Best ways to market your vacation home

Written by Posted On Friday, 11 December 2015 12:45
Photo provided by Orlandovacation.com Photo provided by Orlandovacation.com

Renting out your vacation home for shortor long-term periods is an ideal way to bring in an extra income. But how will potential guests learn that you have such property available?

List Your Property on Multiple Websites

There are several Vacation Rental Marketplace websites on which you can list your property, such as Airbnb, HomeAway and VRBO which cover the entire world, and local sites such as OrlandoVacation.com which specializes only in a specific city.

An essential way to market your vacation home is to list it on each of these sites. Potential guests may search every site when they are looking for a good location at a good price, or they may deal with just one site that they have particular trust in. As a result, it’s important that your property be represented on every single one.

Pay special attention to your headline, description and property photos.

When someone conducts a search for accommodations in a city, they are presented with a grid of search results consisting of a photo of a room or home and a headline.

And that’s it.

As a result, obviously that featured photo and the headline are extremely important to catch the eye of your potential rental.

The headline can specify the distance to a landmark. For example:

·       “10 minutes from Times Square”

·       “3-Bedroom Heated Home Just 4 Miles from Cooperstown”

Snow sports enthusiasts will be particular interested in the location. For example:

·       “On slopes, ski in/out”

·       “Five minutes from mountain”

The photographs you take of the property and the surrounding area are particularly important. You may have the most beautiful home in the world, but if the photos are dark and taken from the wrong angle, it will not do you any good.

What kinds of photos should you take?

Well, potential renters will want to see what the bedrooms look like, and the bathroom. A photo of the exterior of the home is also useful, as people traveling with kids will want to see if there’s a backyard, as well as any nearby locations of interest such as a public transportation stop, a park, gardens and so on.

These websites also allow you to provide a photo of yourself and a brief biography, which helps to generate trust.  The same advice applies – make sure you use a photograph that shows your face and isn’t too dark.

Ensure the Property Matches Expectations

Each Vacation Rental Marketplace website allows your renters to post reviews of their experience in your property, and these reviews are extremely important in helping other searchers decide to choose to rent your place over those of your competition in the same area.

To that end, make sure all appliances are working properly and fix them if they aren’t. The same holds true for heating or air conditioning units.

Because positive reviews are so important, it’s a good idea to go the extra mile to ensure that your guests have an enjoyable experience.

Think about providing a guide to “what to see and do” in the neighborhood, as well as instructions to all public transport options if your guests will not have a car. Suggest your favorite restaurants, museums and parks.

Marketing Your Property in Other Locations

Although you should always deal with your renters through a Vacation Rental Marketplace website to ensure that payment goes smoothly, you can certainly advertise your property in other locations.

For every city, in its Housing section, there will be aVacation Rentals section. You can describe your property here and provide photos – but just as with the marketplace websites, you will not give out your name or address. Interested parties will have to contact you and you can then direct them to your marketplace listing.

You can also place a video of your homeon YouTube or Vimeo.com. However, unlike YouTube, Vimeo doesn’t allow people to view videos unless they create an account, so YouTube gets the higher traffic.

As with your photographs, the quality of the video is extremely important. While you do not need to hire a professional to do the video, it must have a professional appearance. If you’re using a hand-held camera be careful to hold it steady or slowly pan when taking shots. If there’s a lot of extraneous material, edit it out using MovieMaker or some other video program. Put in some copyright free music as well (from such websites as bensound.com or creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos).

Conduct a walk-around of the exterior of the location, then go inside and show every room that your guests will have access to, paying special attention to the bedroom and the bathroom. Many people may not care about the state of the bedroom – as long as there’s a bed in the room, but they will want to be able to see that the bathroom is very clean.

Word-of-Mouth Referrals Are Essential

As with many businesses, word-of-mouth referrals are extremely important. People trust their friends, and if someone returns from a stay at your home and tells all their friends about it, chances are a couple of those folks are going to want to stay at your place the next time they go to your city for vacation or a business trip.

These types of recommendations are as important, if not more important, than those positive reviews on the marketplace websites. After all, you actually have to wait for someone to find your listing on the website before they can read those positive reviews; whereas people who have had good experiences with you will actively seek out people to tell them of their good experience.

While you should always deal with renters through one of the marketplace websites, there’s no reason why you can’t contact your past guests on your own. Ask them for their email address, and ask them if it’s okay for you to send them an occasional newsletter. (Make sure you get their permission in writing, by the way.)

Then, just create a simple newsletter sharing what’s going on in your city on a month-to-month basis, which you send out to your former guests. If something is happening that they might be interested in, they may well make plans to return to the city to attend the activity, and stay in your place.

It’s always good to stay in touch with guests, since you want them to be return guests.


I hope this article is helpful to you if you are looking to buy a vacation home. If the home you are buying a home located near Disney World or in the Orlando/Kissimmee  Florida area, please check out my website at http://www.orlandovacation.com/home-rentals/ or give me a call at 1-800-641-4008 ext 7007. I would love to talk with you about managing house.

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Trey Duling

Trey Duling is the owner of Orlandovacation.com. He has been managing and renting vacation homes in Orlando since 2001. If you have a vacation home in the Orlando area and you are looking for a property manager give Trey a call at 1-800-633-7108 ext 7007.

www.orlandovacation.com

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