

The one that surprised us

Nearly a quarter of your combined unit bookings are work trips. Not one or two. A quarter. And one of your guests wrote your sales pitch for you.

"We have 6 couples in town for a business conference. We enjoy staying together instead of hotel rooms."

12 guests, Sunset Grove

"Work retreat (engineers)"

6 guests

"Work retreat, therapists"

7 guests

"Law school trial advocacy competition at Wake Forest."

10 guests

"Sister's 50th birthday"

13 guests

"Son's seminary graduation"

13 guests

A team of 12 booking one house instead of 12 hotel rooms is cheaper for the company and better for the team.

That is your "work and play" positioning, except you do not have to argue for it. Your guests already proved it with their own money, twenty four percent of the time, and there is not a single page anywhere on the internet that says Sunset Grove does this.

Where they actually come from

You guessed 80% out of state on the call. Your data says 82%, across the 106 bookings where origin was captured.

OriginBookingsWhat it means
North Carolina19 (18%)Mostly Wake Forest and Raleigh. Local displacement and family overflow.
New York9Five states are a third of your out of state guests. That is not the whole country. That is a targetable list, and it is the answer to why the ads felt like boiling the ocean.
Florida7
Georgia7
Texas7
Maryland6
Origin is blank on 38% of bookings. Fixing that capture going forward is free and it doubles the value of this table within a year.
24
Median days booked ahead
Short window. People decide fast, which means being findable at the moment they look matters more than being remembered.
25%
Revenue from 7 night stays
Only 13% of bookings, a quarter of the money. Long stays are worth chasing on purpose.
Sep
Your weakest month
September and October, not winter. February and March are among your strongest, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
Your reviews

128 reviews, and almost none of it is on a page you own

We pulled every review off your three Airbnb listings. 121 of them. Here is what you are sitting on.

5.0
Sunset Grove
28 reviews. A perfect rating on the listing you say does not sell.
4.96
Tessa
45 reviews.
4.93
Julianne
55 reviews.

117 of the 121 are five stars. Two fours and two threes in nearly three years. That is not a property with a demand quality problem. That is a property almost nobody has heard of.

What guests bring up on their own
The host49%
Cleanliness44%
Location40%
Beds and comfort38%
Would come back31%
Room for the group26%
Stairs, as a problem12%

Guests mention the host in 49 percent of reviews, cleanliness 44, location 40, beds 38, returning 31, group space 26, and stairs as a negative in 12 percent.

Marianna comes up in half of all reviews by name. Your property manager is a marketing asset, not just an operator, and none of that goodwill is visible anywhere you control.

The quote that sells the work retreat page

"We were a group of 7 staying for a work trip, and the house was absolutely amazing. The open plan living areas were perfect for spending time together, while the bedrooms being tucked away gave everyone their own space and quiet."

Ana, March 2025

"Every year my family travels and meets in a location for Thanksgiving and we were right at home. We loved being across the street from a supermarket, and the area was quiet. All 15 of us..."

Shaka, November 2025

"Fantastic location with easy access to Wake Forest downtown and routes to get anywhere in Raleigh. We loved the modern amenities, roof deck with a view, and the massive supermarket with restaurants right across the street."

Mark, May 2024

"It was a pleasure to stay in both units, both were fully stocked and all the starter amenities were available. Walking distance to the grocery store and other restaurants."

Shana, May 2024

Your reviews describe a property that your own marketing does not.

Reading 121 of these turned up things nobody mentioned on our call: a rooftop deck with a view, a garage, a personal chef option on the Tessa listing, and a Wegmans directly across the street with restaurants beside it. Guests bring up that supermarket constantly, because for a group of 13 cooking together it is the difference between a stay and a hassle.

Not one of those has a page. They are sitting in review text where Google and the AI tools can barely see them and where nobody planning a trip will ever read them.

The one recurring complaint, and what to do about it. Stairs come up in 12% of reviews. Multiple floors, no elevator. That is not fixable and it is not a crisis, but it should be stated plainly on the site rather than discovered on arrival.

Saying it out loud does two useful things. It stops the wrong booking, which is where three star reviews come from. And it builds trust with the right booking, because a group organiser who reads an honest limitation believes the rest of the page.

Your welcome guide

We read all 36 pages. You already paid for a year of content

Aleksey called it "a beautiful book" with "a lot of words in it." He undersold it. Pages 15 to 30 are a local guide naming more than 40 businesses with addresses, organised into categories that map almost exactly onto the pages this site needs.

