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 attorney in your area.
That being said, there are plenty of template agreements online, for example here, here, & here. Get one that works for you. Make it as simple as possible, while still covering those things you want everyone to be clear on: names and contact info, dates & times, rates, who is staying in the unit, pets or no pets, smoking or no smoking, etc.
While the ultimate goal of a contract is to make the arrangement legally binding, putting everything in writing helps to ensure everybody understands all the terms of the rental. It’s not fun if a renter shows up a day early. Having a rental agreements helps to make sure everybody is on the same page for all the pesky details..
Sample Contracts
Like I mentioned above, you can find example contracts here, here, & here. For my Florida condos, I use this sample vacation rental agreement (again, I make no claims about it’s legality! 
. Fill in the fields and it calculates my local 9% tax rate. Edit the field formula to change it to your local sales & lodging tax.
Sending to the Renter
I like to send a PDF of the contract to the renter. PDF is a pretty universal format. In my 6+ years of renting, I have had less than 5 renters who couldn’t open a PDF file without my help. Plus, PDFs are read-only, so it keeps renters from “accidentally” modifying the contract.
Convert your Word document to a PDF by using the free and easy-to-use doPDF (Windows only). Mac users already have this capability to create PDFs from documents in MacOS via the print function.
Can Renters Fax the Contract to you?
In short, that is fine. In practice, most of my renters send in a check by mail so I have them include the original signed agreement in the same envelope.
Don’t have a fax? No problem – fax machines are so 1980′s anyway!
For a small fee you can setup a virtual fax (meaning you don’t need an extra phone line at your house or a clunky machine sitting on your desk). Virtual fax services send you an email anytime someone sends a fax.
I like and use maxemail and the industry leader for this service is efax. You may be able to find a free e-fax service, but I recommend paying for a reliable provider such as the two mentioned. Free services might drop your fax number after some inactivy period (which can happen easily during your low season).
And, if you use a free webmail provider like gmail, setup your virtual fax to email you an attachment of the fax and use gmail to archive that fax. You never know when you will need a copy of the contract!
Feel free to suggest any other rental contract templates or other ideas on how you handle contracts in the comments below.
