CoastRentals Beach Vacation Blog

Is to rent my property out for all of ‘07? That’d be a nice present. With January right around the corner, you probably will still be reeling from the joyous holidays when the inquiries start flooding your inbox. Are you prepared? Here’s a few things to check off before Jan. 1:

1. Check your rates - are they up-to-date for 2007?

2. Send test inquiries through all of your listings (on CoastRentals and anywhere else) to verify that they are coming through to your email.

3. Pictures = inquiries. Make sure you have the best, brightest, and most recent photos of your vacation property on your listing(s).

4. Check your due dates. Before the big season comes and you are swamped with inquiries, make sure you are all paid up on your listings across all sites so you don’t have to worry about one of them going down in the coming months.

5. Keep that availability calendar up-to-date. This applies to now and throughout the coming months. Chances are you have a Rentors.org calendar, and if you don’t, get one.

6. Buy a featured listing. This is for the hardcore people out there, but a featured spot on CoastRentals (or any other vacation rental website) can make a big difference in your exposure. We see 5-7x the pageviews for featured listings versus our standard listings.

7. Check over your property description and amenities. Get people excited about your property. Chances are, if you wrote something a year ago, you could re-write it this year and make it even better.

8. Link to your property listing or the area you are in from your personal site. The big vacation rental sites, like CoastRentals or those other big boys (and their VC money) have large online marketing efforts and a whole lot of weight in the search engines. Linking to them will only help increase the chance that your listing or your area gets more exposure through Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It’s a free way to help and it can only be beneficial.
So, give yourself 20 minutes and run through the checklist for each of your property listings and get ready for January. 2007’s going to be a great year!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Beach Vacations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.