As a vacation rental owner or a serviced apartment operator, you might start your business with one property in a place where you know will give you promising returns. However, after a while you’ll want to expand your portfolio and deal with multiple properties in various neighbourhoods, cities, or even countries.
This can be a brilliant idea as having one property might not bring you revenue all year round, especially during off seasons. So, you can manage multiple properties across different regions to guarantee a constant income for yourself. But you must remember, managing a short term rental requires a certain amount of time, patience, energy and skill. So, increasing the number of properties can be a shot in the dark as there are scaling challenges you’ll face on all sides.
To gear up, you first have to understand the challenges of dealing with multiple properties. We’ve tried to put together some of these obstacles in this article. But don’t panic after reading them. There’s always a solution to save you from skating on thin ice.
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The Hassle of Multiple Accounts to Manage Multiple Properties
Managing multiple properties doesn’t always mean managing a number of units in a complex. As mentioned before, you might want to rent out properties scattered across different locations to reduce the risk of not having sufficient income at any given time of the year.
Whether you’re a professional property manager or have just embarked your short term rental as one, you’ll need competent property management software to help you reduce your headaches and take the weight off your shoulders. If you use a standard PMS, you’ll need a separate account for each and every location where you have a property. Even in the best case scenario, your PMS might give you a central login. Still, if you want to manage multiple properties, you need to keep switching between accounts. Even thinking about it may make you feel dizzy!
Multiple Properties Require More Operations Management
By multiplying your properties, you are increasing the time you have to devote to keeping track of what is happening in each of them in real time. Sometimes, you have to mount up your staff members and the outsourced companies you work with. For instance, you never want your guests to arrive at a property that hasn’t been fully cleaned yet. So, obviously you need more cleaners.
Another problem that may often occur when managing multiple properties is that you or your staff mixes the check-in instructions and sends the guest the ones for another property! These might seem like little mistakes, but a tiny error can jeoprodise your business’ reputation and lead to guest dissatisfaction.
More Main Maintenance Issues
You want your properties to be maintained to a high standard, especially when you’re managing short term rentals overseas. But unfortunately, most hosts lack an efficient system to make sure their properties are kept in good conditions when managing them remotely.
It’s a fact that all your guests won’t take care of your property. And even if they do, a house usually needs repair from time to time. Managing multiple properties efficiently means more repairs. The biggest thing is that managing those properties is a drain on your time.
Cleaning
You need to make extra time to take care of the cleaning aspect of multiple properties. You might hire a cleaner or sign a contract with a cleaning company which means you have to give them access to check-ins and check-out dates and time, the number of the guests, and whether they have any particular requests or not. That implies each housekeeper should also be updated of any changes once a booking comes in.
Even if you use an advanced PMS, there’s a high chance it doesn’t offer some tasks regarding task management like leaving scheduling of mid-stay cleans for longer stays and assignment of tasks for the host to do. Therefore, you have to take care of all this yourself or hire a few people to do them.
Reports
You might be one of those vacation rental owners who are responsible for the management of their properties as well, or maybe just a manager who runs different aspects of the business for an investor. In each of these cases, you need to prepare reports that include complete information of your profit, expenses, income, and other important data. Otherwise, you can’t optimise your efficiency and understand your faults and strengths.
Preparing reports for each property increases you and your clients’ understanding of your performance. On the other hand, it’s not a piece of cake at all. You need to be accurate enough to combine the pieces of information correctly. Imagine having to go through this process each month for each of your properties. That’s a huge amount of work!
Staff Management
One of the essential points you have to take into consideration as you move to running multiple properties is employing some staff to help you run your hospitality business. However, you can’t hire staff and just leave them to themselves. You have to manage every single section of the operations they’re responsible for like a professional juggler. We’re not saying that’s impossible, but you can imagine the amount of extra hassle it’ll bring to you.
Calendars
Another significant requirement for managing multiple vacation rentals is having a clear visual overview of all the bookings from various properties. Your PMS may have a solution to display all the properties close to each other on the same page, but it’s not enough when you want to find a booking immediately.
Moreover, to manage revenue, you need an overview of the rates for all unit types and their availability, as well as any restrictions that may have been applied in a blink of an eye. But the problem is that a lot of property management software providers may lack this feature, which makes rate inspection too time-consuming.
What Does Zeeou have to Offer to Manage Your Multiple Properties?
Despite all the above-mentioned obstacles, there’s an efficient way to manage all your properties from one central login even though they are located across several cities and/or countries, and ultimately overcome all these challenges. Having a diverse portfolio is difficult but if you have the right tools, you can also increase your income. Zeevou’s multi-location property management system allows you to increase your revenue by expanding your business to more and more locations effortlessly.
This feature enables you to achieve your goal by offering different solutions for each of the problems you might face:
- Hierarchical structure
- Generation of a Page for Each Property
- Calendar Syncing
- Multi-unit Calendars
To learn more about the details of Zeevou’s multi-location PMS, take a look at this page. For still more clarification, you can also schedule a FREE DEMO HERE.
