Marketing Your Rental / Vacation Home
Marketing / Advertising Your Rental or Vacation Home
If you have chosen to be your own landlord, then this is where you work starts to pay off! Even if you have decided to use a property manager and they market the properties for you, it doesn’t hurt to have some extra help! Besides, if you are doing a little marketing on your own and you start sending inquiries to your management company from your efforts, you are telling them that you are involved and they better stay sharp! And it really doesn’t take much time especially once it is set up. Just make sure you and your manager are not duplicating efforts.
Major By-Owner Rental Sites
Most of these sites can do it all for you. They will list your property and generate inquires, help keep track of bookings, and some even process payments for you. These last two are especially helpful for vacation rental homes. We will list the top by-owner sites for you. There are many others, but don’t bother, these will give you all the exposure you need.
Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO), www.vrbo.com
· Delivers an average of 90 inquiries per listing per year 
· Receives more than 65 million traveler visits each year
· Travelers find VRBO through over 600,000 keyword searches on major search engines each month
· Over 115,000 listings worldwide – the largest vacation rental-by-owner site on the internet
· High Google and Yahoo rankings
· Regularly mentioned in The New York Times, Budget Traveler, Frommer’s, and The Wall Street Journal
12-Month listing starts at $249 per year and includes the following:
· Easy online setup – if you can type, you can do it
· 5 photos
· Online guestbook and reservation calendar
· Two links – including one to your personal website
· Central member account for managing all your listings
· Easy online access 24/7 to edit your listing from any computer anywhere in the world
Extra features:
· Add up to 11 additional photos
· YouTubeTM video tour for properties with 16 photos Learn More >>
· Thumbnail image of your property on the city/location page for listings with 12 or more photos
Vacation Rentals, www.vacationrentals.com
HomeAway, www.homeaway.com
· Ranks #1 on Google for the term “Vacation Rentals”
· 5x more traffic than our nearest competitor with over 75 million traveler visits a year (Nielsen/NetRatings Jun-Aug 2008)
· Full listing on HomeAway.com including 12 photos, location map, and availability calendar
· Basic listing on their leading international sites, Holiday Rentals (UK) and Fewo-Direkt (Germany)
· Free full listings on Cyberrentals, Greatrentals and A1Vacations
· Free HomeAway Connect availability calendar
· Statistics and email history for the term of your listing
· Display 8 free photos of your vacation home rental
· Over 35,000 family-friendly beach houses, condo rentals and vacation home rentals
· $169.00 per year to list on Vacation Rentals
· $329.00 per year to list on Home Away
Rentals.com, www.rentals.com
· For both single family homes and vacation rentals
· Reach millions of qualified renters at the optimal rental search phase.
· Receive a guaranteed lift in your rental response.
· List on the most effective source for rental advertising — better than other Web sites, better than the local newspaper.
· Save time and money while shortening the duration of your vacancies between tenants.
· Obtain reliable, accurate reports.
· Close vacancies faster.
· Many other services like finding a rental manager, credit checks, etc…
Others