What is sitting in that PDF right now
Section of your guideNamed in itThe page it becomes
BreweriesNorse, White Street, BlackbirdBreweries and coffee near Sunset Grove. Black and White was founded by two US Barista Champions, which is a genuine reason to pick this area over a hotel by the airport.
Coffee and bakeriesBlack and White Roasters, Summer Moon, Wake Forest Coffee Company, Paul and Jack, Sweet Traditions, Plant Cakes
GolfHeritage, Paschal, Brevofield, plus the free disc golf course at the seminaryGolf and the outdoors. This is the page a work retreat organiser searches for when picking between locations.
Parks and activitiesHolding Park, E. Carroll Joyner Park, Fantasy Lake, Falls Lake, the Dunn Creek greenway
Shopping and downtownThe Cotton Company, Page 158 Books, NC General Stores, White Street MarketDowntown Wake Forest. The whole White Street strip in one page.
Restaurants and barsOver the Falls, Farm Table, Amalia's, Bodega, Broadside and Brews, Tonic Social ClubWhere to eat and drink. Walkable to a lot of it.
Music and eventsFriday Night on White, second Friday monthly, April to SeptemberEvents calendar. Note the months. It runs straight through your softest season.
WellnessYoga Soullective, BarreAlley, Spa MackFolds into the retreat page. A team offsite with a sauna and a yoga studio nearby sells itself.
Marianna wrote all of this. It is researched, specific, local, and completely invisible to Google because it lives in a PDF that only people who already booked ever see.

Two things in there that change the pitch

Your guide has an entertaining section. That is not a normal rental feature.

Page 30 lists Femme Fromage for charcuterie delivered to the door, Primo Hoagies for catering, and Elated and Inflated for balloon arches and party setup. The rooftop page describes grabbing a cold one from the cooler and playing corn hole while the sun sets, with panoramic views.

Read your booking data next to that. Milestone birthdays are 13% of combined unit stays. Weddings are 15%. Events another 13%. You are not renting a house to people who throw parties. You are running a venue and describing it as a townhome.

The family detail nobody is selling

Buried in the house section: a Pack 'n Play, a high chair, kids dinnerware, and board games. Marianna's house rules even open with "I love kids and am happy to host families."

Family visits and reunions are your single largest category at 28% of combined bookings and 31% overall. A grandparent booking Thanksgiving for 13 people needs to know there is a high chair before they book, not after. Right now that fact exists in a PDF they receive once they have already paid.

This is the pattern across the whole guide. Everything that would win the booking is written down, and all of it is behind the booking.

Two names worth chasing that we would not have found otherwise.

Your interiors were done by M. Kalderman Interiors. That is a real credential and most guests never learn it. It also makes a natural partnership: designers like showing finished work, and a link from a design portfolio to your site is exactly the kind of local signal that is hard to buy and easy to earn.

The guide itself is credited to What's Up WaFo, a local community brand. Local media that already knows you is the cheapest press there is. Both of these go on the list for month two.

The ads

Your Facebook experiment did not fail. It had nowhere to land

You told us the ads did not work. We read the tracking sheet. That is not what happened.

Seven weeks of Meta ads, March 16 to May 3
PromotionSpendClicksSite visitsCost per click
Book 3 nights get the 4th free$37.76152168$0.25
Cleaning fee waiver$39.956765$0.60
Graduation 15% off$47.43172155$0.28
Graduation 15% off$43.61162145$0.27
Wedding $150 off$51.30151133$0.34
Wedding $150 off$39.027773$0.51
Vacation $150 off$45.02234161$0.19
Total$3041,015900about $0.30
Graduation targeting hit 2.6% and 2.9% click through. For cold traffic that is genuinely good. The targeting was not the problem.
900 visits

You spent $304 and roughly 900 people went to look at your property. Thirty cents each. That is cheap, relevant traffic and you already know how to buy it.

Then every one of them vanished. No pixel to follow them. No analytics to count them. No email captured. No page built to turn a curious visitor into a booking. You were pouring water into a bucket with no bottom, and then you concluded the water was the problem.

This is the clearest argument in this whole document for building the site first, and it is your own data making it. You do not have a traffic problem. You have a destination problem. Fix the destination and the $304 experiment becomes repeatable and measurable instead of a dead end.

