By Asli Theobald, MS
For absentee owners, below is the 4-step fail-proof recipe for generating the best returns on vacation rental investments without headaches:
- Find a manager who will list your home on the Airbnb and VRBO vacation rental booking platforms, avoiding all the local management companies that only list the homes they manage on their own personal websites. All of these “big” local companies are way smaller and less popular than the world’s biggest international booking platforms Airbnb and VRBO. Utilizing the world’s top 2 most popular booking platforms and this alone will generate the maximum exposure needed to generate maximum returns.
- There are 2 reasons why the “big” local 30A vacation rental companies often list the homes they manage only on their personal websites. The first reason, obviously, is not to have to pay a commission to Airbnb and VRBO, despite lower profits for owners. The second reason most local management companies avoid using Airbnb and VRBO is to prevent homeowners from seeing any negative reviews that may accumulate on these platforms not under their control. If any vacationer leaves a bad review on Airbnb or VRBO, that review must stay there, whereas any bad review left on the local company’s own website almost always immediately gets removed, which is why most local management company listings often show very few reviews even for homes listed for years. This is quite unfortunate, as not having an abundance of good reviews fails to utilize the most important trust factor. This discourages countless vacationers from booking, causing huge losses.
- To find the best manager for your rental investment, I recommend looking for the most highly rated managers on Airbnb and/or VRBO, since nothing can give you a better idea of how well a manager has been performing than an abundance of great reviews from actual guests. Visit Airbnb.com or VRBO.com, perform a broad search for vacation homes in Santa Rosa Beach, sort the search results by highest ratings, and click on the profiles of the managers that come up at the top. Select and message the best managers who have the best review ratings despite having a fairly large number of total reviews for all homes managed (e.g.: Dream Home 30A has been able to maintain a 4.9-star rating despite having accumulated around 500 reviews, consistently never having failed for more than 5 years). When you message these most successful managers using Airbnb or VRBO’s messenger and ask if they’d like to also manage your rental, you’re likely to get quick responses as Airbnb and VRBO grade managers on their response time.
- If you can get your home listed and managed by one of the most successful managers on the world’s biggest booking platforms, your listing will immediately get featured on that platform’s search results due to the way the platform’s ranking algorithm elevates the homes listed by the most highly rated managers. As your highly-rated manager causes your home to acquire many great reviews, more and more vacationers will trust and book your home, causing your successful investment to rake in increasing returns.
Asli (“Ashley”) Theobald is the owner/operator of Dream Home 30A. Call 850-867-5449 now to start making maximum profits as described above.
Author: Sowal Editor
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