Looking to learn exactly what is involved with renting your property short term? Perhaps you've been doing it for a while and are looking for some help to maximize revenue? Have lots of experience but want to learn more from people who have done high volumes for years?
With our combined knowledge, we can get you on the right track. Let us help you create efficient policies, let us help you fill your calendar, let us help you take your vacation rental to the next level!
Vacation Rental Management
Tap into the 50 years of combined experience of industry leaders and learn the shortcuts to success. Use these proven ideas to maximize your property�s potential and achieve financial success.
Internet Presence
The difference between success and failure in this marketplace is simply how effective your website brings you business. It's simple, you need a website that is highly visible that converts mild interest into inquiries. Our courses will help you help you easily understand what you should be doing with your website and how best to achieve your success using the internet to it's fullest potential.
Maximizing Return
Maximizing your return in the Vacation Rental business requires you to have your property booked for as many days and weeks as you can handle. You must also work to avoiding cancellations, especially last minute. Learn the secrets to capitalizing on every step in the process, from marketing your property, to booking inquiries and cultivating repeat business.
Accepting Payments
There are many payment processors and many payment possibilities, wading through the selection can be a daunting task. We can help you by teaching you how to set up effective policies, how to take and retain your deposits and how to ensure that your guests are who they say they are, reducing your fraud risk to essentially null.
Check-in and Cleaning Services
Now that your calendar is full, how do you best manage your arriving and departing guests and prepare your property to achieve the "wow" that you would like your guests to experience. Our courses will assist you in better understanding the guest, the process and most importantly, how easy it can be to manage a full calendar.
Policies and Procedures
Having rock solid policies and procedures are the difference between having a successful vacation rental free from issues and, well, not. After years of experience running vacation rentals we have created detailed lists and amassed information on what the best and most efficient policies and procedures are for running a vacation rental and we are going to share that valuable information with you.
About
Vacation Rental Training is comprised of 3 principals who together have developed millions of dollars of business in both the vacation rental industry and elsewhere.
2005
Our Humble Beginnings
Eric and Blake of VRT began working together at EMR Vacation Rentals.
March 2008
Kevin Joins
Kevin is hired and is successful in increasing closing rates on sales leading up to the Olympics in Vancouver.
Summer 2012
Focus on markets
Eric leaves EMR to focus on more efficient internet market development.
Summer 2015
The idea is born
Kevin, Blake and Eric meet and realize that we collectively have a wealth of knowledge that we should be sharing with the world and Vacation Rental Training is born.
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Valuable Information for Free!
We'd like to offer you some simple but effective tricks to improving your business. Feel free to take advantage of the complementary information offered here.
Sell your property
Sales Advice
The Importance of Pictures
Marketing Advice
How to differentiate yourself from your competition
Sales Advice
Brand Protection
Marketing Advice
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Our Amazing Team
Combining 30+ years of experience in the Vacation Rental and Business Training industries, the principals of VRT have everything you need to create a successful cash flow from your vacation rental.
Kevin Neufeld
Business Trainer
Kevin is a veteran sales professional with over 25 years experience in direct selling, sales management and consulting. His experience in high tech started with ACD Systems, a highly successful digital imaging software company. As the director of channel sales at ACD Kevin was responsible for growing all offline sales channels. He managed a team of high performers that spanned the globe. Channels included Retail, VARs, Direct sale B2B, Europe Asia, OEM, as well as Customer Service worldwide. During that time he has also ran a successful consulting practice helping set up strategies and sales process for companies in the financial services and insurance industries. As an Olympic Gold Medalist he has taken the same drive, dedication and competitiveness that saw him excel in rowing and channel it into improving sales and service results. Kevin's unique outlook on the service side of selling inspires his team to maximize sales results while delivering exemplary customer service.
Blake Mackenzie
Vacation Rental Manager
Blake MacKenzie has over 20 years working in various fields within the tourism industry. Blake's experiences include, developing and marketing heritage and cultural tourism attractions, providing leadership and vision while working within tourism marketing boards, consulting and sales with tech start-ups, and currently is the general manager and president of a British Columbia based vacation rental company and has worked within the vacation rental management industry for 12 years.