One thing to flag, gently. Every promotion in that sheet was a discount. Free night, waived cleaning, 15% off, $150 off. You are discounting a luxury property that already gives up about 30% off the top before you see a dollar. See the next section. Discounting is the most expensive way to buy a booking and it should be the last lever you pull, not the first.

The margin

About 30% of every booking is gone before you see it

Airbnb runs two fee structures. In the old one the host pays about 3% and the guest pays around 14%. In the newer one the host pays 15.5% and the guest pays nothing separate. Airbnb's own help page says the 15.5% structure is mandatory for one group in particular, quoted exactly:

"hosts who use property management software"

Airbnb Help Center, article 1857. Software connected hosts were migrated automatically and that migration finished on April 13, 2026.

Your property manager runs everything on Hospitable, which is property management software. So Sunset Grove is very likely on the 15.5% structure already, and has been since spring.

What comes off the top
Booked on Airbnb30.5%
Booked direct18%

Airbnb bookings lose about 30.5 percent off the top. Direct bookings lose about 18 percent.

Booking typePlatformProperty managerOff the top
Through Airbnb15.5%15%30.5%
Direct on your own siteabout 3% card processing15%about 18%
Airbnb's fee applies to your cleaning and extra guest fees too, not just the nightly rate. One assumption to check, Aleksey: this takes both fees on the gross. If the management fee is calculated on the net after Airbnb's cut, the total is nearer 28% and the gap narrows to about 10.6 points. Either way it is large. Tell us which way the agreement reads and we will use your real number.
$1,050 to $1,250

Back in your pocket for every $10,000 of bookings moved from Airbnb to direct. Same guest, same house, same manager earning the same 15%. The only change is where they clicked.

Against your recorded $165,633, moving even a quarter of it direct is real money. We are showing the rate rather than a projection because we are not going to forecast your business for you.

Check it before you believe us. Pull any recent Airbnb payout statement and find the service fee line. If it reads about 15%, all of the above is your situation today. If it reads about 3%, you have some runway, though Airbnb is moving everyone across. It is your money and it takes two minutes.

The winnable lane

Here is what people do search near Raleigh, and what a new site can win first

Your guests do not search for a wedding house. But 11,930 people a month search for a place to stay in your market, and a good chunk of that is reachable from a standing start. Here is the map, pulled live, with the hard parts marked.

1,950
Searches a month, first 9 months
The terms a brand new site can realistically compete for. Not the whole market, the reachable part of it.
16
Terms at difficulty 40 or lower
Difficulty is Search Atlas scoring how hard the front page is to take. Under 40 is open to a small site.
$8.64
Top cost per click
What advertisers pay Google for one click on corporate housing Raleigh. The market pricing a visitor.
What a new site can rank for, and when

Difficulty 2 to 10. Winnable from nothing.

These are the terms where the sites currently ranking are weak enough that a new, well built page can pass them. This is where the first 90 days go. Small volume, but the highest paid clicks on the whole list and the exact guest who books a long midweek stay.

Search termA monthDifficultyClick value
corporate housing raleigh nc1404$8.64
corporate housing durham nc302$7.32
corporate housing cary nc207$7.54
relocation housing raleigh nc1010n/a
executive rentals raleigh nc1010$2.21

210 searches a month. That sounds small until you price it. At $8.64 a click, buying this traffic costs real money every month forever. Ranking for it costs once.

Difficulty 11 to 40. Earned on the authority the first 90 days build.

This is the bulk of the reachable market and where the site starts producing. Every one of these needs the site to have been live, indexed and adding pages for a few months first. Quoting these as 90 day targets would be a lie.

Search termA monthDifficultyClick value
furnished apartments raleigh nc48027$4.74
short term rental raleigh nc39037$3.30
places to stay in raleigh nc32026$1.96
corporate apartments raleigh nc14019$8.64
monthly rentals raleigh nc14019$3.52
short term rentals cary nc11026$3.52
temporary housing raleigh nc7028$3.55
weekly rentals raleigh nc3038$2.15
temporary housing durham nc3030$3.10
furnished rentals durham nc2034$3.81
travel nurse housing raleigh nc1028$2.38

1,740 searches a month. Travel nurse contracts run 13 weeks. Relocation and insurance stays run 30 to 90 days. These are the bookings that fill Sunday through Thursday.

Difficulty 41 and up. The long game, and we will not pretend otherwise.

