All Forum Posts by: Valerie Rogers

Hi @Brenda Rogers and congratulations on the purchase of your vacation rental property! My family used to vacation in Vero Beach, FL at a campground on the beach when I was growing up...great memories!

We own 3 STRs in Fort Walton Beach, FL and get most of our bookings from VRBO/Homeaway. We get a smaller percentage from Airbnb. And being on the Gulf Coast we advertise on Emerald Coast by Owner also, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how many inquiries & bookings we've received from that web site. Our listing on Florida Rentals by Owner has been a disappointment...only a couple of inquiries and no bookings.

I used to advertise on TripAdvisor but I took down all of my listings on that site when they stopped sharing guest contact information even AFTER the guest made their first payment. They didn't provide the guest's contact information until the booking was paid in full. That is a long time to wait to have a phone conversation with a guest and send a rental agreement for them to review and sign, in my opinion. (Plus the service fee that they charge their travelers is exorbitant compared to VRBO and Airbnb.)

Best of luck!

@Jon Crosby Thanks! The "short code" suggestion went right over my head, though.....lol.  I'll look for some of the YouTube videos you've mentioned.

Hi @Jon Crosby, I am so happy to see you recommend Pinpoint, because I've recently purchased it to install in my Wordpress site and am having a really hard time figuring out how to set it up and get the calendar on the correct page. There does not need to be a tutorial or manual that I can find. Do you know of one? Thanks for any help!

@Mike Neubauer you might look into OwnerRez or ReservationKey...either of those might work for you.

Hi @Kevin Fox, appreciate the response. We've contacted a few listings we saw on Zillow and not one person responded. :-( And this was BEFORE we could ever have a conversation about the STR aspect of renting the property. That is why we decided we need a contact there in San Diego to help us find an appropriate property.

I am sure there would be a lot of concern on the part of the landlord about allowing us to rent the property on the short term market when we aren't using it ourselves. They'll be worried about the liability, the wear & tear and the usual concerns people who are not familiar with the STR market have about the property being destroyed.

I'm just hoping that if we can have a conversation with the landlord we can share with them the following:

• I've been in the business since 2002 and own/manage other STRs currently so am a professional, not someone who does not know what they are doing.
• We would secure the appropriate insurance.
• I am very particular about who we rent our properties to and screen every guest before accepting their booking. 
• I require every guest to sign a rental agreement & provide a copy of their ID
• The property will be kept clean. At least the landlord will know that after every guest the property will be professionally cleaned. Who knows how often a long-term lease tenant might clean the property while they are living there?
• The property will be kept in tip-top condition. We will make sure everything is working properly and problems are addressed right away. Who knows if a long-term least tenant will do the same?

I'd love to see an example of such a lease if anyone happens to have one.

There are smaller booking & marketing services out there that do what Evolve does but with more attention. They might not have as many bells & whistles as Evolve but can give your property the attention it deserves. But since they are a step between doing everything yourself and having a full-service property management company handle everything for you you should expect to have some time invested in the venture even if you use a marketing and booking service.

It is great that you live close by, that will allow you to keep a close eye on the property and quickly handle any maintenance issues yourself instead of having to hire a service to do it for you. 

Unless you are planning on handling the housekeeping yourself my best advice is to find the best, most reliable cleaning service you can. You always want the guest's first impression to be "Wow!"

Best of luck!

My husband & I are considering renting a small (1 br) apartment in the North Park area of San Diego to be closer to our son & his wife. They are expecting our first grandchild and we want to spend as much time there as possible!

We'd like to rent an apartment but offer it on the short term market to help offset the cost of the rent when we are not using it.

Does anyone have a realtor connection in San Diego who might be able to help us find such a property and a landlord who would be willing to allow us to STR the property?

Thanks for any help!

I used to use OneRoofTop. (It was called WebChalet when I first started using them.) I liked the website that came with it and their support team was great.

I never used any of their channel management tools though, just the calendar sync option.

