If you google ‘the most profitable vacation rentals, you might face long explanations about the importance of a property location and size. But are they really the top characteristics of a good vacation rental property?
Let’s look at it in another way. Imagine if you have inherited a flat or took the management of a house that apparently is not located in the city’s best spot. Does it mean that you never can derive a benefit from it? If all the leading vacation rental companies had believed this, they would have never succeeded.
We don’t, and we can’t ignore the power of a great location and lovely neighbourhood. What we are trying to do in this article is to introduce other essential features that each property manager and service apartment provider can practically implement on their rentals to make a remarkable profit.
Table of Contents
1. Decoration and Furniture
Decorating a vacation rental home is not synonymous with being unique and luxurious. It’s more important to provide a pleasant and comfortable atmosphere that appeals to guests with different design tastes.
Aside from giving your house some character, try to promote neutrality. You may use a plain but fresh coat of paint and avoid bold and bright colours on walls. You can also embellish the room with plants, enough bright light fixtures, and quality furniture.
2. Full Amenities
An excellent short-term rental is equipped with proper amenities that reflect the type of accommodation and the target audience. For instance, a serviced apartment is expected to have a fully equipped kitchen and in-room technology. Preparing an amenities checklist is what most profitable vacation rentals do to ensure nothing is overlooked and everything is ready for a spotless and welcoming stay.
3. Property Description
Should you want to get the phone to ring, you must go beyond ordinary descriptions. Give the unique selling points of each property in detail to reach the right target guest and show why anyone would want to book with you.
By highlighting your rental’s specific features, such as having a playground or a pool, you’ll make sure of addressing your guest’s expectations. But don’t go too far as it might be difficult to keep the guest happy when you have raised the bars too high
4. Professional Photography
A picture is worth a thousand words, but this is not true upon a blurry and dark image. A picture is the first thing that grabs attention and is the determining factor for a traveller to book or not to book your room. More importantly, you need to stand out from other top-notch properties in the area, which cannot be achieved by amateur phone-captured pictures.
With the help of a professional vacation rental photographer, you can properly present what your property has to offer and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
5. Efficient Pricing
Successful vacation rental operators use dynamic pricing to capture as much market share as possible during a specific time and season. As demand constantly fluctuates in the vacation rental market and rental properties have a limited lifespan, it’s essential to adjust unit rates based on real-time data. A dynamic pricing tool is the most efficient solution that professional property managers use to maximise their earning potential.
However, some dynamic pricing tools lack the feature of providing a base price and require manual input. In order to set efficient prices, it’s crucial that hosts first analyse their property’s return potential. This is where a property deal analyser comes in handy. It allows you to evaluate your property, calculate profits, and make informed decisions.
6. Direct Booking Website
For every business seeking to grow, it is critical to have a direct booking website with a booking engine to drive reservations without a third-party commission fee. It also allows you to gain guests’ contact information, essential for establishing further communications and creating lasting relationships with guests. However, you must also concentrate on obtaining organic traffic through SEO in order to get the most of this marketing strategy.
7. Learning from Negative Reviews
Most successful property managers didn’t already know all the efficient strategies and didn’t always receive positive feedback. What they have done perfectly is to take bad reviews as an opportunity to improve their work and build trust with guests. Learning from negative reviews helps you gradually progress and shows your guests that their opinions are precious and useful.
8. Listing on the Right OTAs
The fact is you should target the right audience in order to have their 5-star reviews, and OTAs can be a big aid in this regard. Getting your property listed on the right booking platforms based on your property type is the key to receiving more bookings and attracting the proper guest.
Suppose you own a house in a popular tourist location; in that case, Vrbo would be a great option. If you have a serviced apartment downtown, Airbnb is more likely to be your best choice.
9. Online Visibility
When developing a direct booking strategy, it is necessary to advertise your vacation rentals on social media platforms and metasearch engines. Using social media for your business enhances your brand awareness and empowers your relationships with guests and other entrepreneurs in the industry.
There are various paid and unpaid opportunities to increase your business’s online presence, including Google’s free booking links, Facebook business page, and Facebook Marketplace.
10. Guest Screening
Managers of the most profitable vacation rentals apply several ways to prevent income loss. As you know, one of the major causes of property damage is new troublemaking guests who can ruin your profit and reputation in a matter of a night. Therefore, tenant screening is vital for all property owners with any business scale to evaluate potential guests in many ways, such as performing screening tools and a safe booking process.
11. Automation with a PMS
When it comes to scaling your short-term rental business, you need the right tools to manage your daily operations while also guiding you through the process of establishing a tailored plan leading to achieve your objectives. This is where a Property Management System comes to your help to automate all aspects of running a rental property, from tenant screening to dynamic pricing, by providing various automation tools and valuable integrations.
How Do the Most Profitable Vacation Rentals Assess Their Profit?
As a property manager, you should access a clear overview of your company’s performance at any point in time. Doing so helps you evaluate each aspect of the business and find out the most productive segments as well as the sources of money leaking.
Thus, almost all leading vacation rental companies use real-time reporting, including financial reporting, to increase profit by accurately managing their expenses and analysing their costs.
In this regard, Zeevou has introduced an advanced feature named profit analysis that enables you to look at both calculated income and estimated expenses in one picture. Zeevou’s complete profit report takes into account some factors, including:
- Accommodation profit
- Add-on profit
- Refund types profit
- Penalty profit
- Management fee profit
- Unit expenses
- Transaction expenses
- Currency conversion expenses
Zeevou has also developed a free property deal analyser, taking the guesswork out of your short-term rental analysis and allowing you to quickly and accurately evaluate your business profits.
There are several benefits of using this property deal analyser for your vacation rental business:
- Accurate data: Our property deal analyser provides accurate and reliable information about your property’s earning potential.
- Time-saving: It eliminates the need for manual calculations, saving you valuable time and energy.
- Error reduction: It reduces the risk of human error, which can lead to inaccurate results and poor decision-making.
- Better decision-making: It allows you to make data-driven decisions about pricing and other aspects of your vacation rental business.
- Optimising earning potential: It can help you identify opportunities to optimise your revenue and increase your earning potential.
- Easy to use: It does not require any technical knowledge to use. It is a web-based and user-friendly tool.
- Downloadable results: It provides downloadable file results, allowing you to keep records and easily share information with others.
Becoming a profitable vacation rental requires implementing effective strategies and keeping track of operation-related costs. You can employ a proficient PMS to take the load from your shoulder by automating the whole management process and keeping you in line with profit reports.
