put your listing or listings on all the major listing sites. Booking.com, Airbnb, VRBO, FlipKey. You cannot always tell which ones do well in your market, so try them all. Also, there is a lot of owners who got themselves delisted by fake guest complaint such as hidden cameras. Then something such as Airbnb will cancel all their bookings for months ahead and leave them in the lurch. If you are an all the sites, it is a lot smaller problem. Also have your own website and use Craigslist. You are trying to get all of your guests from the listing sites in the future to book with you directly on your website. Direct booking is King.
use a short-term property management system such as Freetobook, guesty, lodgify etc. I use ownerreservations.com based on other owner recommendations. you can set up their templates and legal agreement to automate a lot of the communications and payment and other things. It will also handle the calendars between these different sites to avoid double bookings.
some at least Property Management Systems also have a hosted website, for small monthly price and they therefore take care of all the website support as well
put smart locks such as remotelock or Resort lock ory errentallock on your doors to control the check-in and check-out times of your guests. It will save you much headaches
use a dynamic pricing utility to control your pricing, such as pricelabs or wheelhouse or Beyondpricing. Some may work better in your area. It can earn perhaps 5 to 30% additional yield, as compared to doing nothing. Sometimes they also know the events in your area and can surge price your units.
unless you will be meeting every yes, install something like a ring video doorbell facing the door to interact with guests.
all of the above suggestions obviously need thought and configuring and research to use properly.
again, from what I have seen if you were going to do short-term rentals, I've seen many people who try to focus on three to six days stays. there is a lot more, but to me this is core stuff to success.
Originally posted by
@Kerry Baird:
@Ken Latchers, thanks for the tidbit about getting delisted. I have plenty of long term rental experience, and so much of this is new. I hadn’t come across that information, but it makes sense.
Most of my friends who do STRs here do 3 month snowbird listings, and use a lease.
I also did not know that ACH could be pulled after 60 days. BAM! Very good information, all around. I’m grateful~