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Top 3 Time-Saving Vacation Rental Management Tools for Vacation Home Owners

With property management companies charging up to 45% of the rent on a rental property, more and more vacation home owners are turning to the Internet to book their rental properties in order to keep more of their rent.

While sites like HomeAway offer vacation home owners a new place to advertise their rental properties, most vacation home owners find that these websites alone do not produce enough rent to keep their property fully booked. Worse still, vacation home owners are finding that the mundane tasks of answering questions, submitting invoices and rental agreements manually, updating their property availability calendars, and all the other tasks associated with replacing a property management company properties add up to a total work

However, there are online software management tools for vacation rental properties that can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend managing these types of activities.

To help vacation home owners find, book and manage rentals online for their rental properties, here are the top three vacation rental management tools that no vacation home owner should go without.

1. Online Booking and Booking Management System

If there is something that online consumers have learned to expect, it is an instant gratification. If a potential renter cannot book and book your vacation property online instantly, you are decreasing your chances of getting their business.

Websites like HomeAway urge vacation home owners to “respond quickly! Data show that homeowners who answer questions within 3 hours close 57% more bookings than homeowners who respond within 24 hours.” Imagine what eliminating response time can do to improve your bookings, then.

With today’s integrated online booking, credit card processing and reservation management systems, there’s no reason to keep your prospective tenants waiting. These best services offer renters an instant rate quote, including taxes, and allow them to sign up and book their vacation rental property instantly using any credit card.

Some vacation rental management software solution providers offer this service – including setting up business credit card processing on your behalf – at no up-front cost. You pay only a small portion of the reservation amount when a renter uses the online system. If you have multiple sites, be sure to find a provider that allows software to integrate with other sites so you can centrally manage online bookings for all sites through a main interface.

2. Auto Update Availability Calendars

If you’re like most vacation home owners, to find enough renters to book your property as often as you like, you have listings on all the major vacation listings sites. You can complement these efforts with manual posts on Craigslist and even your own personal website that you maintain. Whenever you book a rental, you must log in to each site / listing and update the vacation property availability calendar. This can take a long time.

A better way to manage your vacation home availability calendars is to use a centralized, self-updating calendar, linked to a booking and reservation system. Whenever you accept a reservation through the reservation system, the availability calendar automatically marks the booked dates as unavailable. After pointing all your sites and listings to your centralized calendar (as easy as inserting a link on the web page), all your listings are automatically updated with the latest availability information – without the need for manual intervention from your site. part.

3. Electronic Leasing Agreements

A big time saver for the DIY owner is the electronic rental terms and contracts. If done correctly, an electronic contract is a legally valid signed contract. Many vacation rental software providers offer vacation home owners the ability to customize terms and rental agreements and include agreeing to these as part of the booking / booking process – ensuring that their renters have signed and agreed with your terms before they can book your vacation home.