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As vacation rental properties continue to be a popular alternative to conventional hotels, investors, big and small, are snapping up multiple vacation rental properties to buff up their real estate portfolios. However, as an investor, you need to understand that the vacation rental business is not a passive income-generating business model. Indeed, there’s nothing passive about marketing your properties, checking in and out your guests, resetting and cleaning the property for the next guest, and handling all the backend operations, such as bookkeeping, accounting, and other administrative tasks. Handling multiple vacation rental properties is a tough job even with a property manager.
Fortunately, there are tech solutions designed especially for the short-term vacation rental industry. Let’s find out how each one can make your property manager’s job easier.
As with any business, keeping your books and accounts in order is one of the most important things you need to do to ensure the financial health of your vacation rental business. For this, vacation rental accounting software is the answer. From tracking rental income and expenses to generating detailed financial reports, such a tool can provide valuable insights into your financial performance.
When seeking solutions, explore software products that provide a wide range of tools to handle expenses, taxes, commissions, and other tasks. Ideally, your software should also feature a tool that will let you keep track of your funds in separate ledger accounts. This capability aids in effectively managing and verifying your fund balance whenever necessary, with detailed information available in account statements.
It used to be that all you needed to do was list your property on Airbnb, and you could call it a day. However, the competition is incredibly fierce within this industry today. As such, you need all the big guns to stand out, and this includes building your own website.
Thankfully, you don’t necessarily need an expensive web development budget to build your website. With a vacation rental website builder, you can build your own. Simply choose your theme, customize the details, and launch your website under your chosen domain name. A great benefit of having your own website is that you can build your brand across your different short-term rental properties.
From your site, repeat guests can contact you directly without going through an online travel agency (OTA), which you have to pay. What’s more, if you market it right, you can even have potential new customers going through your website’s booking form instead of other OTA platforms.
With multiple properties to manage, it can be overwhelming to list them across multiple platforms. Thanks to tech solutions like vacation rental channel managers or property management systems, you will have just one interface where you can manage property listings over multiple OTAs like Booking.com, Agoda, and Airbnb. You or your property manager will be able to quickly update listing information, photos, and availability across various platforms simultaneously.
Imagine receiving bookings and reservations from multiple platforms, as well as your website. This could easily overwhelm your property manager and may even result in overlapping bookings. That’s why you need to centralize and synchronize calendars across all properties. This eliminates the hassle of manually updating calendars and reduces the risk of booking conflicts. With real-time availability updates, property managers can optimize pricing and capitalize on peak booking periods.
Effective multichannel communication is essential to attracting and retaining guests. Your guest can contact you initially using email and then finalize the details using messaging apps. With multiple guests to book, this can get confusing fast.
With tech solutions offering unified communications, however, managing your correspondence with guests will be easier. What’s more, replies are also speedier with an automated responder. Features like a customized arrival form, meanwhile, present a professional way to ask for more details from the guest before arriving.
One of the most challenging aspects of running a vacation rental property business is when you allow problematic guests in. According to some reports, there have been guests who have used short-term rentals to throw unruly parties, resulting in neighbors calling the police. Others had refused to leave when they were supposed to, causing a nightmare for the property owners.
To prevent these unfortunate incidents, you can install CCTVs on the public areas of your property. Just indicate their presence on your listing to avoid violating the guidelines of some OTAs. Other security tech solutions include electronic locks on your door. This provides incredible convenience when checking in guests. You can simply message them the temporary passcode so they can access your property freely. After their stay, you can reset the locks on your door to prevent unauthorized entry.
We can’t write about tech solutions without mentioning smart home automation. This revolutionary tech allows users to remotely control or automate appliances, lights, and even curtains in a house. For a short-term rental property owner, these innovations provide greater control to ensure your property is energy-efficient, climate-controlled, safe, and secure.
Make technological innovations your partner in your vacation rental business. With the practical benefits they provide, your business can streamline operations while enhancing customer experience for your guests.
