Hello everyone! Today, we’re going to dive into a very exciting topic: how to start a vacation rental business.
1. Research and Planning:
The first thing you should do is to make a good market research. This will help you find opportunities in terms of location, type of housing, prices and knowledge of the competition. A good market study will save you a lot of headaches since you will be able to know beforehand what your potential clients need and therefore, offer it to them from the beginning. This will help you save a lot of time.
2. Choosing the Right Property:
Once you have done your market research, you will know what your potential customers need. One type of valuable information you should collect is the type of housing your target audience needs. For example: It is not the same to worry about buying an apartment than a house. There is also a big difference between a very large house, in which many people can be accommodated (a group of friends), a house for a single person who is staying for a few days for work or a house for a family with 2 children who are spending 5 days on vacation. Taking into account the economic capacity of your target audience, you will opt for a “luxury” property or a more demure property.
3. Legalities and Regulations:
Now comes the “boring” part. You must know all the laws regarding: opening a business, housing laws, vacation rental laws, how to make a good vacation rental contract so you don’t have problems in the future, etc… It is fundamental so that your business is not affected by legal aspects. This is usually a great source of loss of money for those people who do not take into account all the legal aspects.
4. Establishing a Management System:
The use of business management tools as short term rental property management software or Airbnb PMS is fundamental to automate processes and therefore save money. There are tools that allow you to connect all your customer acquisition channels and traffic to have a global view on a single screen, extract useful reports for your business and therefore increase your sales percentage. These types of tools are the ones that will allow you to take your vacation rental business to the next level.
5. Marketing and Advertising:
Try to establish different sales channels. It is not recommended that you simply publish your apartment on websites such as Airbnb. It is recommended that you generate branding. You can dedicate yourself to create a good social media profile, informing your potential customers about activities that can be performed in the environment in which you have your home, typical foods, and even giving exclusive offers for your followers.
On the other hand, you can launch google ads or facebook ads campaigns to reach a larger audience. This will be very useful when there are times of the year when you want to fill your calendar in a more forced way.
Another complementary strategy is to work well on your SEO. This is essential to appear to those people who are looking for, for example, “accommodation in “the place where your home is” “. Being in the first position in Google rankings, can give you a large percentage of your sales. It can also help you to include those people who have visited your website through an organic search, within retargeting campaigns in Instagram ads, to give them an irresistible offer or to generate urgency so that they end up booking in your property.
6. Customer Service and Hospitality:
Actually, this is also a marketing strategy. If you treat your customers well and give them impeccable service, they will recommend you to other potential customers. You know that word of mouth is the best marketing channel.
Make sure they lack nothing. Try to anticipate their needs and cover the smallest detail (a chocolate on the pillow when they arrive at the room, can be a nice detail that costs just a few cents).
7. Maintenance and Cleaning:
It seems like very basic advice but nobody likes to have to live for a while in a dirty house that is not theirs and where other people has been living there.
