Vacation Rental Management: Everything You Need to Know
A vacation rental property is often referred to as passive income, but in fact, it’s not the type of business where you can expect to earn money by doing nothing. Running a short-term vacation rental property involves many important tasks to make your business succeed financially.
Still, you can either choose to manage your property yourself or hire a vacation rental management company. As your business grows, the process of managing your vacation rentals might get overwhelming, but it can also be gratifying when done right.
Read on to learn more about different aspects of vacation rental management and how automation software like Hospitable can help you manage your rental property like a pro.
What Is Vacation Rental Management?
Let’s start with the vacation rental property management definition.
Property management is the oversight of a property by a third party on behalf of the property’s owner. Property managers are generally responsible for the day-to-day operations, from communication with guests to arranging for cleaning, repairs, and maintenance.
When deciding whether to seek professional management or to become a DIY host, you should take into account a few important considerations.
Running a vacation rental property is similar to being in the hospitality business, requiring greater attention to detail. It involves some management tasks unique to vacation rentals, such as communicating with guests before, during, and after their stay and being available to answer their questions at any time.
These tasks are a part of the hosting routine and are very time-consuming. So first of all, you should enjoy being a host to deliver a great experience to your guests. Make sure you have enough time to manage your short-term rental and be available to your guests nearly 24/7.
Vacation rental property management can come with a diverse set of challenges and responsibilities, and in fact, work never stops. That’s why automation of as much as possible is now a necessity. In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of automation. You may be interested in our automation guide for further reading.
Have conversations with your guests even when you sleep
How Do Property Management Companies Work
Since managing short-term and vacation rentals involves a lot of work, many homeowners prefer to outsource these operations to short-term rental management companies. Owners pay property managers a fee or a certain commission from every booking.
If you lead a busy life, hiring a property manager to help you stay on top of your business can be a good option. So how do property management companies work? Let’s take a look at the process. It includes a long list of essential operations and tasks:
Listing the rentals on third-party online booking platforms, including Vrbo, Airbnb, and Booking.com;
Pricing each rental and adjusting prices for specific calendar dates;
Communication with existing guests and responding to inquiries from potential guests;
Alignment of calendars on multiple channels to avoid double bookings;
Coordination with property cleaning and maintenance staff to ensure the rentals are prepared for each stay;
Addressing any issues that arise during a guest’s stay;
Improvement of the guest experience.
If you hire a professional company, they will take care of all aspects of managing your vacation rental property and convert it into a passive income asset. You can be sure they know how to get the most profit from your listing, which means more cash in your pocket.
Hiring an experienced professional to handle all aspects of your vacation rental will give you peace of mind knowing that everything is properly managed. And as an added benefit, you’ll get more “you” time to relax and do what you enjoy. You will earn money from your property without the hard work of being a host.
One more aspect you should consider, are you really comfortable giving full control over your property to a third party? Because if you are not, it would be better to do everything yourself.
It would be very stressful for you and your property manager if you try to control them at every step and challenge every decision they make. This will lead to a bad experience for both of you.
If you think you’ll be more comfortable being a DIY host, the best approach is to manage your listings yourself and outsource the tasks you don’t enjoy doing or just don’t have enough time for, such as cleaning.
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How to Manage Rental Properties on Your Own with Hospitable
Although there’s much to juggle, choosing to manage your vacation rental yourself doesn’t have to be as time-consuming as you might think. You need the right automation tool to run your STR business on autopilot.
Hospitable is all-in-one vacation rental software that offers many valuable features to hosts to help them with vacation rental management. Let’s briefly overview the critical advantages of our system that can help you manage different aspects of your business.
Firstly, Hospitable allows you to manage and update your property calendars on multiple channels, communicate with guests, and answer inquiries from a single central location.
You can schedule automatic messages to your guests triggered by such events as a new booking request, check-in, check-out, new inquiry, and many more. And you can use Hospitable to automatically upsell an extended stay or late check-out if your listing is available.
Moreover, you even have an opportunity to set up automatic answers to your guests’ questions. Our AI will recognize specific questions from your guests on more than 20 common topics and instantly answer on your behalf.
And Hospitable’s ChatGPT integration can help you quickly create thoughtful responses to your guests’ messages. ChatGPT integration will use information from your booking channels (about the guest, listing, and booking) to provide personalized answers and tailored recommendations, considering the guest’s specific needs.
Our system will help you manage and assign tasks to your team members automatically. Hospitable will notify your team members via email or text/SMS whenever a new job comes up.
It allows you to easily manage multiple platforms and keep your calendar and pricing updated. You can also use integrations with the top pricing tools that will help you push smart pricing to multiple channels.
Our vacation property management software will protect you from double bookings with instant calendar synchronization across multiple sites, including Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo, as well as Homelidays, bookabach, Abritel, FeWo-direkt, and stayz.
Want to be less dependent on OTAs and consistently build your brand? With Hospitable, you can easily create your own fully functional direct booking website to help you stand out, generate more leads, and drive repeat direct bookings.
Final Word
Some hosts believe that vacation rental property management is the best way to go and ensure that everything runs smoothly, but still, many hosts decide to manage their property themselves.
Although earning more money on your vacation rental property when you do it alone requires dedication and effort, it can be quite rewarding with the right vacation rental management software.
Modern software like Hospitable can streamline your workflow and ensure perfect communication with your team and guests. With Hospitable, you can automate almost every aspect of running your vacation rental business.
Don’t forget to download our STR automation guide, which will help you boost your revenue.
Short-Term Rental Automation: The Easy Way to Streamline Your Business
