If you’re a Vacation Rental Manager looking for the best way to manage your holiday properties, Your.Rentals has got you covered! Not only do we have a bunch of great features to help you create, publish your listings and manage your bookings across different channels such as Airbnb and Vrbo, but we’ve also got years of experience in the industry and we’ve learned many valuable things throughout this time that we want to share with you!
We know how much effort it takes to be a great vacation rental manager. But we have compiled a list for you to become a first-class short-term rental manager quickly and easily. Check out our 6 top tips on what to do (and not do) to make your property management experience top-notch!
Set the right prices for your rental properties
There comes a time when you have to choose the price for your vacation rentals, and if you have been in the short-term rental industry for a long time, this step might be a piece of cake for you. However, if you have a new property in a new market or are just getting into the vacation rental industry, this step can be quite confusing.
The easiest way to set the right prices for your vacation rental property is to check first how your competitors are doing and carry out market research. The second step is to set the basic nightly rate. The best way to do it is to take into account the market research you have done and other factors like the season of the year that you get most guests. According to the basic rate you choose, the seasonal rates and offers will be calculated based on this first-set price. Therefore you might want to keep that in mind when you get to the point where you have to choose your vacation rental prices.
Failing to do adequate research, and instead just setting your nightly prices based on what you want to earn per month, or on what you think is fair based on your own opinion is something you definitely should not do. If you do it this way you are risking to overvalue your property and not get any bookings or on the other hand, undervalue your property and lose potential income.
Add stunning Photographs
A picture paints a thousand words, and in this case, it might even paint a thousand guests! Listings with quality pictures get 63% more clicks than those with bad quality images. And in fact, guests like to see and imagine where they are going to stay during their awaited vacation time. Therefore, if you manage to create a positive feeling when they look at the pictures, you will most likely convince them to book your property. But how do you do this?
You can either hire a professional photographer to highlight the qualities of your property and make your listing much more attractive or if you have or can borrow a high-quality camera you can try to do it yourself. However, the holiday house photographs will always be better if it is a professional who is in charge. Your.Rentals has a guide on how to take vacation rental photographs for those short-term rental managers who like to get things done by themselves!
Things you should never do: taking photos with your old, out-of-date phone, not paying attention to the lighting, not planning the staging of the photograph, neglecting details or just publishing one picture per room or space. Also do not ignore editing the pictures before putting them on the listing. The prettier the better!
Update your vacation rental calendars
Something that the sales channels like Airbnb, Vrbo or Booking.com value a lot is the availability of a listing. Keeping your property available is something that will definitely help you rank higher in Booking.com, Tripadvisor and other vacation rental websites. What actions should you take to keep your vacation rental calendars updated?
Our recommendation is to keep your availability calendar up to date, ensuring you enter every reservation and that every booked date is blocked. If possible you should use Calendar Sync to automatically synchronise your calendar with the listings on different rental platforms to avoid double bookings and save time. Check out Your.Rentals Calendar Synchronization tool.
Do not add minimum or maximum length of stay rules, this will make the search engine of the rental sites show your property less. Also, having many unavailable dates will negatively affect your listings’ performance in search engines. One more thing to take into consideration is to try to never cancel a booking made by a guest. This usually happens with double bookings, but you can say goodbye to these awkward situations with calendar synchronisation.
Personalize your Vacation Rental Listing’s title
The title is what first captures the attention of travellers so it is very important to take your time to choose it. Of course, what follows the title is a description and a good combination of both is what will help your rental business to get clients. Find how to write a good description for your vacation home here. Anyway, first things first, a good title will lead the travellers to read the description, therefore, this is what you should and should not do with your vacation rental’s title:
Write descriptive titles that include the main characteristics of your property, capacity and location. Think about the most valuable element of your property, and add it in the title in a way that attracts your ideal guests. For example, if you rent a cottage in The Alps and it has a cosy fireplace, that is a good trigger to attract your ideal guests! Or if one of your short-term rentals is a summer house 5 minutes away from the beach, that is a good element to highlight in the title as well. The key is to show the aspect of your property that your ideal guests desire the most!
Some titles that will not stand out from the crowd will be those with generic adjectives such as “good”, “beautiful”, “comfortable”, etc. Or those who are either too short or too long and do not optimize the space given by the short-term rental platforms. Choosing a title will affect positively or negatively the performance of your listing, therefore not testing the different titles you have chosen is also a very common mistake. You can ask your friends or family which one sounds more attractive and you will already be increasing your chances to get more bookings.
Show your Vacation Rental Business Reviews
We, as humans, do not like the unknown. And you, as a short-term rental professional can help your potential clients to know more about you through other guest’s reviews. This will make your listings more attractive but also reliable. For example, in Your.Rentals we have a Capterra and a Trustpilot account to be able to receive reviews and learn from them. Look what our customers say about us.
Asking your guests for reviews nicely is a must for your vacation rental business to grow. There are many ways you can ask for a review, if you manage to do it in an original way that will add a plus to your properties. Besides, reviews are very valuable to business owners because they allow them to know what aspects of the property are making your guests happy and which ones need improvement.
Being afraid of the reviews and not asking for them is one of the worst mistakes that you can make as an owner or property manager. Some owners do not add reviews to their property’s listing to avoid getting bad comments, but in fact, this only harms your image and makes your business look less reliable. Of course, not all the reviews will be positive-or if you manage to do so, GOOD JOB!- but managing and answering to those “not that happy” customers is what makes you look trustworthy and committed to your work.
Get as much visibility in your listings as you can.
It is all about exposure. The well-established rental channels are the ones that will bring you new potential customers and visibility. Nevertheless, pushing your direct bookings is a way to gain more value to your holiday rental business. We encourage property managers to have a good balance between bookings from different sales channels like Airbnb or Vrbo and bookings straight to your website or email.
Using a Channel Manager to automatically list your property on multiple rental sites is the fastest and easiest way to receive bookings. With Your.Rentals you can publish your properties on more than 20 different platforms and only pay when you get results. Besides, we offer many functionalities to make your business more efficient and profitable.
Listing your properties only on Airbnb or Booking.com may make you lose customers who are better suited to your property and who would leave better ratings. There are tons of specialized rental websites for specific groups. Find out with our Channel Advisor exactly which rental platforms are right for your holiday home listings.
Conclusion
There are many actions that you can carry out to improve your rental business, and always reviewing and checking those actions is what will make your properties succeed. As you can see in this article we gave you some tips to make your vacation rental business more profitable, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. By signing up in Your.Rentals you will receive the latest news and tips about the vacation rental business to always keep your properties updated and profitable.
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