Holidaylettings Guide to Letting Your Holiday Home

Andy at Holidaylettings contacted me recently to let me know about a guide they have produced for holiday home owners, covering all the important aspects of letting your holiday home. Although I have seen several similar guides, I am impressed with the simple and clear style of Holidaylettings guide and it is full of very useful tips.

The guide covers a number of areas, including :

Choosing the right property
Furnishing a rental property
Being a responsible owner
Setting your pricing
Letting your property
Managing your bookings
Owners’ checklist for renting
Marketing your property
Advertising secrets
Internet advertising
Tricks of the trade

I particularly like the "Tricks of the Trade" for letting your holiday property, including tips such as providing a welcome pack for guests on arrival at your property (I know from personal experience this can make a huge difference in getting repeat renters or referrals to other renters) and working with other holiday home owners in your area.

I also like the final peice of advice " don’t forget to keep some weeks free for you & your friends/family to enjoy! It can sometimes be tempting to take all the bookings on offer, but make sure you don’t end up in a hotel!"

For more information, go to the Holidaylettings guide

Alexa, Homelidays and VRBO

I received an email notification from Homelidays announcing that Alexa now ranks Homelidays as the number one vacation rentals site worldwide, beating VRBO, who have long since held this title. The claim is based upon the "Daily Reach" figure that Alexa calculates.

Alexa recently changed their ranking system, expanding it to include sources other than just users of the Alexa toolbar. It's possible that this might explain the change in ranking, although it's not clear from the information provided.

According to Homelidays, they overtook VRBO sometime early in 2008. If true, this is quite an achievement, as Homelidays is a European site,with a lot fewer vacation rental listings than VRBO, which has a huge amount of US vacation rental listings. However, when I check the latest alexa traffic rankings, using the vacation rentals site reviews page of COHR, VRBO seems to rank higher than Homelidays. Which is correct?

Alexa rankings should be used with caution. They are a good overall indicator of the traffic on a particular vacation rentals site, but because they are only based on a small sample of web users, you should not take them as an exact indicator.

iContact and the COHR April Vacation Rentals Newsletter

I sent out the COHR Newsletter to over 2,000 vacation rentals owners this week. The newsletter includes links to many of the posts here and on COHR. You can find it here :
http://community.icontact.com/p/wwwcohr/newsletters/advertisors-april/posts/cohr-newsletter-april-08

I recently switched from sending the newsletter out via regular email to using a professional email marketing package. The one I use is called iContact and I am very pleased with it so far. Not only does it have excellent editing tools, including lots of great HTML templates, it's amazing the level of information that it gives you. If you do any email marketing of your vacation rental business, I would encourage you to give it consideration.

For example, I used to wonder how people actually read my newsletter: with iContact, not only do I know how many email actually got delivered (and how many bounced), but I can also tell how many people opened the newsletter and how many clicked on links within the newsletter. I also give a list (by email address) of all those that opened the newsletter, together with a list of which links were most popular!

This is really powerful marketing information .... you can also create segments based upon the responses and send follow up emails to these segments.

For the record, approximately 15% of those who received the email clicked on at least one link. Overe time, I will be able to tell if this is good or bad and hopefully tune my newsletters to be more effective.

iContact offers a free 15 day trial and thereafter, you pay depending on the size of your subscriber list. It starts at $9.95 per month (with discounts if you pay for a full year), which seems reasonable enough to me.

Also, they conform to US standards for spam and will automatically manage subscribes/ unsubscribes for you. They also have tools for rating how email spam filters will assess your email newsletter, so that you have the best chance to ensure your newsletter actually reaches your readers.

If interested, you can sign up for the free trial here :
http://www.icontact.com/a.pl/224908

Vacation Rental Homes Offer Bright Spot in Bleak Real Estate Market

According to research by Homeaway ( the rental network with over 95,000 listings) , a "record number" of vacation home owners are planning to rent their vacation homes. About 25% of purchasers of a second home intend to rent out their home, up from 14% in 2005.

It's not clear if this is because more of the puchases are for vacation homes, or if, in light of the current economic situation, more vacation home owners need the money! However, it is interesting that more and more people who initially did not intend to rent their vacation homes, now plan to do so. Again, it is possible this is because they need the money although the research also indicates that, after a couple of years of vacation home ownership, the owners realise that they are not getting as much use as planned, and, rather than seeing their vacation home lie vacant, they go ahead and rent.

I must admit, this makes some sense, although I have also seen the opposite, where some owners stop or reduce renting when they realise it is sometimes not as easy as it looks, and one bad experience with a renter can cause a lot of second thoughts.

The research also indicates that over 70% intend to use online vacation rentals sites, such as Homeaway, in order to find renters. The WVR Group, which owns Homeaway and many other vacation rentals sites, has made huge investments in the "vacation rent by owner" market in last few years, so they will no doubt be re-assured by the results of the research.

Of course, as a vacation home owner, it may not be good news that the level of competition for renters will become even more fierce.

You can find more details here ...

Homeaway Press Release