Introducing Homevy Score: Dubai’s First Public Airbnb Listing Audit Tool

If you don’t know what’s wrong with your Airbnb listing, the algorithm & potential guests will tell you… by ignoring it.

Most owners only find out when bookings stop completely. By then, competitors in the same building have snatched months of your revenue. We’ve watched it happen across several portfolios in Dubai. And for the last few months, we’ve been lowkey building a tool to help.

That tool is called the Homevy Score – an Airbnb listing audit tool built inside our property management company, used internally at first, and now opened up to Airbnb hosts in Dubai for only $0.99, less than a cup of coffee.

Here’s the full story.

TL;DR: What Homevy Score Is and Why It Exists

• Homevy Score is a public-facing Airbnb listing audit tool launched in 2026 by Homevy,  Dubai’s most intentional holiday homes company.
• Homevy Score analyses any Dubai Airbnb listing across 10 sub-scores (Superhost status, Guest Favorite eligibility, title, photos, amenities, description, pricing signals, competitive positioning, review gaps, and a prioritised fix list).
• The price is $0.99 per single report, $3 for a 5-report bundle. The goal isn’t revenue; it’s qualification.
• It serves two audiences. Self-managing hosts who want clarity, and property owners using it as a second-opinion audit on their current property manager.
• Homevy Score was originally built as an internal tool for Homevy’s own portfolio, then opened to the Dubai market so everyone can benefit from it.

Dubai’s STR Market in 2026: Why an Audit Tool Matters Right Now

The Dubai short-term rental market in 2026 is harder than it looks from the outside. Average Airbnb occupancy across the city sits between 44% and 73%. The gap between top-performing listings and average ones has widened significantly in the past 12 months.

Three things are happening at once.

1. Supply is going up – Dubai is on track to deliver tens of thousands of new units in 2026 alone, with a heavy concentration of studios and 1-bedrooms in JVC, Dubai South, MBR City, Business Bay, and Dubailand. More supply means more competition for the same guest searches.
2. Demand has been volatile since the regional disruption that began in late February. Over 226,500 short-term rental bookings were cancelled across the UAE in the first month of the conflict. Some operators saw occupancy drop from 90% to under 20% in three weeks.
3. Airbnb’s algorithm is tougher than ever. Photo captions, amenity completeness, response rate, and Guest Favorite eligibility now carry more ranking weight than they did 12 months ago. Listings that don’t meet up are often demoted in search results without their owners realising it.

In a market like this, “I think my listing is doing okay” isn’t good enough anymore. You need data on where you rank, what’s missing, and which fixes will get you results.

That’s the problem Homevy Score solves.

How Homevy Score Started: The Internal Tool Everyone Wanted

Homevy Score wasn’t built as a product for the public. It was initially built for our own portfolio.

Kyle Johnson, our CEO and one of the technical brains behind most of Homevy’s systems, built something similar in late 2025. We had a property in a strong area performing below expectations. We’d done all the obvious things: professional photos, good description, dynamic pricing. The numbers still weren’t where they should be.

So Kyle built a script. It pulled data from the listing, compared it against the top performers in the same building and area, and surfaced the gaps. 

• The title was missing two keywords every top listing had. 
• Amenity list was missing four amenities guests in that area filtered for. 
• Photo order had the bathroom before the living room. 
• The hero image wasn’t the property’s strongest angle.

We fixed it, and bookings recovered within three weeks.

Then we ran the script on every property in the Homevy portfolio. The findings were uncomfortable…well at first. Even our best-performing listings had two or three optimisations needed. But we got to work and rolled out the fixes.

The results showed up in our monthly performance index. October 2025: Homevy averaged 91.97% occupancy versus the Dubai average of 75.6%. November 2025: 95.52% versus 81.19%. By the end of 2025, 13 properties hit 100% occupancy in a single month.

Image by Homevy

The script worked, and we continued using it internally. It was our little secret.

Then came the disruption that happened to the Dubai market in late February 2026. Occupancy crashed overnight, and we had to double down on optimizing our listings, while pivoting to monthly stays.

This led to us doubling down on our internal script. Then one bright Wednesday afternoon; Kyle figured we could make this an actual tool where we could just paste in the URL and get the fixes. 

We later shared it with a small circle of fellow hosts and property managers. Within weeks, they were reporting similar results – higher rankings, more bookings, better reviews. 

What Homevy Score Analyses

Homevy Score evaluates any Airbnb listing across 10 sub-scores and 47 data points. each weighted by how much it actually moves bookings. Every sub-score returns a specific gap Here’s the full breakdown.

