All Forum Posts by: Valerie Rogers

Hi Anna,

Congratulations on your new vacation rental property!

In my opinion it IS worth it to create a website & a Facebook page to advertise your property as well as list on vacation rental websites. It is worth the time to develop each marketing avenue. You don't want to put all of your "eggs in one basket" so to speak, just in case something happens. It is good to spread out your marketing dollars to several different avenues.

I have three VRs and one just about to come on in a new market for us. We have found that the majority of our bookings come from VRBO. We also advertise on Airbnb and TripAdvisor.

We have one website for our first three VRs and I'm creating a new, separate website for the fourth property. We have separate Facebook pages for each property.

I would recommend that you brand your property with a specific name, and incorporate that name into your website and Facebook page. I have had guests contact me through my own website or Facebook page after having found my property on a commission-based website. Because each of my properties has a name, they googled the property name and found either the property's Facebook page or my website and were able to save having to pay the site's "Service fee" that way.

Good luck with your new venture!

Hello Clinton, nice to "meet" you. I'm happy to help. What would you like to know about my condos in FL that I haven't already shared?

Valerie 

I live in CO and have 2 rentals in the Panhandle of Florida (Fort Walton Beach.) They are condos in the same building. 

When we were beginning our search to buy our first rental in FL we looked all up and down the Gulf coast of FL. I loved many of the cities we saw along the southern Gulf coast, but found most of them to be way out of our budget and a lot of them had rental restrictions that would have made it impossible for the property to pay for itself. (Example: limited to on rental per year, at least 30 days.)

We decide to purchase in Destin, which does not have any such rental restrictions. But even in Destin we were having a hard time finding a condo in a nice building that was directly on the beach, that had an amazing view and was within our budget. Our realtor took us over the Destin bridge to Okaloosa Island (which is part of the city of Fort Walton Beach) and that is where we found our first unit. It is in a small building (20 units) that sits right on the beach with a beautiful view. This condo was actually larger than any we had seen in Destin and it was well within our budget. We bought the first unit in 2014 and the second one last year.

The occupancy rate has been great; actually more than I expected. I assumed we would be able to rent the condo during the summer season and maybe secure a few snowbird bookings during the winter. It turns out that the condos rent well throughout the year. Our "slow" times are usually January (unless we are able to get a snowbird booking), November and December. Last year our occupancy rate was 78%.

As others have said the crucial thing is to have very good, reliable help on the ground. My housekeeper is great, I couldn't do this without her. I pay her more than she requested when I first interviewed her because I want her to value this relationship and I also pay her a bonus for every review that I receive that mentions how clean my units are.

It is also imperative to have very good maintenance contacts. The A/C in one of my units failed one September while it is still very hot. Even though the call came in on a Friday my contact was able to temporarily fix the AC the next day (Saturday) until they could install a new unit the next week. I gave those guests a refund for a couple of nights to compensate them for the inconvenience.

Things will always go wrong....plumbing issues, etc. But if you have good, reliable contacts in the area they can be handled as expediently as is possible and most guests understand that these things happen.

Best of luck to you with your new venture!

For my Summit County property (which is not far from where I live & is easier to stock than my FL properties) I use a dispenser like this to dispense shampoo, conditioner & body wash. I also use the body wash as liquid "soap" in a dispenser on the counter in each bathroom. I buy the supplies by the gallon and my housekeeper tops off the dispensers each time she cleans. My guests have commented how much they enjoy having that amenity supplied. I use "Aroma Land" Lemongrass & Sage products. I love the scent. 

We've been renting that property for 4 years and I've only had to order twice so they last a long time. The body wash seems to go faster than the shampoo & conditioner. (I think most people carry their favorite products with them.)

However, in FL I buy the little hotel sized soaps, shampoo & conditioners. I use the Coastal Breezes line from the National Hospitality website. (Click link to view product options, quantities & prices.) 

My housekeeper puts two soaps, one shampoo & one conditioner in each bathroom (2) for the guests to use to get started. It averages to less than $1 per stay to provide these items for my guests. . We seem to go through soaps more than shampoo or conditioner.

 Well, there IS an option.  You can tell your owners that you will buy and pay for their advertisements going forward and YOU purchase the listing in your account. The listing will belong to you, not the owners, but it will allow you to eventually use the channel management system.

I've decided to do this for any new clients going forward. I doubt any of my current clients will want to let go of their own listings so I'll just keep managing them as I am now. But any new clients that I take on I will pay for their advertisement so that I can "own" it in my MyVR account.

I asked Markus at MyVR if those listings can be linked to different payment accounts and he told me that they could. So even though the listing you purchase for your client will be in your account, the payments from the guests can still be directed to the owner's bank account instead of yours.

 Yes, Mike, you have to have at least 5 listings in your account in order to take advantage of the channel management option. I have heard that this is true for different solutions, not just MyVR, so I wonder if it is a limitation set by the listing site (like VRBO/Homeaway). That is why I am not using this option right now...since I only have 3 properties in my MyVR account (my own.) But won't it be nice someday to be able to go to one dashboard (MyVR), change the rates and have those new rates push out to all of your integrated listings! What a time saver! Same is true for listing description changes, changes to photos, etc.

Hello, I hope you all don't mind me re-opening this discussion after so long! But I'm in the midst of this experience myself so I thought I'd pipe in and share a little bit of what I am experiencing.

