The end of the year is usually a good time to reflect. The vacation rental market as a whole has seen remarkable expansion over the last 12 months, as well as multiple mergers and acquisitions, consolidations, and a slew of new limitations and laws throughout the world.
The end of the year is a good time to evaluate your vacation rental company, identify what is functioning well, and identify what needs fine-tuning and polishing. With the following year-end assessment checklist, you can bring your short-term rental up to par by considering both online and offline variables. Here are ten techniques for doing a rental property analysis:
1. Examine the facilities and equipment
Every item in your holiday home has a certain lifespan. Long-term rentals often see less wear and tear than short-term rentals. As the proprietor and host of your home, it is your responsibility to ensure everything is in excellent working order for your visitors.
Use the opportunity at the end of the year to examine your home’s important components. Anything from substantial conveniences like refrigerators and washing machines to more modest ones like towels, sheets, and pillows. For these kinds of vacation rental repairs, there are certain timelines you may adhere to, but sometimes all that is needed is a little common sense and meticulous attention to detail.
We’ve designed a printable vacation rental inventory checklist to get things started. You may assess and rank the state of each appliance, item, and piece of furniture in your rental home using the list below:
2. Examine Your WebsiteÂ
A lot may change in a year, therefore keeping your website current is crucial for controlling visitors’ expectations. By reviewing your website as the year draws to a close, you may enter the next season ready for a fresh flood of visitors and positive evaluations.
Viewing your picture gallery, are the images still a true depiction of your home as a holiday rental? It’s time to upload the images that go with any enhancements, features, or even color changes you’ve made to one of your important rooms.
How well does your website’s property description do in encouraging people to make reservations? If the answer is no, take advantage of the New Year to improve the content on your website so that it is better able to generate online bookings.
3. Review your SEO
You should also examine the SEO of your vacation rental website. It should come as no surprise that this will help your website rank better since the Google Freshness algorithm adores new material. Make sure your company name, address, and phone number are shown at the bottom of every page of your website by doing a NAP audit. Review each of your pages’ meta descriptions to see if you can improve them by adding additional keywords.
Not to mention, of course, the actual keyword research. Are there any new phrases you need to focus on for SEO in the next year? Determine precisely what your prospective visitors are looking for, then adjust your website’s content and SEO accordingly.
4. Examine Contracts with Outside Partners
Cross-promotions and partnerships with neighborhood companies are incredibly effective and cost-effective ways to increase website traffic and bookings. If you haven’t already established relationships, now is an excellent time to start looking at regional suppliers and developing a marketing plan that will work for both of you.
The end of the year is also an excellent opportunity to assess any current relationships, agreements, and contracts if you currently have agreements with external partners. What are they providing to your company, should you wonder? Has this cooperation helped my company grow? What might be done better?
Determine which of these are a valuable and advantageous addition to the way you manage your vacation rental, and terminate any agreements that don’t meet your requirements. In reality, you can discover that certain gaps call for the hiring of new services and the drafting of new contracts at the beginning of the year.
5. Examine the workflow for flaws
Review the feedback you received from guests over the last year and note any areas that may be improved. Perhaps guests noticed your below-average response time, a cleaning checklist omission, or even worse, a cancellation brought on by overbooking.
The start of a new year is the perfect opportunity to review your procedures and make any necessary improvements to ensure the smooth operation of your company. The process will be improved by using vacation rental software to do fundamental tasks, such as displaying real-time availability and synchronizing calendars across several channels.
6. Reconsider OTA Listings
Listing your home on OTAs is a great method to attract thousands of tourists to check out what you have to offer. To boost the proportion of direct bookings you accept, you should concentrate more on your website if you are listed on numerous sites, but only a few of them generate reservations. Therefore, you may want to consider deleting your listings from those.
You’ll be able to be as structured and focused as possible for the next year by letting go of the sites that don’t generate much revenue. To optimize reservations and raise occupancy, the majority of vacation rental owners and property managers utilize their website in addition to a maximum of three to four external listing sites.Â
Worried about the performance of your listings? Lodgable offers our customers an optimized tool that allows you to analyze your listings and make sure you do things to improve their performance.Â
7. Arrange Your Promotions Ahead of Time
Planning your marketing tactics and any promotions or special offers you desire to run at the beginning of the year is the best time to do it. Examine your figures and outcomes from the previous year. Which months had the most bookings, and which ones could have used more? Many firms in the vacation rental sector are influenced by seasonality, therefore, you may attempt to combat the shoulder season by promoting discounts at certain periods of the year.
The creation of a Black Friday campaign would be a smart move. Learn how to prepare your property in a similar way for Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. Alternatively, you may consider launching ads targeted at certain traveler demographics and visitor kinds, putting up special rates to target your off-peak or shoulder season explicitly. Watch out for the busiest travel times in the US.
8. Set Objectives for the Upcoming Year
Setting some attainable business objectives for the next 12 months is a wonderful idea as a new year heralds fresh starts. Determine some of the most important changes you can make to your company based on the results of your analysis of your total vacation rental over the last year.
This might consider your resort itself, your marketing strategies, and the number of reservations you want to attract. Occasionally, it is simpler to make a checklist of all the important benchmarks or objectives for the next year and choose a few to swear by.
9. Remain social
Social media platforms, particularly in the tourism sector, are gaining ground year after year. To establish a brand for your vacation rental company and encourage prospective customers to interact with you on these platforms, it’s critical to maintain contact with your past, present, and future visitors using applications like Instagram and Facebook.
Set aside some time to organize your articles; sometimes, it’s simpler to schedule a month’s worth of material in a few hours than to produce it sporadically when you get the opportunity. Planning can also help you have a consistent publishing schedule, which may increase engagement rates.
10. Perform a SWOT evaluation
Last but not least, do an analysis that focuses mostly on your product (your vacation rental) and you as a company owner. There are several things to think about, including your budget, target market, pricing, etc. You may not be making the most of your finest qualities if you don’t know what they are. Similar to this, if you are unaware of your deficiencies, you may not be aware of what you need to work on.
Check out the SWOT analysis for hosts in the vacation rental business, along with the 10 questions to ask while performing a vacation rental study.
Finally, assess the overall success of this year in operating a vacation rental company. Find out what is doing well and what needs to be improved. Examining each of these characteristics, you may predict what to anticipate in the next year.
At Lodgable, we are dedicated to helping you perform that is why our team will help you do quarterly reviews with all of our clients to help review your performance and help you to perform better. To learn more, CLICK HERE.