This is where the volume actually lives. It is also where Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and the hotel chains sit. No new site takes these in year one. They become possible once the site has real age and real links behind it, which is what everything above is quietly building.

Search termA monthDifficultyClick value
airbnb raleigh nc3,60064$0.86
wake forest nc hotels2,90074$2.27
extended stay raleigh nc1,00063$2.37
extended stay durham nc88073$3.25
airbnb wake forest nc32063$0.96
hotels near wake forest nc32063$2.12
raleigh nc lodging32052$1.96
where to stay in raleigh nc26043$1.93
vacation rental raleigh nc26059$1.46
furnished rentals raleigh nc9068$3.92
pet friendly rentals raleigh nc3047$2.33

9,980 searches a month sitting behind a wall. We are showing it so you know the ceiling is high, not so you think we are going to hand it to you in 90 days.

Every number here pulled live from Search Atlas on August 3, 2026, United States, in one batch so the table is consistent with itself. Treat them as a reading, not a constant. Search volume is estimated, and on this same pull two of Search Atlas's own endpoints returned 390 and 480 for short term rental raleigh nc. That is the honest error bar on every row. We re report these monthly from your own Search Console once the site is live, which measures what actually happened instead of estimating what might.

The market already tells you which guest is worth more. Ten times more.

A click on corporate housing raleigh nc costs an advertiser $8.64. A click on airbnb raleigh nc costs $0.86. Same city, same month, same Google. That gap is not our opinion, it is what businesses are willing to pay, and they only pay it because that visitor books longer and cancels less.

The cheap clicks go to the weekends you already fill. The expensive clicks go to the midweek and winter gaps that are costing you the year.

Why difficulty matters more than volume for you

You are starting from absolute zero. No domain, no age, no links pointing at you. So the honest question is not what has the most searches, it is what can a site with no history actually take. Here is what you are up against, measured today.

SiteAuthoritySites linking inVisits a month
Sunset Grove today000
corporatehousingbyowner.com464627,268
furnishedfinder.com401,776363,005

Two things in there are good news for you.

  • The niche is not a fortress. corporatehousingbyowner.com has been at this for years, has 462 sites linking to it, and still only pulls 7,268 visits a month. Their individual city pages, Denver and Las Vegas and Portland, each earn between 60 and 130 visits a month. That is the exact page we would build for Raleigh, and it is not out of reach.
  • The big player is winning on its name, not on these terms. Of furnishedfinder.com's traffic, 82% is people typing the brand name. Strip that out and the giant of this category earns about 23,700 visits a month from actual search. There is far more room here than the headline numbers suggest.
Read plainly: difficulty 2 to 10 is winnable with a good page and a few months. Difficulty 60 and up needs years of links you do not have yet. That is why the first 90 days go where they go, and why we will not sell you the top of the list.

What this changes about the build. The corporate and extended stay page stops being one page among nine and becomes the page the search half of this plan rests on. It gets the Raleigh geography, the work retreat reviews, the desk and wifi and garage detail, and the plain answer to how long can we stay. Everything else on the site earns its keep through AI answers and conversion, which is the next section.

What we skip

What we are not going to chase for you, and exactly why not

Most agencies would put the list above in a deck and stop. Here is the other half, because a strategy that only says yes is not a strategy.

We pulled live search volume for every phrase a person might use to find a big group rental near Raleigh. Every single one came back at zero searches a month.

Measured monthly US search volume
What someone might searchSearches a month
large group house rental raleigh nc0
corporate retreat house rental raleigh0
raleigh corporate retreat venue0
house rental sleeps 13 raleigh0
7 bedroom house rental north carolina0
reunion house rental raleigh0
wedding block rental raleigh nc0
nc state graduation house rental0
Sixteen more phrases tested, same result, 24 in total and every one at zero. We ran this twice, on July 30 and again on August 3, on two separate lists. This is not a gap in our research. It is the finding.
The big one we are walking away from

There is one term in your market with enormous volume and a difficulty score we could genuinely reach. We are telling you not to chase it.

Search termA monthDifficultyClick value
house rental raleigh nc11,36636$1.34

Eleven thousand searches a month at a difficulty we could work toward. Any agency would put that on the front page of a proposal. Here is why we are not.

