Pricing
How I price my Turo Corvette
I host a 2023 C8 in Dallas–Fort Worth. Here's what I actually do every week, including the part I got wrong for about four months.
A Corvette is a strange car to price. There's no obvious answer the way there is with a Camry, where forty identical listings sit within ten miles of you and the market already decided what a day costs. But it's not an exotic either. You can't just invent a number and wait for somebody's birthday.
When I listed mine I did what most people do. I looked at two or three other C8s, picked something in the middle, and left it there. It booked, so I figured I'd solved it. Then over the summer three more C8s showed up in my market at rates well under mine, and my calendar went quiet for two weeks before I noticed why.
So now I check every week. It takes five minutes. Here's what I'm looking at.
Who you're actually competing with
The mistake is comparing yourself only to other Corvettes. Your guest isn't doing that. They typed a date range into Turo and they're scrolling a page with a bunch of cars on it.
For my car, the list that matters includes the other C8s, obviously. But it also includes the Mustang GTs and Scat Packs, because those set the number a guest has in their head before they even get to my listing. It includes the 911s and M4s, because those define how high anybody in my market is willing to go before they decide to just rent the Porsche instead. And it includes C7s, which I underrated for a long time. Somebody searching “Corvette” sees both. A C7 at $110 makes my C8 at $200 a harder sell than I'd like.
Write down what each one charges. Then write down how many trips they have. That second number is the one people skip and it's where the information is.
The median, and only the listings that book
Don't use the average. One host with a $400 fantasy rate drags it up and tells you nothing. The median is the price in the middle of the list, which is roughly what a guest experiences as “normal” while scrolling.
But filter first. A listing at $260 with two trips is one host hoping. A listing at $135 with ninety trips is a fact. I only take the median of cars that are clearly booking, and that number usually comes out a bit higher than the median of everything, because the dead listings sitting at low rates pull the raw number down.
Then decide where you want to sit relative to it, and be honest about why. Under the median is fine if you're new and buying reviews, as long as you pick a date to stop. At the median is the default and there's nothing wrong with it. Above it you need a reason a guest can see from the search page. Mine is Hypersonic Gray with the red interior and the Z51 package, which is rare enough in DFW to carry a premium, but only a small one. I found the ceiling by going past it and watching the bookings stop.
Don't price every day the same
This is the change that made the most difference for me. A Corvette is a weekend car. Friday and Saturday are a completely different market from Tuesday, and running one flat rate across both means you're either too expensive midweek or too cheap on the weekend. Usually both.
My weekend number is the high one. Sunday through Thursday drops meaningfully, because weekday renters on a sports car are mostly locals with a car in the shop or someone in town for work, and they shop on price in a way weekend guests don't. Event weekends I set by hand, weeks ahead. Turo's automation has no idea when there's a race at Texas Motor Speedway or a big show in Fort Worth.
I also keep my weekly and monthly discounts smaller than the defaults suggest. Ten days on a C8 is real wear, and the discount should reflect that instead of copying whatever the slider lands on.
The number I didn't know for too long
Your daily rate isn't your income. Turo keeps a share of every trip, and how much depends on which earnings plan you're on: 70, 80, or 90 percent to you, with the higher-paying plans leaving more damage responsibility on your side of the line. Dallas is also one of the markets where hosts on the 90 plan can keep the full trip price on trips booked far enough ahead, so two identical rates on two different calendars genuinely don't pay the same.
What I eventually sat down and worked out was my floor. Take the daily rate, multiply by my share, then subtract what a day actually costs me: the loan payment, the off-platform insurance, storage, and a real reserve for tires and brakes. On a C8 the consumables are not a rounding error. Whatever's left has to be positive.
That floor came out higher than I'd assumed. Knowing it is the reason I stopped taking bad midweek bookings out of anxiety about an empty calendar. Some of those trips were costing me money and I was treating them as wins.
The weekly habit
That's really all of it. Once a week I open a Turo search for my market, run Compare, and look at one thing: where does my rate sit against the current median of cars that are booking? If nothing moved I close the tab. If three new C8s appeared at forty under me, I know now instead of in three weeks.
Pricing a Corvette isn't a decision you make once. It's a five-minute chore, and everything above is just how to read what it tells you.
The five-minute version
Pricing Lab is the Chrome extension I built to do this. It reads the Turo search page you already have open, pulls your comps, shows the local median and where you rank against it, and works out what you keep after Turo's share. No Turo login, and nothing changes on your listing unless you click.
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Pricing Lab is built by a Turo host and isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Turo Inc. Earnings plan terms and market rules change, so check Turo's current host documentation for what applies to your account.