So you just sold a property to an out of town investor and you were given back the keys to manage it as a short-term rental? Most likely because the investor wanted to also use the property a couple of times a year and doesn't want the property to sit empty?
And you said YES to the new challenge.
You're now facing some familiar and some completely new tasks. You start listing the property, which is a familiar process, and then quickly find out that it takes a lot more to manage vacation rentals (well). You start looking around for software solutions because you're probably thinking that - there must be a simple solution to all of this. You quickly find out there are too many solutions, and individually, none of them help you solve your problem.
The good news is that you're looking for a solution and not trying to use your tools from your real estate brokerage or property management business. Manually managing vacation rentals is simply not possible. It will handicap you completely and you will be dealing with double bookings, upset customers, repetitive e-mails, phone calls, and much more.
Realtors are perfectly positioned for getting highly qualified leads. However, they're also receiving a serious threat from the new breed of managers who specialize in vacation rentals. The new breed of VRMs is clueless about standard property management and client management, however, they've learned a few things about the issues described above and they're now sitting in the high speed train.
VRMs have learned that the answer to successful management of vacation rentals is: Complete Automation.
Automation can only happen when you incorporate software applications and management practices to work together. Just having the software applications will have a minimal impact, and the same goes for only having great management practices.
Over the following of months we will be writing about specific parts of the VRMs job and how they're handled by professional vacation rental managers.