If you have never considered renting our your home on a short-term lease, then maybe it is time you should try. If you are someone that rents out their property, then sometimes the best way to bring in a decent income is by renting it on a short-term basis. In order to do this, you will not need a marketing team to set everything up for you. All you need is to dedicate a small amount of time to use simple website listings and your property will soon be turning over a decent weekly rental rate.
Sign Up To A Website Builder
The best website builder for vacation rentals at the moment is Lodify. You pay a monthly rental that is around the same amount, but usually less, than you would pay monthly for maintainance on a custom designed website built by a website designer. At the same time, you save on the initial expense of having to hire a web developer and pay for hosting.
You will need to purchase a domain name, but aside from this, you really don’t need to do anything else on top of this. Included in the Lodgify package is a channel manager, which you will need to sync calendars. There is a complete booking system that allows guests to select their dates, then make a payment by credit or debit card plus other options include check or bank tansfer.
Literally everything you need is built into the system. Furthermore, you have access to 24/7 support, plus the website provided will be fully mobile responsive. We really cannot speak more highly of the Lodgify website builder because the company behind the idea has thought of everything. We also cannot find another vacation rental website builder that can compare.
It is also worth mentioning that if you prefer to have a WordPress site, then Lodgify also has WordPress theme options. If you don’t want to use the Lodgify WordPress themes or if you already have a vacation rental website using another platform, then Lodgify can still help.
Weebly, SquareSpace, Joomla, Wix, and WordPress wigets, html code or plugins can be added to your site so you have a booking system and/or channel manager.
More Information About Lodgify
Take Advantage of Free Vacation Rental Listings
Setting up your own branded website is a great idea, but the marketing involved with having your properties stand out online so people can your site and make bookings is hard work. Therefore, once you have your listings as you want them on your vacation rental website, then you should start to take those lostings over to other vacation rental website where you can begin to gain some bookings.
Sites like VRBO, FlipKey, HomeAway, and Airbnb are all great places to start. These websites have huge marketing teams that are already high up on Google searches, social media, press releases and on other online areas people use to search for information. That means these wbesites are able to pull in a huge amount of traffic thanks to their multi-million dollar marketing budgets.
When someone searches for a short term rental in the area you are looking to rent your property out, they will see your property listed. Now at first it might be hard for them to find your property because you will be lacking in reviews. Therefore, you should set a bargain price to begin with in order to establish yourself on the website.
Most people will use filters on these websites and especially price filters. If you have a nice place that stands out among cheaper properties and explain that this is a special rate because you have no feedback, then you are going to get your first few bookings pretty quickly. You should also guarantee yourself a good review because the guest will be staying in a place on a low budget compared to the quality.
Introducing Guests To Your Website
You will inevitably start to build feedback on all the site your property is listed on. Once this happens you can start to raise your prices, but also intriduce your guests to your website for any future bookings.
The reason you should not introduce them to your website via the free listing website like HomeAway is because this will just get your account ban. Every booking made via these website, a 20% serivce charge is applied to the booking maount. Plus, the guest also pays a booking fee.
That said, once the guest is staying at your property, you can then leave leaflets, business cards, or offer incentives to look at your website. On here you can offer them the same price as you receive from the free website listing. This means if the guests return, then they will get a 20% discount; while you still get exactly the same rate minus the fees from the website.
More Information About Discounts For Guests
Hopefully for those of you that are looking for a better way to earn money out of yopu property you have picked up a few ideas here. Having your own website certainly helps to build up a loyal following of guests for the future, but you should also be listed on the major vacation rental websites to. Furthermore, you not have to follow the procedure in this article to the letter. Some people prefer to list their property for free on Airbnb or HomeAway first. If they feel things are working out positivly, then they start their own website after this.
It is totally down to you how you go about starting out as a vacation rental business owner. Everyone has their own business plan and ideas, and we hope that this article has helped confirm ideas your already had or enlightened you.
