By The Hospitable Team
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.
First of all, you should really enjoy being a host in order 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.
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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 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;
- 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, and that means more cash in your pocket.
As an added benefit, you’ll get more “you” time. 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.
Let Hospitable automate your STR routine.
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How to Manage Rental Properties on Your Own with Hospitable
Hospitable offers a lot of useful features to hosts to help them with vacation rental management. Let’s briefly overview the key advantages of our system.
Firstly, Hospitable allows you manage and update all of 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 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 will instantly answer on your behalf.
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 every time there’s a new job coming up.
It allows you to easily manage multiple platforms and keep your calendar and pricing updated. You can also take advantage of integrations with the top pricing tools that will help you push smart pricing to multiple channels. For example, you can integrate your Hospitable account with Pricelabs and use this tool to optimize your Airbnb and Vrbo, and Booking.com vacation rental rates.
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 that will help you stand out among competition and generate more leads.
Final Word
Some hosts believe that vacation rental property management is the best way to go, but still, a lot of 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. Using modern software like Hospitable, you can streamline your workflow and ensure perfect communications with your team and your guests.
Don’t forget to download our STR automation guide, which would help you boost your revenue.
Airbnb Automation: 7 Ways to Streamline Your Business
Airbnb automation can help remove the stress from the equation of managing your STR business and give you more free time to focus on providing exceptional guest experience and increasing profits or spend this time on things you care about.
Become a DIY Airbnb Host, or Hire a Property Manager?—Which is Right for You?
If you manage multiple units, this quickly turns into a full-time job. That’s why many hosts choose to outsource some or all of these tasks.
But how do you decide which tasks to outsource? That’s an important decision every host has to make.
Let us help you make this decision!
Airbnb Channel Manager: Gain Massive Exposure Across Multiple Platforms
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could promote your listings across multiple platforms and not just Airbnb?
You see, there are a few savvy property managers out there that are driving bookings across multiple different channels, and they’re not even breaking a sweat!
They’re using an Airbnb channel manager to do all of the work for them.
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