As a second home owner renting out your property throughout the year I am pleased to bring you the safest and simplest way to manage your home from miles away without the needs for keys!

It will be of great benefit to you and will make your life so much easier when dealing with your tenants, housekeeper, vendor or maintenance man.

The Oracode lock has been on the market for over 7 years and with over 12 000 locks installed in North America it is a proven and unique product which does not require any software.

It consists of a proprietary web based application that manages your lock from a distance from anywhere in the world once we program it for you prior to shipping.

I will be happy to answer any further inquiries you might have regarding our product,

Regard;

Vanessa Pavillet

If your unit is in a popular tourist area you may be able to find some of these already built with instructions on how to load them.  Here is a link to one I used when traveling to WDW http://www.mousesavers.com/gps.html

For the technically capable here is a link to a popular POI site that includes directions on building these files.  http://www.poi-factory.com/

If anyone can share a great guide on how a novice can build and/or customize their own custom POI files please post!

Andy

Panama City-Bay County International Airport

For those of you in Panama City Beach, Laguna Beach, Mexico Beach, Grand Lagoon, and elsewhere in Bay County, FL:

The county commissioners just raised the tourist development tax from 3% to 4% for March 1-31 and 5% for after April 1. Combine this with the state of Florida tax of 6%, we are now collecting 11% from our renters. Yikes!

From what I’ve read, 1% of this is to market the new airport on the west side of Bay county set to open in May of 2010. The other 1% is to lure a low-cost airline to the airport (Air-Tran or Southwest maybe?).

The new airport can accommodate larger jets, something I assume the old airport in Panama City could not.

I hope 2% brings in enough tenants in the area to justify this cost (including the cost of the airport relocation) I’m not so sure…

How many of your tenants drive versus fly to the gulf coast? How many more bookings will you get because of this airport? I would guess your answer is similar to mine – not many.

Add your comments below.

But what if you don’t have the time (or inclination) to screen renters, handle inquiries, maintain an availability calendar, send out rental agreements, and collect payments? What if, at this time and place in your life, you just don’t want to do it all yourself?

If you’re not forced to maximize the income your property generates, if your current goal is to simply cover most of your property’s expenses, then going the property-manager route might very well make sense. But here’s the problem: The really good property managers handle dozens (even hundreds) of vacation rentals. They tend to market them all in the identical way, with a listing on their company’s Web site. And their goal is to generate as many bookings as possible for their company, rather than for your specific property.

So, assuming that for reasons of the sort cited above, you want to turn your vacation home over to a property management company. What can you do to make sure your place stands out from the crowd and gets its fair share of the bookings? How can you help your property manager do the best possible job for you?

Here are some suggestions:

• Write your own property description. It’s unlikely that your property manager knows anywhere near as much as you do about the joys and pleasures of your vacation home. But the system requires that they produce some descriptive copy, so you end up with bland, boring sentences that sound essentially the same from one property to the next. You can set yourself apart from the competition by creating your own write-up and providing it to your property manager. Put your personality into it. Explain what you love about the place. And be frank. If there’s an ocean view, but you have to crane your neck out the kitchen window to see it, go ahead and say so. Then make the point that for a full ocean view, the price would be considerably higher.
  
• Take charge of your photos. Unless your property manager is a terrific photographer or has one on retainer, we strongly recommend providing your own photos. Enlist the help of a friend (or hire a professional photographer for about $200-$300) if you’re not comfortable with a digital camera. Be sure to “dress” the set, pay attention to lighting, and use a wide-angle lens for your interior shots.
  
• Augment your management company’s online listings with your own. As noted, most property management companies now have their own Web sites with pictures and descriptions of the properties they manage. But when it comes to getting noticed by the search engines, more is often better. So boost your property’s “search footprint” by listing on several leading sites and directing all phone and email inquiries to your property manager. For suggestions on which sites to use, take a look at the free Vacation Rental Resources Guide available at our FullyBookedRentals Web site (www.fullybookedrentals.com).
  
• Spread the word with business cards for your property. For less than $25 at sites like VistaPrint (www.vistaprint.com) and OvernightPrints (www.overnightprints.com), you can design your own business card, including a picture of your property and the address of one of your online listings. Plan to order a supply of 100-250 cards to keep on hand. Offer them to friends and business acquaintances who ask about your property.

There really are many ways to get what you want and need from a vacation rental. And the Internet is a big help, regardless of the path you choose. Personally, we prefer doing everything ourselves. But we would never suggest that others might not be best off teaming with a property manager. It really is “different strokes for different folks.” The key thing is to take the reins and use the Internet tools at your disposal to help your property manager keep your place fully booked.

About the Authors. Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner are experienced vacation-rental owners and the authors of How to Make Your Vacation Property Work for You! They also own and operate FullyBookedRentals (www.fullybookedrentals.com), a membership Web site devoted to helping other vacation-rental owners advertise, rent, and manage their properties effectively and profitably.

I deal with a lot of group bookings, and sometimes the groups try to over-max the property, but we would never know this if we didn’t talk to them and tell them the rules.

plus it is a bonus to form a relationship with guests to keep them returning year after year. i personally HATE automated systems and will never have one responding to any of our calls.

Hayley

Florida Deluxe Villas

If you go the Google Maps home page http://maps.google.com/ you will notice a link to “put your business on google maps”

Go ahead.  You never know!

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 favorite vacation rentals by owner website.
• If possible, insert a one-sentence blurb about your rental.

You never know who will read your email and decide to book!

As you may know, my email of choice is the free GMail from Google.  Setup an email signature by clicking “Settings” and look for the “Signature” option on the “General” tab.

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 think they are getting a great deal, no matter what they are buying.  So, they put the word “cheap” or “discount” in front of whatever it is they are looking for, and see what Google spits out.

Realizing this, I did a bunch of research on Google search traffic in the vacation rental industry specifically related to the phrases “cheap” and “discount”.  I was not surprised to find that “cheap vacation rentals” and “discount vacation rentals” are two of the more popular search terms in the entire vacation rentals by owner online industry.  On our website, http://www.findvacationrentals.com, we put up a speical website section called “Owner’s Specials“.  Our customers can log in to their Owner’s Corner and post an owner’s special anytime they want.  This immediately places their vacation rental on our special “Owner’s Special” section, giving them extra exposure and helping them to increase their inquiries and bookings.  We also make our Owner’s Specials available through a RSS feed, so anyone that finds our Owner’s Specials mini-site can elect to receive instant updates on their mobile phone, or can even have our owner’s specials on their “My Yahoo” or “iGoogle” page automatically.

Yeah, I know.  “Cheap” doesn’t sound like something you want to associate with your vacation rental.  But these days, I’m not as proud as I used to be.  I really need to keep my place booked, and advertising a special so that someone selects my vacation rental versus the many other choices they are going to have is a competitive advantage.

Another thing that owners can do is put the keyphrases “cheap vacation rentals” or “discount vacation rentals” in their actual online advertisements for their vacation rentals.  “Discount” probably sounds a little better than “cheap”, but either way it should increase the exposure to your individual listing.

If you are a customer of www.findvacationrentals.com, you can log in to Owner’s Corner if you want to make any adjustments to your listing text.

Cheers,

Jon, Owner, www.findvacationrentals.com