Have you been contemplating renting out your secondary home… but then stop short because you’re troubled about the extra work involved in becoming a landlord? You’re having trouble keeping up with Life already without fitting that in?
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.