Two things make this different from generic Airbnb listing checklists.

1. The benchmarks are local. The tool doesn’t compare your villa in Palm Jumeirah to a studio in Deira. It compares it to the actual competition: same building, same configuration, same price band.
2. The fix list is prioritised. You get a ranked list with a clear “fix this first” at the top.

How to Run Your First Homevy Score Scan (Step-by-Step)

Running a scan takes 60 seconds.

1. Go to homevy.com and find the score tool
2. Paste your Airbnb listing URL.
3. Enter your email and WhatsApp number.
4. Pay $0.99 (or $3 for a 5-report bundle if you have multiple listings).
5. Wait for the email. Full report arrives in under 5 minutes.

The report is delivered as a clean PDF and a web view. You can read it on the phone, share it with a partner, or forward it to a property manager. It’s fully yours.

If you want help implementing the fixes, our services page has several options. If you just want a quick conversation about the report, we handle those personally and you can send us a Whatsapp message.

Why We Charge $0.99 for a Tool We Could Give Away

A single Homevy Score report costs $0.99. A 5-report bundle costs $3. The pricing isn’t a discount, a teaser, or a freemium hook. It’s a deliberate filter.

Free tools attract tire-kickers and people who’ll never actually fix anything. Anyone willing to put a card in and pay $1 signals some seriousness – they own a property, and they’re going to read the report. That alone makes the tool more valuable to use.

The long and short of all these is that – a tool you pay for is a tool you’ll use.

Who Homevy Score Is Built For

Homevy Score serves two audiences with one tool, and the way each audience uses it is different.

Image by investarabian

The first audience is self-managing hosts in Dubai. Owners who wrote the listing themselves, picked the photos, set the price, and have no objective benchmark for whether any of it is working. These are the hosts who built their listing in 2023 or 2024, posted it, and haven’t seriously revisited it since. The market changed underneath them, and most don’t know by how much.

For these owners, Homevy Score is a clarity tool. They get a number, a fix list, and a 60-second answer to “is my listing actually optimised?”

The second audience is owners who already have a property manager.

These owners pay 15-25% management fees and assume their property manager is handling listing optimisation as part of the package. Most of the time, they have no way to verify that. Homevy Score gives them a second-opinion audit. If the property manager is doing strong work, the report confirms it and the owner can sleep well. If the report shows obvious gaps (missing photo captions, no Guest Favorite progress, amenity list six items short of building standard) that’s a real conversation to have with the PM.

Sample Homevy Score Report Walkthrough

Here’s what a Homevy Score report looks like (anonymised from a property in Business Bay we ran during beta).

Overall Score: 64/100

Now 64/100 isn’t a disaster. It also isn’t winning. Most listings we run land between 45 and 75 on first scan. Above 85 is rare and usually held by Superhosts who’ve been iterating for two-plus years.

Sub-Score Breakdown:

• Title Quality: 6/10 (missing two of the five highest-converting keywords for Business Bay 1-beds)
• Photo Optimization: 5/10 (no captions on first 5 photos, photo 1 is the kitchen instead of the view)
• Amenity Completeness: 4/10 (missing parking, washer, pool, and “long stays” amenity flag)
• Description Quality: 7/10 (strong opening, weak middle, missing a clear “who this is for”)
• Competitive Positioning: 8/10 (priced correctly, just under-discovered)
• Superhost Status: Active, healthy
• Guest Favorite: 11 reviews short, average rating already at 4.92

Prioritised Fix List:

1. Add captions to photos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with location keywords (estimated impact: +8-12% impressions, fixable tonight)
2. Re-order photos so the view is photo 1 (impact: +3-5% click-through, fixable tonight)
3. Add the four missing amenities (impact: appears in 4 additional filtered searches, fixable tonight)
4. Rewrite the middle of the description with specifics (impact: +2-4% conversion, 30 minutes of work)
5. Update title to include “Business Bay 1BR with View” pattern (impact: keyword relevance, 5 minutes)
6. Push for 11 more reviews to hit Guest Favorite threshold (impact: badge eligibility, 30-60 days)
7. Adjust pricing curve on weekend nights (impact: +5-7% rate without occupancy loss, tested over 2 weeks)

What Our Teammates Say About Homevy Score

We sat down with Shinnel Johnson, Homevy’s co-founder and head of operations, and asked her: across the hundreds of listings the team has audited internally, what are the recurring gaps?