Look at what the click is worth. $1.34, against $8.64 for corporate housing in the same city. When advertisers pay almost nothing for a click, it is because the person clicking is not close to a purchase. In this case they are not even your customer. Someone searching house rental raleigh nc is looking for a twelve month lease on a place to live. They are shopping Zillow and apartments.com, not booking four nights for their sister's wedding.

If we chased it and won it, you would get a traffic chart that looks fantastic and a phone that never rings. We would rather lose the impressive number and keep the honest one.

Same reason we are not building you pages for wake forest nc hotels at 2,900 a month. You are not a hotel, and the people searching that want a front desk and a nightly rate.

Your demand is real, paid for, and invisible to a keyword tool.

214 people booked. They came for reunions, work retreats, weddings and graduations. But nobody types "corporate retreat house rental raleigh" into Google. They open Airbnb and filter by guest count. They ask a friend. Or, more and more, they ask ChatGPT where 13 people can stay near Raleigh, which is a question with no search volume at all because it was never a search. It was a conversation.

So we are not going to sell you a keyword ranking plan, because it would fall apart by month four and you would be right to fire us. Here is what actually works for a property like yours, in order of how much it matters.

What this means for the wedding and reunion pages. We still build them, and now for a much better reason than we had before the data. They are 15% and 28% of your combined bookings. Those pages exist to be found by AI, to convert someone who arrives from any source, and to close the loop on the ad campaigns you were already running for exactly those occasions. What they will not do is deliver Google search traffic, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not checked.

The build

What we build first, and what we leave out

You said crawl, then walk, then run. This is the crawl, built so the walk does not need anything torn up.

9
Pages at launch
Aimed at the combined unit, because that is where the $488 nights are.
3
Weeks to live
From go ahead. We already have your photos, your data, and your listings, so the clock starts almost immediately.
100%
Yours
Domain, files, content, accounts. Leaving is easy and always will be.
Included in the build

The pages

  • Home. Sunset Grove as one 7 bedroom property that sleeps 13, with the group story leading. Not three listings competing for attention.
  • Three listing pages. Tessa (3BR, sleeps 6), Julianne (4BR, sleeps 7), and the combined Sunset Grove (7BR, sleeps 13). Each stands alone so each can be found alone.
  • Work retreats and team stays. The page your data says you need and do not have. 24% of combined bookings, zero pages about it.
  • Weddings and celebrations. 15% of combined bookings, and the target of ads you already ran. Built around the rooftop, the corn hole, and the catering and balloon partners already in your guide, so it reads as a venue rather than a rental.
  • Family gatherings and reunions. Your largest category at 28%. Leads with the things a grandparent booking Thanksgiving for 13 actually needs to know: the Pack 'n Play, the high chair, the kids dinnerware, and the Wegmans across the street.
  • Corporate and extended stays. The one lane with real search volume. This is the SEO beachhead.
  • Gallery. Built from your 185 professional photos, organised so a group planner can see the whole house fast. The rooftop deck, the garage, the personal chef option and the Wegmans across the street all get shown properly instead of hiding in review text.
  • Guest reviews on every page. All 121 we pulled, placed where they do work: the work trip reviews on the retreat page, the Thanksgiving ones on the family page. Marked up so Google and the AI tools can read your 5.0 rating, which they cannot do while it lives only on Airbnb.
  • A blog that works. Set up so every future post lands right without needing a developer.

The availability calendar

Hospitable ships a booking widget you can embed. Your property manager already has it in the account she uses daily. We drop it on the site, guests see real availability, and it hands off to Airbnb or Vrbo for now. No custom development.

The part you have never had

  • Google Analytics. Who visits, where from, what they look at.
  • Google Search Console. The exact words people use before they land on you.
  • Meta pixel. So the next $304 is measured, and so you can follow up with the 900 people instead of losing them.
  • Schema markup. The code that tells Google and the AI tools exactly what this is, where it is, and that it sleeps 13.
  • Guest origin capture. Your sheet is missing origin on 38% of bookings. We fix that going forward so this analysis gets sharper every month instead of staying frozen.
Fast, simple, and yours outright. No page builder subscription, no plugin licence, no platform that reprices you later.

What we are leaving out, and why.

A Google Business Profile. A rental house does not qualify for one and setting one up invites a takedown. The right Google surface is Google Vacation Rentals, which is free and opens up in phase two. Details below.

Direct booking. Not because it is hard. It is a setting. It is out because switching it on needs your property manager, and we will not bill you for something we cannot deliver on our own.

