What does the average day of a vacation rental property owner look like?
Are you waking up before the sun and kids to have a bit of quiet time to organize your accounting books? Or perhaps you sneak out during your lunch break to check in new guests to your home? Later that night do you stay up after everyone has gone to bed watching The Late Late Show, while you attempt to find inspiration to rewrite your property listing for the summer season quickly approaching?
We get it.
You’re a one man or woman show running your vacation rental on the side of your full-time job while taking care of a family. It’s absolutely exhausting and can sometimes feel as if you are living two lives.
Although you probably started your vacation rental in order to have more time, more freedom, and more income. But right now, sometimes you question if you can keep up with the day to day work.
JZ Vacation Rentals was built by a host, for a host, so we get it, and we understand your struggles.
In the grand scheme of things, we both know how much opportunity lies within the industry, but most of the time you don’t have the time to bask in the benefits.
So, we have created a beginners guide to automating your vacation home, to give you back more time to do the things you love.
Here are a few tips on how to automate your vacation rental business.
1: Hire a copywriter
Copywriting can be a hassle, let alone a waste of time if your creative juices are not flowing, especially if you’re not aware of the technical aspect of writing property listing or marketing copy.
We suggest hiring a professional copywriter to write your property listings and marketing copy.
A copywriter will be able to create a property listing template that you can edit and tweak as your property grows or the seasons change. The copywriter will know how to write an effective listing that sells for you while you are sleeping by adding in SEO, keywords, meta, and H1 tags to your listing.
You can take it a step further and hire a copywriter to do all of your marketing for you as well. Copywriters understand how the power of words can impact your bottom line. You can hire a copywriter to edit and run your website, your social media, and a blog that will all have a long term impact on your sales.
2: Invest in an automated lock system
At JZ Vacation Rentals, we have partnered with Point Central to create a keyless security system in all of our homes.
With any sort of automated keyless lock system you can ensure your guest are able to check in and out with no problems, and never have to worry about losing keys or getting locked out of their rental, saving you time in the end from having to make extra stops.
With an automated keyless system, you are increasing guest safety as you can ensure keys will never be copied.
3: Hire a professional cleaner
Hiring a professional cleaner can quite literally take off all the dirty work from your plate, saving you hours each week to focus on your job, your vacation rental business, or simply the things you wish you had more time for.
You are guaranteed perfection every time a new guest checks in.
4: Adapt an online accounting system
Many small business owners accounting books are in the form of a handwritten booklet spread across the kitchen table, or a massive excel spreadsheet stored on their home computer.
The great thing about the entire world moving online is that accounting has moved online as well.
There are thousands of free and paid for accounting software applications that will straighten up and automate the books for you, taking out the time spent crunching numbers. Some of these platforms even help you out when tax season comes around.
We suggest adopting some sort of online accounting system to streamline your books and take away any possibility of human error.
Conclusion:
The vacation rental industry is a people-centered business, and you want to be with the people, not inside your business.
When you start to implement small steps of automation into your rental, you will not only have less stress but have more time to be doing the thing things you love.
If you’re looking to automate your vacation rental in full, check out our property management services here.
