*Written by our friends at Lodgify
If you’re feeling like you’re in over your head with vacation rental property management, you’re not alone. This is an incredibly demanding role in an industry that’s constantly evolving, and no property manager is immune to its stressors.
Luckily, there are processes and solutions you can implement to lighten the load, from getting help you can rely on to investing in the right tools. In fact, succeeding as a vacation rental property manager absolutely depends on it.
So, let’s take a look at some of the best ways to streamline vacation rental property management. Once you try them out, you’ll never want to go back!
Rely on a Channel Manager
If you’re not already using a vacation rental channel manager to sync your calendars across all the third-party booking platforms you’re listing on, this should absolutely be your first step to streamline property management.
Using a channel manager will keep your calendars up-to-date across all your booking channels, preventing errors such as double bookings and overbookings. It also enables you to manage all your bookings from one place—no need to log into multiple platforms.
All of this adds up to significant time savings, in the ballpark of up to 20 hours a week.
Get Set Up to Accept Direct Bookings
Whether you’re managing your own vacation rental properties or someone else’s, one of your primary goals will be to save money. And one of the easiest ways to do that is with a direct booking site.
That’s because just about all third-party booking platforms charge commissions on reservations made through their site. So while it can be hugely beneficial to list on sites like Airbnb and Vrbo to tap into their visibility, especially when you’re just getting started, those fees will eat into your bottom line.
With a direct booking site, on the other hand, you can reinvest the funds you save on commissions into other efforts that will actually make you more money.
Luckily, building a vacation rental website doesn’t have to be a monumental task. In fact, vacation rental website builders like Lodgify’s enable you to create a website and start accepting direct bookings in minutes.
Enable Instant Bookings
Are you still reviewing each individual booking request before accepting? While booking requests may make you feel more in control of who you rent to, they also come with various drawbacks—not the least of which is the significant time investment.
For example, most travelers expect an instant answer. If they see that they have to wait for a response, they may simply book elsewhere, leaving you down a booking. What’s more, accepting instant bookings opens your rental up to last-minute reservations, making it that much easier to keep your calendar full.
Leverage Your Guest Data
So, you have a direct booking site set up to accept instant bookings. Now you just have to direct travelers to your site.
Marketing campaigns aimed at acquiring new guests may well form part of your plans, but if you’re strapped for time, why make your life harder? Many PMs don’t realize that they already have a plethora of guest data at their disposal, and it’s only a matter of tapping into it.
For example, StayFi makes it easy to leverage your existing guest data and integrate it into your email marketing. You can also use StayFi’s WiFi splash pages to easily collect guest data from every guest staying at your property—not just the booker. Before you know it, you’ll have a substantial and growing database of customers to reach out to (with minimal effort on your part).
Assemble a Reliable Turnover Team
One of the easiest ways to streamline vacation rental property management is simply to prevent problems before they happen. And that’s why it’s absolutely essential to hire professional cleaners you can rely on.
Imagine you receive a call just after a new guest checks in: the rental hasn’t been cleaned properly and the guest wants it rectified immediately. Now you’re stuck scrambling to find a last-minute cleaner, paying for a rush job, offering the customer a discount to appease them…all of which could have been avoided simply by hiring more reliable cleaners.
Pro tip: Property management software can also help you manage your turnover team and verify task completion—more on that next!
Invest in Property Management Software
Our final tip is one that will pay off tenfold, and that’s to invest in effective vacation rental property management software (PMS).
What channel managers do for your booking calendars, a PMS does for numerous other aspects of your vacation rental business. With a PMS, you can manage all your reservations, tasks, guest communications, and finances from a single platform.
One example of this can be seen in your task management, as we mentioned above. Imagine scheduling a turnover task from the convenience of your phone and then being notified once it’s completed. You can even have your team upload photos of their work so you can verify that it meets your expectations.
With Lodgify’s PMS, all this (and a lot more) is possible.
As Lodgify customer Chet Long from KBL Advantage and Sunken Escapes explains, “with all the automated tools that Lodgify provides, such as the PM modules side to automatically assign cleaners and send messages at certain points, it really alleviates a lot of the day-to-day stuff.”
About Lodgify
Lodgify is the comprehensive vacation rental platform designed for independent hosts and property managers, simplifying the management and marketing of lodging businesses.
It offers the essential tools to start, manage, and grow a rental enterprise, enabling users to create a bookable website, synchronize property data and availability across various third-party platforms, and efficiently manage all guest reservations and communications from a single, user-friendly interface.