Paid ads. As Justin said back in July, we do not run ads in house and he will introduce you to the person who does. Get the site and the pixel live first so the next campaign is measurable.

AI lifestyle photos. You asked about placing people into the shots. Doable, quotable separately, and not needed to launch. You have 185 real photographs.

On the agentic website Justin mentioned in July

He told you he wanted to build you a self learning, self improving site, and he meant it. Here is the honest sequencing. That system reads real traffic and behaviour and adapts to it, so it needs data to learn from, and today there is none. The build below is what produces that data.

Get the foundation live and measuring, and by the 90 day review there will be a real behaviour trail to switch it on against. It is the same site. This is the order that makes it work rather than a bolt on that has nothing to learn from.

The domain

Match the name you already use, and skip Wake Forest

Wake Forest University is in Winston-Salem. That is 97 miles away.

It kept the name when it moved in 1956. So anything built on "wake forest" competes with a national university in a different city and loses. Your property is in the town. Your guests are going to Raleigh, and 82% of them are flying in from somewhere else.

Your Instagram is already sunsetgrove.nc. That settles it. The website should match the handle you are already telling people, because one name in every place is what makes both people and AI systems recognise you as one business.

Checked against the live registry on July 30, 2026
DomainStatusOur read
sunsetgrovenc.comAvailableOur recommendation. Matches your existing Instagram handle exactly. Short, easy to say once and spell right, and no fight with the university.
staysunsetgrove.comAvailableStrong second. "Stay" signals lodging clearly, and it would not tie you to one state if you buy elsewhere later. Only reason it is second is that it does not match the handle you already have.
sunsetgroveraleigh.comAvailableBest location signal, matching how out of state guests describe the trip. Locks the brand to one metro.
sunsetgroveresort.comAvoidPromises a resort. A guest expecting a front desk leaves a three star review about something you never offered.
sunsetgrove.comTakenHeld since 2014, renewed through 2027. Four to five figures if buyable at all. Not a good use of money against a $3,000 build.
Also free and fine but not recommended: sunsetgrovestay.com, sunsetgroveretreats.com, sunsetgrovetriangle.com, sunsetgroverentals.com, sunsetgrovelodging.com.

Straight answer on domains and rankings. Keywords in a domain do not help you rank. Google stopped counting that in 2012. What the domain does affect is whether somebody can repeat it after hearing it once, and whether Google and the AI tools can connect your site, your Instagram and your listings into one business. For a property that grows on referral, that is worth more than a ranking factor would have been.

The 90 day plan

Built on your booking history, not on guesswork

Every page below exists because your own guests told us it should.

Days 1 to 30
Build it and turn the lights on
PagesBlogs
  • The 9 page foundation goes live
  • Analytics, Search Console and pixel running from day one
  • Work retreats page, aimed at your 24%, and at "short term rental raleigh nc" and "corporate housing raleigh nc"
  • Two posts: the Raleigh work retreat guide, and what a 13 person stay actually costs a team against hotel rooms
Days 31 to 60
The occasions that already book
PagesBlogsLocal
  • Weddings page built for the guest party that needs 13 beds, which is your 15%
  • Graduation and campus page covering NC State, Duke and UNC weekends
  • Two posts from your welcome guide, which is written and paid for already
  • Local guide: downtown Wake Forest. The White Street strip your guide already documents, from Bodega and Broadside and Brews to The Cotton Company and Page 158 Books
  • Your first real read on who is visiting
Days 61 to 90
Fill the soft months
PagesBlogsLocal
  • Extended and relocation stay page, chasing the 7 night stays that are 25% of your revenue
  • Events page for Oktoberfest, Dreamville, Friday Night on White and tournament weekends, aimed at September and October, your two weakest months
  • Local guide: breweries and coffee. Norse, White Street and Blackbird, plus Black and White Roasters, founded by two US Barista Champions
  • Local guide: golf and the outdoors. Heritage, Paschal, Brevofield, the free disc golf course at the seminary, Falls Lake and the greenway. The page a retreat organiser opens when choosing between locations
  • Outreach to M. Kalderman Interiors and What's Up WaFo for local links
  • The 90 day review with real numbers and an honest call on what happens next
How you judge us at day 90

Justin said three to six months for search traffic on the call and that has not changed now that it is in writing. These are the things that honestly tell you whether this is working before the curve has had time to bend.