My husband & I own 3 vacation rental properties of our own and I manage the bookings & marketing for 6 clients. As you can imagine, manually handling all of the inquiries & communications with potential guests, sending quotes & payment requests, sending contracts, notifying housekeepers, scheduling "stay" emails like the Check-in packet, access codes, Welcome and Follow-up messages.......is a time-consuming task! But this is why my clients pay me to do this....so they have more time to do the things they prefer to spend their time on.

I have found some tools along the way that helps improve the efficiency of my process but it is still a step-by-step process that has to be done manually for each booking.

For those of you who are not quite ready to take the leap to start using reservation management software, I'd like to take a little side trip to mention a couple of my favorite tools that I've found to help maximize the manual process:

• Boomerang for Gmail - a tool that allows you to create an email to be sent later at a scheduled time. This was a great tool at first, but the free option is limited to 10 credits per month. As the number of properties that I was handling grew so grew the number of scheduled emails I needed during the month so I soon outgrew that limit.
• Gmail Scheduler - the answer I needed when my business outgrew Boomerang. Like Boomerang, with Gmail Scheduler I can create all of the various emails each reservation required in my Gmail account, and then use the Scheduler tool to pick a date & time to send each email....except that there is no limit to the number of emails I need to schedule. It is available in Free and Premium editions. I paid a one-time fee of $40 and it has been a great tool, allowing me to do most of the work involved with each booking at the very beginning instead of having to send the various emails related to a booking in real time. 
• TextExpander -  lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a repository of emails, boilerplate and other content, as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation. So if you have certain blocks of text that you use over & over you can use this tool to quickly type a quick keystroke code and the "snippet" of text is instantly deposited on whatever it is that you are writing. For instance, if I type "vjr" TextExpander instantly populates "Val Rogers". Pretty nifty! I love this tool

But eventually as your business grows you'll find that even with these kinds of tools the manual process still takes up most of your time that could be spent on more valuable things like marketing and growing your business. This is the point that I find myself in at present.

I've decided to give MyVR.com a try. MyVR has options & prices for vacation rental owners or property managers.

Right now I'm not using it for anything else except for instantly automating the usual "stay" emails such as:

• Notifying the housekeeper when a booking is confirmed
• Sending the property's Check-in packet to the guest 14 days in advance of arrival
• Reminding the housekeeper one week before the guest's arrival
• Sending an email to the guest letting them know we are looking forward to their arrival & asking what time they expect to be arriving? (I've found it best to be on "alert" if a guest isn't going to be arriving till late in the evening so that I will be sure to leave my phone on  if they need assistance checking in.) This email is sent one week before the guest's arrival.
• Sending the "Welcome" email one day after their arrival
• Sending the "Check-out" email one day before their departure (reminding the guests of the check-out procedures)
• Sending a follow up email thanking the guest for their visit & requesting they submit a review of their say on the property's listing (one week after their departure.)

All I have to do is confirm in MyVR a booking that has been synched from a listing's calendar and all of these messages are instantly created and scheduled. As you can imagine, just this one benefit alone is saving me hours of time each week.

But MyVR can do so much more and I"m looking forward to expanding my use of the software in the future....namely:

• Creating a new website to advertise my own properties on using the MyVR website builder
• Creating a new website to advertise my business and my clients' properties on using the MyVR website builder
• Using the channel management software which allows full, direct integration with all of the major sites like VRBO, Homeaway, Airbnb, Flipkey, and more. Full integration means that I'll be able to manage property data (like rates, description, photos), availability, renter communications and reservations all through the MyVR dashboard and have those changes push out to the listings on the integrated sites.

I think that some of the other solutions that others have mentioned might be less pricey than MyVR, but since I plan on expanding my use of their tools more fully I am willing to pay the price. I want more than just automation of emails, which I think some of the other solutions only offer.

Anyway, I hope that some of this information is helpful in this discussion! Best wishes to everyone searching for the best option for your situation, and keep us posted on your findings & experiences!

I came across this post today, a bit late, it seems. But I just wanted to chime in and say that often a guest will contact me to ask if I can take their payment outside of VRBO/Homeaway so that they will not have to pay the service fee.

I always respond by telling them that since they contacted me through VRBO I must take their payment through VRBO. The reason is because Expedia is monitoring our conversion rate (turning inquiries into bookings) and if that conversion rate is low or drops off from what it was before they will assume that we are taking payments outside of their system in order to help guests avoid having to pay the service fee. As a result, they will stop promoting my listing in the search results when guests are searching in my area for accommodations.

I am not willing to put my listing's performance in jeopardy to help guests avoid paying the service fee.

I tell my guests that once they've booked my property through VRBO if they want to stay with me again they become a repeat guest and should contact me directly to book the next time.

It has been a full year now since the Service fee was introduced, and despite all of the outcry and paranoia our listing's 2016 performance was even better than 2015. 

@James Carlson, thanks for the update. This is very interesting information for me, since I live in the Denver metro area. My rentals are not in the city of Denver....we have one in Summit County (Dillon) and two in Fort Walton Beach, FL.

How does one go about securing a position on the Short-term rental advisory committee? Maybe they only want people who actually have a short-term rental property within the city limits of Denver (which I do not) but I have a unique experience in the industry (having worked for the original founders of VRBO and then Homeaway before I "retired" in 2013.)

It is a subject about which I am passionate.

Thanks again for the information...

Regards,

Valerie

@Elizabeth Shelby 

I may have totally misunderstood what you said, or maybe you have received some incorrect information from the vacation rental home owners in your area, but you absolutely CAN add additional fees to the rental rate that you advertise on Homeaway/VRBO:

Not only can you add whatever fee you wish, but you can also indicate if the fee is taxable or not.