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How to prepare your vacation rental listing
The expansion of Internet in the last decade made a revolution in the information delivery. Now you are able to access information from the other side of the world just with a click of a mouse. How does this affect the vacation rental owners? Are they prepared for the new market? If you are vacation home owner but you still think whether you need to list your property on Internet you better hurry up – soon it may be too late.
Here are my advices how you can better prepare your listing. Even if you have already listed your rental you may rethink your approach and go and change or add lot of things to your listing after you read the lines below.
First think of your vacation rental not from your owner’s point of view but from the vacationer’s point of view. If you alone go to vacation what are you interested in, what do you look for and how do you choose the location? Sit down and list all these things on a piece of paper. Now go and speak with your wife, relatives and friends and ask them the same questions, write down the answers and try to summarize the results. When you finish with this start listing the special features of your vacation rental and try to match them to the list you have already prepared. At the end you will end up with a good list of features that your vacation rental has and you need to emphasize when you list it.
If you are not able to do the research by yourself you can turn for help to some professional marketing or travel agency. Many of the listing web sites can provide you with the same information for a lower cost.
Second you need to price your vacation home correctly. For sure your vacation rental is not the only one that is rented at its location. Talk with the neighbors and try to learn how much they ask for their rental. You can also do a market research via Internet, just go and search for vacation homes in your region and see what the prices are. Knowing the market is important if you want to keep your place occupied all the time. If you don’t price it properly you may lose more than you expected to win.
Third step is pictures. Don’t neglect that one! Providing just a text description for your vacation home is not enough. From other side if you do the description by yourself you may not be objective enough and this may turn on to be a disadvantage for you – keep in mind that anyone can give negative rating for your property or post a comment that will be visible to thousands of people. People say “picture is worth thousand words” so place as many pictures in your listing as you can.
The last step is to find a place to list you vacation home with no or minimum cost. One good place for that is TravelWeaver.net. It offers free subscription until the end of 2006 and also big discounts for the following 2 years. You can also look for other web sites that have similar offers; many web sites provide also trial subscriptions so you can list your vacation home for month or two and see what the performance is. Also listing prices vary a lot; you can find free sites that allow you to list with no charge and very expensive sites that offer you not only listing but online booking and payments; some of them also provide full management service for your vacation home. One important thing to consider is how many properties you can list for the price you pay and how many pictures you can upload for a property.
Working in this new environment, where information flows easily and almost simultaneously around the world, requires you to be more competitive and aggressive than until now. Preparing for the new world is a big challenge for the small vacation rental owner but not accepting it will not lead you to success.
About the Author: Metodi Mladenov writes about various topics like travel, real estate and investing. Visit his blogs to read more.
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