Renting your Holiday Property Page 3

RENTING YOUR PROPERTY

There are a number of different ways for you to market and manage your property.
i) Do it yourself
ii) Management/ Letting Agency
iii) Booking Agency

Do it yourself
Advertising your property on a property rental website is the best media to advertise your property direct to potential holiday tenants.
By advertising your property on such a media, your property is on view to potentially the whole world!
Looking after your property yourself gives you the advantage of dealing directly with potential holiday tenants and this gives you the perfect opportunity to vet the people that will be staying in your property!
Whether you received enquiries regarding the rental of your property via email or telephone, always thank them for their enquiry and ask where they heard about your property, this is always good to make sure that money spent on advertising is being spent in the right place.

It is important to remember never ignore a rental enquiry, even if you are fully booked at that time, you may receive a cancellation. Keep a record of all your enquiries; these are potential bookings for next year if they have not booked already!

With these contact details you can send a yearly reminder about your rental property, giving you a head start for bookings for your following year!

If you decide to fully manage your own property rentals make sure that you do this as professionally and as efficiently as you are able.

Management/ Letting Agency

If you decide to use a letting agency to handle your holiday bookings make sure that you weigh up all the pros and cons, make sure you know exactly what the agency are going to be doing for you.

An advantage of using an agency is that they can cover every aspect of the rental for you from booking enquiries, money transactions to general cleaning and maintenance.

Using a letting agent is ideal for owners that don’t have the time or inclination to deal with people and rentals directly.

Many agencies offer a variety of services depending on what you have paid for, and remember the agency that charges the least is not necessarily the best, when choosing an agent always go on recommendations, word of mouth is always the best advertising, whether it be good or bad!

On making a decision of which agency to use find out what they are going to be doing for their money.
• Property Inspections – Full Inventory Inspection before and after each letting period?
• Check In – Do they check holiday tenants into the property and explain how everything works?
• Departure – Do they check your guests out of the property?
• Maintenance – Do they organise ongoing repairs and maintenance with written reports?
• Emergencies – Do they provide a 24hr call service in the case of emergencies?

It is also advisable, should you choose to use a Letting Agency to think about having a separate company to look after the swimming pool or gardens for instance, as each company can double check that the other is doing what you are paying them to do!

Iii- Booking Agency
This is a compromise between doing it yourself and a full management company.
A booking agency will market the property for you, but you will have to find somebody, if not yourself to manage the property.
Basically the agency acts as a middleman for you, taking and handling enquiries, bookings and payments, with monies being paid to you on completion minus any commission payments due to the agency.