Around the world, millions of individuals are stepping up side jobs renting out their primary residences, second houses, and other real estate assets.
As an excellent renter is aware, managing your reservations is nearly a full-time job. This includes everything from keeping your clients satisfied throughout their stay to maintaining a consistent flow of new business.
As the sharing economy expands, services like Airbnb and others have emerged to assist individuals in running their businesses. But if they’re prepared to put in the effort, owners can handle bookings well on their own, which eliminates middleman fees and increases their earnings.
However, acquiring a consistent flow of direct reservations is the largest challenge for independent rental operators. Increasing regular reservations is a problem all year long, whether it’s because of slow periods during the off-season or a lack of visibility in a sea of rentals.
Here are five strategies you may employ to increase reservations and maintain a profit in the rental market.
1. Build your own gorgeous, optimized platform
The first guideline for online booking success is to have attractive photos of the space you’re attempting to rent. Regardless of your website, utilizing professional-looking photographs of your listing can assist attract visitors.
However, another benefit of spending money on high-quality images is that you may use them to help create your vacation rental website where guests can book directly from you. You’ll be able to keep a larger portion of the rental income if your website has the bells and whistles to compete with Airbnb and HomeAway.
You’ll need to be optimized, mobile-friendly web pages for your listing to appear in search results high enough to compete with larger platforms (which will look as good to Google as they do to your potential customers). To improve your search engine ranks, think about hiring an SEO specialist. However, you can also research topics like the best keywords for your industry or area and the usage of meta descriptions.
2. Inspire visitors to provide reviews
Conscientious travelers may be surprised to learn that a surprising proportion of tourists choose not to submit evaluations once their vacation is over. Even more prosperous landlords claim that only approximately half of their visitors provide feedback.
This implies that to get the critical public input you want, you will need to be proactive about obtaining evaluations.
Within a few days of a visitor staying at your establishment, get in touch and ask for a review. Personalized requests often do better than pre-written texts; some even send handwritten notes to remind recipients of the rental.
Most crucial, assist your visitors by doing the hard work. Make it as simple as you can for people to click, write, and submit reviews by providing links to the page on your website dedicated to them.
Even a bad review has worth it; you may learn from it. According to TripAdvisor, if someone comments on a less-than-ideal experience, you may openly and intelligently address those issues, which can improve your reputation in the eyes of the majority of readers.
3. Be receptive to brief stays
Some landlords have rules that they won’t rent out their property for less than two or three days; the reasoning behind this is that it wouldn’t be cost-effective to have a constant rotation of tenants.
But allowing guests to remain for only one night has unnoticed advantages. The largest benefit is that letting individuals make last-minute, short bookings will rapidly accumulate visitors and feedback. Your site will rank better in search results and on third-party platform results the more reviews it has.
People often choose the location with the most ratings when given a choice between two locations that seem to be equal. Two reviews with an overall rating of 4.5 stars are significantly less significant than 20 reviews with the same rating.
4. Improve and connect your social media profiles.
Without social media platforms, no company’s online presence would be complete in today’s world. Facebook is the standard, of course, but other sites like Instagram and Pinterest, which focus on showcasing enormous, gorgeous photographs of stuff, are also quite popular.
Explore sponsored advertising and user involvement in comment areas to increase user engagement on your social media accounts, which should be outfitted with high-quality photographs much like your standard listing. These actions will increase your visibility. A fresh lead and a new booking could result from using the proper hashtag at the right moment.
You may connect all of your sites using top-notch web design tools, giving your company a powerful online presence.
5. Write your descriptions in Hemingway style
Your listing descriptions should, above all, be factual and sincere. Don’t mislead clients about crucial information about your rental, including its location, size, and layout. It’s preferable to disclose any flaws up front rather than waiting until it’s too late and letting consumers determine for themselves if they’re a deal breaker—negative feedback results from this.
But keep in mind: You’re renting (or, instead, selling) a thing. Write a description for your listing that will persuade potential buyers to click. Try to connect with the kinds of guests you want to draw in by using your words, particularly your keywords, to paint your listing images.
Take the opportunity to wax lyrical. When looking to rent a house, most individuals are just as interested in the property’s history as they are in its location or number of bedrooms. A tenant who is on the fence could respond better if you inject some personality into the situation.
There are many other little tips, tricks, and ideas that you may employ to strengthen your booking brand. You are welcome to take advice from seasoned real estate agents who advertise properties to a range of customers.
You can soon find yourself fending off inquiries from friends about how to improve their listings while being regarded as an authority in the industry yourself! Sending them this article first is a must.
