Increase your vacation home bookings by accepting forms of payments that aren’t cash. Below is a list of some popular options. 1. Personal Check As long as you have enough time before check-in, this is usually your #1 option. Since the renter has to send you the rental agreement anyway, have them drop a check [...]
As a vacation rental owner you have ample opportunities to advertise your vacation home. One such opportunity is email signatures. Every email you send out to renters or friends should have, at a minimum, your contract information. Include the following: Your name Your email address Your inquiry phone number Your listing website address from your [...]
Hello fellow vacation rental owners: I’m not entirely sure what experience everyone out there is having with keeping your rentals booked with the touch economic times, but I am sure about one thing: the two most popular adjectives attached to all search traffic on the Internet are “cheap” and “discount”. In general, everyone likes to [...]
Like many of us in the by owner vacation rental industry, you have to have a solution to the “get a key to the renter” conundrum. Here, I run down the ways to solve that riddle. Again, this isn’t for those who are lucky enough (or unlucky, as it may be) to meet the renter [...]
As a vacation home owner, you are responding to inquiries via email pretty often. And those responses are always the same. Either you have availability and you provide the renter a quote. Or you don’t, and you let them know that. Plus, you want to put your name, phone number, and listing website address at [...]
Your odds of being audited by the IRS are greater under the following circumstances: You have rental expenses on your tax return. You have large amounts of itemized deductions on your tax return. You claim tax shelter investment losses on your tax return. Your business expenses are large in relation to your income on your [...]
The contract, aka the rental agreement, is necessary red-tape in when renting your vacation rental today. You might as well make it as simple as you can. Let me help. First, I am not a lawyer and don’t play one on TV. If you want a legally-binding agreement for your location, talk to a good [...]
Hello Fellow Owners: I had the good fortune of being able to do some traveling in Europe and Northern Africa this past summer. Of course, I used my own site, http://www.findvacationrentals.com, as my first choice when locating vacation rental properties to stay at on my trip. After spending a lot of time as a prospective [...]
Hello fellow owners: As both an owner of a vacation rental website and as an owner of several vacation rental properties, we are often asked what owners can do to help keep their vacation rentals fully booked when inquiries and bookings slow down in an off season. We’ve tried lots of different things, just like [...]
Hello fellow owners: Marketing your vacation rental website online can be an excellent way to keep your property fully booked. These days, with a bad overall economy, it is even more important to keep that revenue coming in even when you are not in your peak season. Fortunately, there are lots of options for vacation [...]