What to look atWhat good looks like at day 90
Pages live and indexedAll 9 foundation pages plus 5 new ones, confirmed in Google's index. Entirely in our control, so hold us to it.
Named by AISunset Grove coming up when ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI are asked where a large group can stay near Raleigh. This is the real target, given the search volume finding above.
First rankingsMovement on the difficulty 2 to 10 corporate and relocation terms. The difficulty 28 to 37 terms are realistically months 4 to 6, because a new domain has to earn trust first.
Real demand dataWhich states, which pages, which words, which listings. The thing you thought you did not have.
Direct enquiriesSome. No number promised. Anyone forecasting bookings at day 90 for a new site is guessing with your money.
We guarantee what we control: pages published, tracking running, reports delivered, work shown. We do not guarantee rankings or bookings, because nobody honest can. Month to month, 14 days notice, and everything stays yours.
Direct booking

The highest return move here is a setting, not a build

You asked for the direct listing site in your very first email, back in July. You were right, and it is more within reach than you think.

Your three worries, and what Hospitable actually does
What you saidWhat is actually true
"I gotta deal with insurance"Damage protection is built in. You are not underwriting anything personally.
"and then guest refunds"Cancellation and refund rules are settings you choose once, same as on Airbnb.
"I gotta coordinate with her"It runs inside the Hospitable account she already uses every day. Her workflow does not change and neither does her 15%. One calendar across every channel, so a direct booking blocks the dates on Airbnb and Vrbo instantly. No double booking risk, which is the thing that actually worries managers.
You also mentioned you are looking at whether the management arrangement changes. Either way this holds. If she stays, it is a feature she already pays for. If someone new comes in, a direct booking channel makes the property more attractive to a growth minded co-host, not less.
And the part nobody told you about

Google has a vacation rentals section inside Google Travel. It is separate from search results and separate from Maps, and it is where a lot of people now start planning a group stay.

Hospitable is an official Google connectivity partner. Once a direct booking site exists, Hospitable publishes your property into Google Vacation Rentals for you. No code, no extra software, and no fee to Google. The leads come to your own site.

The catch is the order. Google Vacation Rentals needs a direct site to point at. No direct site, no listing. So turning this on does not only save you the fee spread. It opens a free Google channel you cannot reach any other way, and it is the one channel that puts a big group property in front of people who are actively planning.

This is why direct booking moved from "someday" to a named phase two. It is the only item here that pays twice.

None of this is in the build and we are not charging for it. We are telling you because between the fee spread and the free Google placement it is worth more than anything else on this page. Get the site live and measuring, then flip it on.

Pick your lane

Every lane builds the same site. What changes is what happens after we launch it

The build is $3,000 in all four. Our normal minimum for a build like this is $10,000, and the gap is the Agentic Society rate, written down rather than implied. So what you are actually choosing below is the pace after launch.

Agentic Society rateLane one
$10,000
$3,000
One time. Nothing after it.
  • The full 9 page foundation
  • Hospitable availability calendar
  • Analytics, Search Console, pixel, schema
  • Blog set up and ready to fill
  • Yours on day one
Honest note: a site with no new content is a business card. It fixes the destination problem your ads ran into, and it will not compound on its own.
Lane two
$697
a month after launch. Same $3,000 build.
  • Everything in lane one
  • 2 new pages a month from the 90 day plan
  • 2 posts a month from your welcome guide and guest reviews
  • Self healing. Broken links, slow pages and indexing errors get found and fixed without you reporting them
  • Self learning. Next month's pages get picked from last month's real search data instead of a guess
  • Monthly report in plain English
Enough pace to have something real to look at by day 90. This is the crawl you asked for, moving fast enough to actually arrive.
What we recommendLane three
$997
a month after launch. Same $3,000 build.
  • Everything in lane two
  • 4 new pages a month, double the pace
  • 4 posts a month, double the pace
  • The corporate and extended stay lane gets covered in months instead of quarters
  • Links come faster, because there is more worth linking to
This is the one we would pick for you. Rankings are a frequency game, and four and four is where a brand new domain starts compounding instead of trickling.
Lane four
$1,497
a month after launch. Same $3,000 build.
  • Everything in lane three
  • The site tunes itself to convert. Every month it reads what visitors actually did, then rewrites the pages that are losing them
  • The direct booking path gets watched and improved, not just built once
  • The full loop closed: build, measure, rewrite, repeat, without you in the middle of it
The fully agentic version. The site stops being a brochure you happen to own and starts working on its own behalf every month.

