More Money For Your Property
Some properties cost $6k a year in utilities alone before taxes or repairs. If your property taxes are 1%, and the property is worth $200k, that’s another $2k a year in expenses. If you spend $2k in maintenance—plumbing, repair, cleaning, etc., you’re looking at $10k a year just to own a property—and that’s if you have it paid off, free and clear, with no mortgage.
Here’s a list of property costs by the city on a monthly basis—spoiler alert: they can be high. Divide your annual average—we’ll call it $10k on the conservative side—by twelve and you’re looking at $833.33 a month. Two properties in this range cost $20k a year just to own. But what if you could turn those properties into moneymakers?
Conservatively, it’s $1.6k+ a month just to zero out annual expenses. That means you have to figure out how to make $55.55+ a day. A great way to do that is to turn a property into a vacation rental, where you charge premium rates. $1k a week becomes $4k a month, subtract $1.6k+ out of that and you just went from losing $20k a year between two properties to making $20k+ a year on one.
If you could make a vacation rental property pull $4k a month on average, you’re actually at $28k+ after direct expenses. Factor out $8k for taxes and extraneous expenses (like marketing) that may be variable, and you’re still seeing $20k profit. So how do you get there? Following are some tips that may help.
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1. Seek Reviews From Guests
Guests who really appreciate what you’ve done with your vacation rental property are some of your best organic, free marketing. Leave a guest book, and encourage them to leave a positive review online. You might even incentivize such reviews with a discount on a future stay, as what you lose directly you’ll gain in new customers.
This will involve having your rental vacation property listed in a way that makes it as visible as possible. It’s imperative to use online visibility, and there’s a way to stimulate that visibility to its highest possible associated impact.
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2. Viral Visibility
There are best practices for online optimization which, when properly used in regard to any property, can make it go viral. Vacation rental advertisement will make you more money than you spend if you do it properly; more than zeroing it out in the long-run. Visuals, SEO, images, videos where applicable—these all play a part in the process.
The more ideal the locale where your vacation property, the better. If you’re in a seasonal place, that will to a degree reduce the overall rental possibility. Influencers can be a key tactic. Influencers are social media celebrities who do videos based on their exploits.
So if you get an attractive young lady at your vacation villa to do a video for her 2,000,000 followers, it can be more financially worthwhile for you to give her a week at that villa for free, than to charge her normal rates. The key is properly marketing and choosing the right influencers online.
You’ve only got 52 weeks a year to fill a vacation rental property; if you’re able to get 1% of 2,000,000 followers at your property, you’re looking at 20,000 possible new renters. Now obviously, you’re likely not going to see numbers that high—20,000 renters would be 384 years of solid bookings at one week per renter! That said, if you are savvy, you could be booked solid a few years out, allowing you to expand rates.
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3. The Cleaning Company: Find A Good One
One of your biggest expenses will be clean up after guests come and go at your vacation rental property. If you’re going to market well, you’ve got to make sure it’s always clean after a guest has vacationed there. A dirty unit won’t market well.
The thing is, some cleaning companies charge twice what they should because they know you’re less likely to call them on it, being remote; so you’ve got to vet those companies carefully and assure they’re not charging fees which are exploitative. Here’s an article that can give you an idea of what such expenses may be, and what drives those expenses.
Turning Your Vacation Property Into A Money-Maker
Find a solid cleaning company to assure your rental vacation unit is always clean, initiate online viral visibility as best you can, seek reviews, and be sure to court online influencers. Such tactics will propound the visibility of your vacation rental property and can do much to assure you are able to see a solid profit.
