Hot take: Personal booking websites for your STR are overrated

[James Carlson]

Headline says it: The recent emphasis on creating direct-booking sites for your STRs and MTRs is overrated. Prove me wrong.

Work/money not offset by savings
The amount of work -- and money -- to build a site and do proper SEO to get noticed is not offset by the small amount of savings from not paying booking fees on sites like Airbnb and Furnished Finder.

It's not how humans search
Direct booking sites ignore how people search for short-term rentals or medium-term rentals. I want a vacation rental for my family? I go to VRBO or Airbnb. Who else but Boomers are slow-typing into Google "V-a-c-a-t-i-o-n R-e-n-t-a-l T-a-h-o-e"? That ain't the future, folks.

Corollary to MTR-insurance relationship
This reminds me of @Erin Spradlin's take on the current emphasis in medium-term rental world on creating relationships with an insurance company. Can it be done? Sure. But why? You've got platforms like Airbnb, Zillow, Furnished Finder that reach millions. Why tether your success to one tenant stream?

Most cynical take
Another Erin take here: The over-complication of real estate only serves vendors who want to insert themselves between you and the STR money. You lose thousands of dollars to Airbnb fees without a direct booking site? Pay me thousands of dollars and I'll set up your website to fix that. 

Similar feelings here about the expensive courses and conferences targeted to first-time investors. Give me $5,000 to teach you how to buy a home and rent it out. That's $5,000 that could have gone toward a downpayment on the first investment, which is where you'll learn the most anyway.

[Ken Boone]

So first of all, the large majority of direct booking websites will NEVER be able to compete with the big OTAs when it comes to SEO. Period. For heavy tourists markets where there are several STR management companies who have websites, most direct booking individual websites will not even be able to compete with that.

But if you work on your social media presence, social media ads, and routing return guest through your direct booking website, you are building a base of clientele which makes you less dependent on the whims and algorithm changes that the big OTAs have.  I have experienced top performing properties drop instantly to nothing, for no reason other than algo changes.  When that happens there is NOTHING you can do in the short term to resolve those issues. I have seen it happen a number of times.

But yes it does require work and it is a slow game not a fast one.  To me it's worth it, to not be as reliant on the big OTAs.  Right now I am about 10% direct, a year ago I was at 5%. Hoping within another year I will be at 20 - 30%.