Image by Homevy

“Photo captions. It’s the single most missed thing in Dubai. Hosts upload 30 beautiful photos and don’t write a word under any of them. The algorithm reads those captions for relevance matching. A property with captioned photos and a property with uncaptioned photos can have identical photo quality and the captioned one ranks higher. It’s free real estate that almost no one uses.“

“After that, amenity gaps,” Kay chips in. People list ‘WiFi, kitchen, AC’ and stop. Meanwhile, every top performer in the building has 30+ amenities listed including the niche ones (workspace, coffee maker, beach essentials, long-stays-friendly). Filtered searches drop your listing from the results when you don’t list the amenity, even if the property has it.”

“Third one is description copy. Most descriptions in Dubai read like specs sheets. Bedroom dimensions, square metres, building name. Nothing about who the space is for, what it feels like, why someone should book it. Description copy doesn’t change rank, but it absolutely changes conversion.”

These three (captions, amenities, description) account for the majority of the “instant fixable” items in most reports we run. They’re the boring, high-impact fixes that move bookings in 30 days.

Homevy is Playing the Long Game

The Dubai short-term rental industry is in a vulnerable moment.

Some property management companies are slowly winding down operations, switching to long-term-only management, or laying off their growth and tech teams. The market has gotten harder for sure.

Homevy is doing the opposite. We’re continually  building. We’re shipping a public tool that gives away part of our internal optimisation playbook.

That isn’t a hero story but a strategic bet. The Dubai market in 2026 is going to reward operators who keep investing through the hard period. The owners we’re building Homevy Score for, the ones running their own listings or auditing their PM, are going to remember which companies kept building regardless.

A tool that costs $0.99 and gives a real, useful answer is the simplest way to prove we still know what we’re doing. 

What’s Next: The Roadmap Beyond Homevy Score

The next 12 months on the Homevy product roadmap include:

• Listing Rescan Alerts – WhatsApp notifications when a host’s listing drops in algorithmic ranking, so they can rescan and see what changed.
• Building Benchmarks – A free read-only view of how a building’s listings perform on average (occupancy, ADR, review scores). Useful for owners considering a purchase in a building.
• Pricing Strategy Layer – A pricing recommendation built on top of Homevy Score that goes deeper than dynamic pricing engines (which optimise for a single goal). Ours optimises for the host’s stated objective: max occupancy, max ADR, or balanced.
• PM Performance Dashboard. For owners managed by a property manager, a quarterly dashboard pulled from Homevy Score scans showing how their listing has changed over time.

Frequently Asked Questions About Homevy Score

What does Homevy Score cost?

A single Homevy Score report costs $0.99. A bundle of 5 reports costs $3. The pricing is intentionally low to filter for serious hosts, not to maximise revenue.

How long does the report take to arrive?

Under 5 minutes. The teaser email (with your score and number of issues) arrives instantly. The full report arrives after the $0.99 payment, usually within 2-3 minutes.

Does Homevy Score work for any Airbnb listing or only Dubai listings?

Homevy Score works across any Airbnb listing and across any country in the world, not just Dubai alone. 

Can I use Homevy Score to audit my property manager?

Yes. This is one of the two main use cases. If your property manager is doing good work, the report confirms it. If there are gaps, the report shows you exactly where. Many of the owners using Homevy Score in beta were in this exact situation. 

The Homevy Score data – is it public or proprietary?

The base data (Airbnb listing data, market pricing, competitor positioning) is publicly available. The benchmarking layer (how your listing compares to top performers in your specific building or area) and the prioritised fix list are proprietary, built from Homevy’s internal portfolio optimisation work.

What’s the difference between Homevy Score and dynamic pricing tools like PriceLabs?

Homevy Score is a listing audit tool. It tells you what’s wrong with the listing itself. Dynamic pricing tools like PriceLabs adjust your nightly rate. The two are complementary, not competing. It’s best you use both. We covered the comparison in detail here.

Who built Homevy Score?

Homevy Score was built by Kyle Johnson (kyle) and Homevy’s internal tech team. It started as an internal tool in late 2025 and was opened to the Dubai market in 2026.

Take the First Step With Homevy Score Today

Homevy Score exists so you’re able to better optimize your listings. The Airbnb and short term rental market is tougher now, and “I think the listing is doing okay” is no longer a strategy.

For only $0.99 per report, you see exactly where your listing is missing bookings and which fixes will get you results.

If you want us to handle the implementation after you see the report, book a free audit call with us by just reaching out on Whatsapp. And if you want to keep running it yourself, the report tells you everything you need.

Either way, the first move is to actually look.