Share VRS284 – Making Your First Vacation Rental Staff Hire with Sue Jones of HR4VR This can be an overwhelming business and deciding to hire your first employee is daunting, even if the goal is to free up your time. Where do you find the right person, how do you choose what they should do, what will the first weeks be like, and how do you make sure they like […]
Share VRS245 – How to Outsource and Other Vacation Rental Tips with Craig Reid Are you doing dull, repetitive tasks that have you saying, “I shouldn’t be doing this”? Is your time spent on boring jobs that prevent you from working on projects that can deliver much greater value to your business? Is that a yes? I’m sure it is for many small business owners who plow through myriad […]
Share 10 Ways to Build Your Vacation Rental Business and Still Have Free Time “When I tell people we are close to Cancun, they envision umbrella drinks, beach, relaxation … my reality is Home Depot, Costco, Mega, etc.” (Post on Facebook group) Ask vacation rental owners how many hours a week they spend on managing their vacation rental property, and you’ll probably receive vague replies. Few owners accurately assess […]
Share VRS244 – Achieving Vacation Rental Listing Site Independence with Lynne Arbuthnott Getting independence from the OTAs usually means a couple of things. You have to work hard at it and have to know what your goals are. It’s no good just cutting ties with Home Away or Airbnb and declaring you are going it alone. Not if you want to continue to drive traffic to your […]
Share VRS243 – 10 Things You Must Do To Stay In Business We are in a new era of our business. We’ve moved from talking about ‘vacation rentals’ to using the term ‘short-term rental’; Airbnb has become a verb; major hotel groups are moving into our space with years of hospitality experience and a strong competitive edge, and we have to watch our backs every day as […]
Share VRS242 – Getting Ahead Of Vacation Rental Regulations with Megan McCrea Regulations – Legislation – Advocacy – Licensing – Lodging Taxes. These are words that are a part of our short-term rental vocabulary and they aren’t going away. In light of the decision by San Diego’s City Council to ban rentals in secondary homes the importance of getting up to date on the current and pending […]
Share Five Vacation Rental Management Tasks to Outsource and Automate Steve Milo, founder and CEO of VTrips (formerly Vacation Rental Pros), was managing 125 properties before he hired his first full-time staff. He explained how he did this in this interview on the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. VTrips now manages over 2,000 properties across the U.S., and is one of the largest independent property management […]
Share The Things We Forget – Being Proactive and Not Reactive Building a vacation rental business involves a lot of moving parts. From staging the property, taking photographs, and sourcing the right linens and towels, to choosing the best reservation system, communicating with guests, and everything in between — it can be tough to manage it all. Occasionally, something will slip through the cracks, and when […]
Share How Tech Can Elevate Your Vacation Rental Business Back in the good old days of renting out a vacation home, when a sign on the lawn and a classified ad was all you needed to score a fully occupied season, there was nothing technical about it. All you needed was a calendar, a spreadsheet, a fax machine, a telephone (yes, we spoke to […]
Share Do-It-Yourself Short-Term Vacation Rental Management It’s a lot easier to self-manage a vacation home than it was 10 years ago. Online vacation rental companies like Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO make it less time-consuming by taking care of the processes that used to be manual. Updating calendars, managing rate tables, altering text, and uploading photos can be done with minimal effort. […]