$1,500 today. That is the only thing that starts.

Every button above charges the same $1,500, which is half the $3,000 build. The other half is due the day the site goes live. Picking a lane tells us which direction to build toward over the next 90 days, and that is all it does today.

The monthly is not a contract and it does not start now. It does not begin, and you are not billed a dollar of it, until the site is launched and you tell us to switch it on. If you get to launch and want a different lane than the one you picked, or none of them at all, say so and that is the end of it. The site is yours either way.

Why we would take lane three. Getting found is a frequency game. Pages earn links, links earn authority, authority is what moves a brand new domain up, and content is how all three happen. Two and two gets you there. Four and four gets you there roughly twice as fast, on a lane that already has 1,950 searches a month waiting in it. That is the whole argument, and it is why we would rather you start at $997 and see return sooner than start at $697 and wait longer for it.

There is a ladder above lane four and there is room below it. None of that matters today. Every lane moves up or down in any month with 14 days notice, so the only thing this decision costs you is 90 days of direction.

Social add on

Social is an add on, not a lane. Bolt it onto whichever one you pick

You asked if we could warm up sunsetgrove.nc. We can. It sits outside the four lanes on purpose, because it is a different team doing different work and it should be priced where you can see it. Add it in month one, month six, or never. Here is exactly what it is and is not.

Steady
$497
a month. Three posts a week.
  • 12 to 13 posts a month
  • Written and designed by us, approved by you
  • Property, local guide and guest story content
  • Captions and hashtags handled
  • Scheduled so it runs without you
Enough to look current when somebody checks you out before booking.
Daily
$797
a month. Every day.
  • 30 posts a month
  • Everything in steady
  • Timed to your real season, so the soft September and October window gets pushed
  • Stories alongside the feed
  • Faster follower growth
For when the account should be a channel rather than a credibility check.

What this is not. We do images and written posts. We do not do video editing or Reels production. Our social team is good and it is basic. If you want a Reels heavy strategy, hire a specialist and we will hand them everything. Better to say that now than disappoint you in month two.

Your raw material problem is already solved. 185 professional photos, a written welcome guide, and 214 guest stories with their own words attached. The same library feeds the website and the feed, so nothing gets made twice.

What we need

Almost nothing. You already sent most of it

The photos, the guest database and the listings are already in hand. That is why three weeks is realistic.

1

Buy the domain

sunsetgrovenc.com, in your own account, two years, auto renew and privacy on. We will send the exact steps. Everything waits on this one.

2

Decide on the photos with people in them

You said real people are in the shoot and you are not sure you can use them. That call is yours, not ours, because it is your liability and we are not lawyers. Either confirm you have the right, or tell us to use only the shots without recognisable faces. With 185 photos we have plenty either way.

3

Export your Vrbo reviews

All 121 Airbnb reviews are pulled and the Julianne welcome guide is read cover to cover, so both are done. Vrbo blocked us. You can export yours from the host dashboard in about two minutes, which beats us fighting it. If a Tessa or a combined Sunset Grove welcome guide exists, send it, though what we have is already enough to build a year of content from.

4

One security note, worth two minutes of your attention

Your welcome guide is a great document and it is a guest only document. It contains the exact unit address, the garage and door entry procedure, the wifi password and Marianna's personal mobile number. None of that goes on a public website, and we have locked our copy so it cannot leak into anything we publish. Worth checking wherever else that PDF has been shared.

5

Ask your property manager for Hospitable access

Enough to embed the availability widget. This is the one item outside your control, so starting early keeps it off the critical path. The site launches on time either way and the calendar drops in when access lands. The direct booking conversation can wait for phase two.

6

Two numbers, five minutes

On an Airbnb payout statement, what does the service fee line say, about 15% or about 3%. And in the management agreement, does her 15% come off the gross booking or off the net after Airbnb. Together they turn the range on this page into one exact number.

One decision, not five.

Pick a lane above and pay the $1,500. That is the whole decision. We send a start date the next business day, and item one on this list is genuinely all we need to begin. Everything else can arrive while we build.

Everything we build is yours. The domain sits in your account. The site files, the content and the analytics accounts are all in your name. Month to month with 14 days notice, no contract, no exit fee, because we would rather earn it every month than trap you in it. If you leave, we hand you the files and a one page moving guide and wish you well.

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