What I didn't like was the way managing reservations worked. The page had SO MANY buttons on it, it was so confusing! It must have been a right brain/left brain thing, but whatever it was did not jive with the way my brain works. I never could get comfortable with it.

When I decided to make a change I went to MyVR. I liked their interface much better and the website for my properties was nice too, but in the end the cost was too high. I discontinued it after one year.

What I liked about both platforms was the ability to sync my VRBO calendar to my website calendar, the ability to point repeat guests and other referrals to my website instead of VRBO, the ability to take payments through my website and the automated messaging. I never did get as far as integrating my VRBO listings to the MyVR system. Something about that just worries me so I haven't tried it yet in any of the platforms I've use.

Now I am using Tokeet since March of this year. (I saw a recommendation here on BP.) It has been a bumpy ride so far. 

Some of the features they advertise are:

• Automation for messaging (important to me since for every booking I have about 4 emails plus a couple of reminders that I want to send automatically)
• Electronic rental agreements (which allowed me to discontinue my Docusign membership which costs around $240/year)
• Invoicing through the website which allows guests to pay directly
• A website to advertise the properties
• Channel management that integrates with all of the major channels such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Homeaway, TripAdvisor, etc. 

Message automation: works very well. The only thing I don't like about it is that we cannot choose to pause or not send a particular message. It is either all or nothing. I'd like to be able to see the messages queued up and be able to edit a message for a particular booking or even pause it so that it would not be sent. (MyVR had this and it was nice.)

eSignature Agreements: Getting the rental agreements set up was kind of a nightmare because even though Tokeet has formatting tools when creating the templates, I discovered that if you used ANY formatting at all when the signed agreement was converted for a PDT the entire thing was run together in one mish-mashed paragraph...terrible! Also, if the last sentence happened to be in BOLD lettering I could not see the guest's signature even though it was signed. I had to figure out on my own that the formatting was the issue so I had to rewrite the rental agreements using only plain text. (I used * instead of bullet points, etc.) Once that was done, it has been working fine. It was just a painful process until I figured it out. (Maybe this post might help someone else who decides to use Tokeet.)

Invoicing: I have never been able to use it. Tokeet advertises that you can use a different payout account for each property which is important for my business model. My clients' payments from guests go directly to the client, not to me. But during my testing I found that the "Pay by PayPal" button on an invoice created for one property actually led to the PayPal account belonging to another owner....that would be a disaster! I reported the issue to Tokeet support back in March and so far I'm still not able to use the invoice option. Kind of a bummer but I can work around it by sending a guest an invoice from PayPal directly but I'd prefer to do it through Tokeet to keep everything in one place and to be branded with my brand.

Website: It is ok, but not as beautiful or slick as I'd like. Tokeet has admitted that working on their website builder is not a high priority for them right now. They are trying to get all of the "under the hood" tools working properly and adding improvements so they probably won't be spending a lot of time on the website builder for a while. I appreciated their honesty to help set my expectations.

Price: Very reasonable. The price that I am paying ($39.99/month for up to 15 properties) is so much less expensive than OneRoofTop or MyVR.

I hope this helps!

 Hi Cristy,

I didn't realize you asked me this question four months ago since my name was not 'tagged' so I apologize that I did not respond before now.

To answer your question I do manage the bookings for my own vacation rental properties. I also have a booking & marketing service that helps other owners of vacation rental properties manage the bookings for their rentals.

Best of luck to you!

Valerie

@Tim Schroeder, you are paying $500/year subscription to VRBO PLUS the 3% credit card processing fee (and an additional 2% for international payments.) 

On Airbnb you pay no subscription fee but 3% to Airbnb...which includes your credit card processing fees.

It actually costs less to advertise on Airbnb.

@Tim Schroeder if you don't want to increase your rate on Airbnb to account for the 3.5% city tax you can always advertise in the listing and house rules that you will ask the guest to pay the tax after their booking is confirmed. As long as you disclose it up front it should not be a problem. Why should you "eat" that cost if the guest knows about it in advance and essentially agrees to pay by booking your property?