We want to invest even more aggressively in advertising – in order to generate even more leads for our property owners. So we have decided to begin charging new property owners a minimal annual registration fee. As of May 1, 2011, the annual fee for registering a property on rentforyourvacation.com will be $89. For property owners currently listing properties on our site, no increase will be made at this time.

It’s true that when you want to get into the vacation rental business in a serious way, you have to invest quite a bit of time and energy at the beginning, and maybe some cash, to get things going. But when you only intend to rent your home for a short period of time, while waiting to sell, you can keep things simple – it’s not really necessary to get all those ducks lined up.

Here are a few things, however, that you do need to do:

• Register your home on rentforyourvacation.com. The listing is free and the site offers multiple marketing and promotional opportunities that you should take advantage of if you want to draw renters in quickly.
• Since you don’t intend to rent long term, you might want to consider setting a rental rate that will ensure full occupancy – review the rental calculator section on rentforyourvacation.com and use the calculator tool to help you calculate your rate.
• Just as you will want to do when you start selling your home, make sure your home is properly maintained during this period – you may want to hire a cleaning person and do certain repairs.
• Prepare a list of simple rules and regulations – you want to make sure your guests take good care of your home during this period so that eventual buyers will find it in top shape. The fact that your home is occupied, as opposed to idle, may even be a plus-point for potential buyers – they know the home is functional, heated, etc.
• Prepare a simple contract form to be signed by both parties. Add a clause that will allow you to show the house to an eventual buyer.
• Take good care of your guests and encourage them to post a property review on rentforyourvacation.com. You could refer potential buyers to those reviews to demonstrate the appreciation guests have for you, your home and your area.

We wish you good luck. And who knows – we’ve seen it happen before: You just might be able to sell your home to a rentforyourvacation.com visitor or to one of your guests or to someone they know.

Let’s put things into perspective by demystifying the workload and reviewing the advantages of renting out your vacation home. The key words here are: MOTIVATION and ORGANIZATION. Let’s look at “motivation” first.

When you’re totally tuned into and focused on the primary reason for renting out your secondary home, which is “ka-ching, ka-ching”, i.e. money in the bank for multiple uses, you’ll agree that it can be a whole lot more fun to sit down at your computer every morning or evening to answer those requests for information that flow in when you’re doing your marketing right and you’ve got a good product. There are a lot of tasks I hate doing – like preparing invoices for clients or income tax papers for my accountant– but I’ve found that if I can stay focused on the money, it changes my whole attitude about the time spent on the task. If you’re motivated to make this vacation rental business work, the time and energy spent will be gratifying.

Now let’s look at the second key factor – “organization”.  No matter how motivated you are to make this work, the different tasks and skills involved could still get you down if you’re disorganized.

Getting “organized” means several things:

• First of all, you need to know what you’re talking about and how this vacation rental business works, so there’s no getting around it, you’ll need to take some time to build your competency, learn about the business, ask questions, do Web research, learn how to calculate optimal rental rates for your region and your property, pull together info about the tourist attractions in your region, and so on. You’ll have to be willing to keep yourself in the “lifelong learning” mode and stay up-to-date about the business and your region.
• You’ll have to decide whether you like people enough to want to deal with them on a regular basis. For this business to succeed, it requires that you enjoy working with people, are curious to get to know them and are generous enough to sincerely want them to have the very best time ever at your vacation home.
• Once you have the first two criteria down, the rest is a question of getting your work standardized, streamlined and organized:

-   You’ll need a quiet workspace with a computer, Internet and email. If you don’t have office space in your home, a corner in the kitchen could work just fine. The important thing is that when you sit down to work, you have everything you need at your fingertips.

-   You’ll need to put up some shelves to store material – maybe binders with key info, a pile of your guest information packets, boxes of tourist pamphlets, etc. Having this material prepared in advance will make your life easier.

-   You’ll have to build some standardized forms, a contract, rules and regulations and so forth. There are a lot of models out there to guide you.

-   You’ll have to decide how you’re going to handle cleaning your rental home between guests and any repairs that may need to be done. And how keys will be transferred.

-   You’ll need to keep your vacation home listing up to date on rentforyourvacation.com and take advantage of every marketing and promotional opportunity the site offers. Spend some time on the homeowners section of the site. Make sure that your listing includes great photos and a video of your home and property.

-   Decide on the best time of day to take your email and answer enquiries from potential guests. Important to not make them wait – you could lose the reservation.

-   Keep your yearly reservation calendar up to date and handy at all times. Some people we know have a copy in their office, one on the kitchen bulletin board and another in the car or workplace.

