Renting your vacation rental property
So, you bought or built a wonderful property and now you are thinking to rent it.
Regardless if this is a full time rental designed as an investment property or if
you are simply trying to make up some of the mortgage money by renting it our during
the times when you are not using it, the problems with renting your property are
always the same. In this little guide we will try to give you some ideas, suggestions
and tips that will help you overcome some of these issues and problems and pave
your path to a better rental business.
The biggest problem that a vacation rental owner has is reaching out to the travelers
and renters out there. For a hotel or a motel chain it's easier. They have the
proper sales channels and funds to have advertising and always be in front of the
traveler's eyes. On top of that, a hotel has reputation and has a certain expected
level of service. For most travelers it is much easier to go into a search engine
and use one of the hotel sites out there and get something that provides most of
what they want. So, how do you fight with that? You are an owner, maybe a family
business. You maybe have a full time job and don't have the necessary time to
dedicate yourself to sales and marketing. And most important, you don't have too
many funds laying around waiting for you to start a marketing campaign. Well, let's
see what you can do?
First off, create a professional looking listing. You don't need to hire anyone
for that nor do you need to spend a lot of time creating a poem about your property.
Follow these simple rules: create grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs
and describe the most important aspects of your property in your own words. Take
good pictures of the outside and inside of your property. Since you do not have
a name like Hilton to flash on a website, you need to be able to capture the visitor
with a state of the art listing. We have a full guide about taking pictures, so
make sure you check that one as well.
So, back to your property listing: spend a little time writing down your property
description. At VacationRentalsLounge we designed our property edit section with
you in mind. We separated your property description into small atomic sub-sections.
This allows you to gather your thoughts and focus them on one item at a time. For
example: the living room. Does it face the lake? Add something brief like "with
a beautiful view of the lake, you will never want to close the curtains." Make
the visitors feel as if they are in your house now. Make them understand how much
you care about your house and push those feelings onto them. Remember, people looking
for a rental house are people looking for something more personal than a hotel room.
They want more of a real experience, something new, something exciting. Bring that
excitement with your description and pictures.
On the other hand, a sloppy, poorly written or too short description will turn off
the visitors. That's the last thing you want to happen, because for every sloppy
description out there, there are 10 better ones and you will lose your visitors
to one of them.
So, our main and major suggestion to you is: spend the right time and come up with
a proper description and a good set of representative pictures for your property.
The second major suggestion is more of a commandment: Thou shall always be honest
about your property. Never lie or somehow imply something that isn't there.
Remember that for a rental owner word of mouth is by far the fastest and most effective
marketing strategy. Make a visitor feel good, he/she will refer your rental to a
friend or family. But if you are not being honest about your property, not only
you will forever lose that traveler, you will also lose all the potential referrals
that he/she would've made.
Together with the tip above comes an obvious one: keep a clean house and provide
enough entertainment in the house. Have board games, install a BBQ, put a volleyball
net outside or a ping-pong table. These are not huge expenses, but they will make
a big difference in the mind of the visitor.
Since we mentioned that the word of mouth is an important marketing strategy, always
have a testimonials or guest book on the premises and encourage people to sign it
and give their thoughts. Have a stack of flyers or business cards that a traveler
can take along and pass it to others. VacationRentalsLounge allows you to create
a PDF flyer from your listing. You can print this flyer and display it in your property.
Now that you have an understanding of the general framework of your rental business,
let's look at advertising. There are a lot of places where you can post free
ads or low priced ads. Nevertheless you should concentrate your efforts on those
places where you get the most benefit, otherwise you will have a lot of wasted time
and no results. Listing your property with VacationRentalsLounge is an excellent
idea because you get a lot of exposure as a result of our continuous search engine
optimization efforts and coordinated marketing strategies that boost our entries
in the top of the listings. Remember, the more hits your property page gets, the
more popular it becomes. So, one idea is to insert your VacationRentalsLounge property
page link into your email signature, forum signature or blog pages. In this way,
you are now working to attract traffic to your page!
And last, but definitely not least, be patient. There is no instant gratification
in this business. There are literally thousands of rentals out there, probably a
few hundred in your area. You are all competing for the same travelers so to penetrate
to them you will have to pass through a wall built overtime by all the other owners
out there. But, with a well articulated description, a conscious online presence
for your property and an extremely valuable assistance provided by VacationRentalsLounge
you will start to see results very quickly. But if you don't see them right
away, don't despair. It will happen, just keep refining your entry and advertise
your property!
Good Luck,
VacationRentalsLounge Team
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