Building a Rental Property Portfolio

Anybody who has been doing business for a decade or more (or, for that matter, even less) will have watched with interest how rapidly the world of commerce has taken to the internet. One of the more vibrant of the newly online business areas is that of holiday rentals – and so you would expect. The internet has enabled property owners to easily rent out a holiday home or second home during the holiday period, in order to turn a modest profit or help to pay down the costs of up keeping the property.

So, too, have larger portfolio holders taken to the world wide web with considerable success; managing a holiday lets portfolio over the internet has become quite a remarkably busy industry in a relatively short amount of time. So, why has it blossomed so fast, and how can you take advantage of the innovations that have come with it?

The blossoming is, in part, explained away by the fact that, pre-internet age, there were such enormous barriers to anybody wanting to set up a small business in holiday rentals. The common way to advertise was to take out a slot in a local newspaper – which was costly, inefficient and as you might imagine, only read by a small number of people. The advent of online letting agencies and portals has meant that, almost overnight, these barriers have utterly disappeared. Whether you have only got a small holiday cottage to let or an international portfolio of properties, there is suddenly an audience of thousands of potential guests, right at your fingertips.

The inevitable corollary of such a boom in opportunities is usually a boom in competition, and that rough rule is very much the case in the holiday rentals business. It is important to get ahead, and there are various ways in which you can do that. One is to maximise your online presence – this means having a quality website that comes up as high as possible on web searches relevant to your property. A great way to do this is to use search engine optimisation – or SEO – to boost the rating of your site. There are various ways of doing this, and a little web-based research can give you the basics. Similarly, you should aim to get your property listed on as many online agencies and / or web portals as you reasonably can. Again, getting good links (and back linking) on these sites is crucial, as the traffic they enjoy is huge.

A second big 'must' is to get your own paperwork down to a fine art. This cause is greatly helped by synchronising your work as much as possible. In other words, have a database that you can access from a smartphone or other mobile device and enter your data there – whether vacancies, bookings, payments, need for a cleaner's visit or any similar task – rather than trying to remember or write down bits and pieces of information. A great way to organise your work easily is to use a property management software product. This is a relatively new, and very clever, idea: property owners can build a professional rentals website with all the important features, which will automatically integrate itself with their offline records. This means that you only have to fill in any one detail once – thus reducing error to a minimum and ensuring that your guests are impressed and satisfied by your service.

One final note: the website itself. It has to be good. Gone are the days when a well-placed listing would do; many customers now look at property owners' websites before making a decision. It is important that you have a good, strong layout, attractive photographs, a clear and simple booking process and a secure payment option. A vacancy calendar, interactive map and other 'top' features are desirable – again, property management software is a very good way to achieve this. But whatever your method, the key point is clear – there's a huge opportunity out there, so you need to make sure you're doing everything you can to be the one who ultimately gets the guests.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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