All Forum Posts by: Ken Latchers

There's also value in their minimum stay logic as well. Some people just slap a minimum such as on weekends or weekdays and don't think about how that might be an advantage throughout the year and near and long into the future

Let's look at the fundamentals. There are three large vacation rental platforms and one little one. Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com and FlipKey.

they dominate almost everywhere on the search engines and other places spending huge amounts of money.

and then there is Joe Average who is miffed at one or more OTAs and decides he will only do direct booking. After a few months of crickets and bills, Joe starts to wander back onto the OTAs.

I cannot imagine any other long-term scenario. I keep telling people they should be on all three large sites with syncing of calendars, the intricacies of each, Dynamic pricing and having their own website to capture billboard effect people

every other pathway is a different version of shooting yourself in the foot. There are good business people and there are fools.

as for the title, will other OTA arise? I can imagine that Google or Amazon or even possibly eBay decides that hotels and vacation rentals and even experiences or something to add to their advertising mix.

Imagine that none of the vaccines work, and we spend the next four years going in and out of Sheltering at home because wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave after wave of coronavirus keeps coming back

they plus booking.com are the gorillas. perhaps google, amazon and even others ebay? decide one day to directly compete as STR platforms...

Even before the Coronavirus, a paid short term rental analysis sites is showing my County went from 400 to 600 short-term rentals in one year. But the guests are not going up particularly much.

to me the 800- pound gorilla in the room is still too many people piling in thinking short-term rentals are the answer.

except for a few markets, and I'm not even sure about them, I am expecting a mega collapse in short term rental markets, and it's just a matter of when.

The prevailing wisdom I have seen is don't allow more than 6 or 7-Day bookings. An Airbnb 2 month rental is asking for trouble. You are not in control, the guests in Airbnb are.

once you are beyond a few days, you are in midterm rentals. That does not mix well with an OTA trying to make their guests happy with cancellations or refunds or a potential chargeback losing you perhaps one or more months rent

2 weeks plus should be YOUR guest in every way. Too much risk otherwise.

You are not going to get solid answer for your location and your properties from others.

perhaps you want to do a side-by-side test with them for similar properties over at least 6 months.

in addition, this pandemic and the following impact of it may throw things off for a while.