-   Once you’ve secured your reservations, there’s a follow-up stage: getting the contract signed, sending out the guest info packet and driving instructions. And then you’ll want to make sure your guest is happy during his stay.
I may have left out a few steps but, basically, this gives you an idea of what’s involved. If you’re an organized person, you can set up your workspace and manage your time so that this just becomes a part of your life… and if you manage things right, a lucrative part of your life. As with any new endeavor, it’s always more work in the beginning as you are learning about the business, setting up your documents and fine-tuning your people skills, but as in all such projects, at one point, things begin to just happen and get easier. You get comfortable, you feel competent and you start to really enjoy the contact with people from different parts of your country and the world.

But the reward is really felt when you realize that you have turned your secondary home into a cash cow which is allowing you to take more vacation, do those much needed renovations or pay a child’s college tuition.

It’s normal to have concerns… I know I did when I got into this business.

You’re attached to your vacation home, your hard-earned furniture and kitchen equipment, your garden – there’s the concern about breakage and wear-and-tear, about cleanliness. How you’re going to feel when you retake possession.

Most arrangements are made with strangers, over the phone. Even when you think you’ve got a good nose, you’re afraid of being wrong and having an unpleasant surprise to deal with when you get home.

I always remind people who are contemplating getting into the vacation rental business about two things. The first thing I tell them is this: “No risk, no reward!” Your secondary home can end up being a veritable cash cow, raking in good money which you will certainly know what to do with. Most owners I know – and this has been my personal experience – find that things normally go very well and that any minor inconveniences are quite easily dealt with. They’ve learned to operate in a professional manner, signing contracts, asking for deposits to guarantee the reservation and deposits for breakage, etc. They’ve adjusted quite well indeed to their new business: they’ve been able to use the rental income to cover a mortgage, take a wonderful trip, pay a child’s university tuition, plant that Mediterranean garden they’d been dreaming about for years…

The other thing I remind people about is this: Take a moment to think about the people on the other end – the vacationers who are thinking about renting your home. They see it listed on rentforyourvacation.com, it looks great, it smells great, it sounds great… but is it great? They turn the photos and video every which way – still looks great. They like their first phone conversation with you – friendly, informative, you seem honest… but what if they say yes, sign your contract and then the house turns out to be a big disappointment… and they feel they’ve been uh, well, screwed by you… What I’m trying to say is: This is a two-way street, a relationship built upon mutual trust. Both parties do everything possible to make themselves clear and inspire the other’s trust. And what’s reassuring is: 99% of the time, things work out just fine for both sides.

In the great majority of cases, the rewards of renting your secondary home far outweigh any inconveniences. The risk is well worth it. Most vacationers who prefer a vacation rental are decent people and quite conscious of the fact that they are staying in a personal home and they take measures to protect it. I’ve even had renters make little improvements to my garden or take care of a minor repair and leave me a cute note. I’ve found that a thorough cleaning between guests and prior to my taking repossession of the house means that I can quite quickly forget that, the day before, some other family was sitting at my dining room table. Every time that thought creeps into my mind, I quickly switch my thinking and say “Thank you Vacation Family – thank you for my trip to Rome! Thank you for the car repair or my son’s tuition.” And I can just hear them say, from their home many miles away in our Global Village: “Thank you for sharing your vacation home with us – it was ever so much nicer than a hotel vacation!”

Whether you’re an old hand at renting a vacation property or are just getting started, or maybe thinking about getting into this business, rate setting is not one of the easiest or most pleasant parts of the job. You always wonder whether you’ve set the proper rate for the vacation rental market or for your area, whether your rate is too high and is chasing potential renters away or, on the other side of things, that they are too low and you might be leaving good money on the table.

Help is on the way! Take a look at rentforyourvacation.com’s new rate calculator – I like the way our team set this up, the instructions are really simple. You just plug in the numbers the tool asks for and the calculator figures out what rate you should be charging to cover your expenses and make a decent profit.

Before you try out the tool, you need to pull your invoices together for expenses such as mortgage, heating, electricity, taxes, renovations, maintenance and so on.

Give the rental rate calculator a try and let me know what you think! We’ll talk more about it.

To come up with the most optimal rate(s), you need to gain an understanding of the market in your particular area. Is it a seasonal or year-round market? What’s the peak season? What rates does your competition charge (other property owners/managers, hotels)? Do you want to charge additional fees – if so, is it best to include them in your rate or present them as additional fees? You’ll also have to fix your minimum stay. I can address these issues soon.

In the meantime, if you want to have more detailed information and tips on how to use the calculator, I recommend that you read Rent For Your Vacation’s newsletter on the subject.