Eric Hughes
Web Marketer
Eric has been marketing web sites since the inception of the internet and is responsible for millions of visitors finding his client's sites. In 2000, Eric started working with vacation rental companies, helping them to redesign, re-brand and re-market their internet sites into traffic generators thereby increasing their business and profits to a whole new level. By 2004 Eric had started a vacation rental management company of his own which he is still involved in marketing to this day. Keeping up with the latest changes in design, coding and marketing tricks is Eric's forte. If there is a way to effectively market a site in today's difficult internet marketing landscape, Eric will find it and help you use it to your advantage.
Contact Us
Drop us a line, we look forward to hearing from you!
Sell Your Property
Do you need to "sell" your property to the people making inquiries?
The answer to that is of course you don’t ... but you should. Too many bookings are missed because the person fielding the inquiry is not selling in a positive, professional manner. There are 2 ineffective approaches to selling rental properties that are fairly commonplace, and ones you want to avoid:
Order Taker
This person answers inquiries politely and efficient but won’t do anything proactive for fear of coming across like a sales person. They feel (hope) that their property sells itself and all they need to do is answer a few questions and when people are ready, they’ll book.
Hard Sell
This person feels they need to talk someone into their property so they overwhelm people with information they did not ask for. The caller feels like they are being sold so they do what most of us do in that situation, they resist.
What should you do?
Focus on helping them decide if your property is the right one for their trip.
People don't buy products, they buy solutions to problems.
People don't rent a house, they are trying to fulfill a vision of their perfect trip and the accommodations are a part of that overall experience. Knowing what their expectations are of the overall experience will allow you to customize your presentation of your property to their specific circumstance. That will add value to their experience in dealing with you and when the perceived value is high, people argue less about money.
Ask "lifestyle questions"
Get them talking about the trip and not just how many rooms and square footage they need. This will help you determine if your property will be suitable for them. It will also increase your rapport with them, flush out any potential objections, clarify in their own mind what they really want, not just what they say they want, and allow them to be heard and therefore willing to listen to you when you start talking about how great your place is.
Zig Ziglar once said that "you can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want". Focus on proactively helping your customer by asking great questions to determine if your place will be a fit for them and watch your closing rate go up.
Date: August 2015
Category: Sales Assistance
The Importance of Pictures
Good quality images make the difference for any property.
Is professional photography required in the vacation rental industry? With the modern digital camera being so very good at taking an excellent photo, the first time, and even some cell phones taking pictures that exceed the quality of pretty well all digital cameras of 10 years ago, it would seem a homeowner could conceivably take photos that would sufficiently represent the property. Unfortunately this is just simply not true. It is an absolute truth, great photos will increase bookings at your vacation rental and quite possibly will set you apart from the competition, just simply because it appears you took the trouble to produce excellent imagery, rather than provide point and shoot images of mediocre quality.
Decisions Made
Someone interested in booking your property from afar has only one way of making an informed decision about the suitability of your rental and that is through reviewing the supplied images. The guest has to trust that the images are a good enough representation of the property and through that, they can decide if your property is right for them. Having images that are less than perfect, clearly shot with poor quality cameras or where the owner has not taken the time to stage the propriety, reflect very poorly on the owner and the legitimacy of the property. I personally would never book a property where the owner did not take the time to hire a professional to take great photos.
What Constitutes Professional Photos
In our own vacation rental management experience, we began by asking homeowners to provide professional photography of their homes. At times, what owners believed constituted professional photography was, I am sorry to say, not acceptable in the least. There are many types of photographers and some are not well suited to architectural photography so when you seek out your photographer, ensure that they have significant experience with taking indoor lit shots with a wide angle lens and that they are able to equalize the lighting between the exterior and interior of the room. Probably the best way to find photographers that will do the best job is in the Real Estate industry. Good realtors use professional photographers.
How to Stage
The photographer is booked, now what to do to get the property ready. First thing, make sure that the linens and towels are all straight, clean and crisp. When shooting the beds, noticing a corner that is not tucked in afterwards is not the end of the world but the image is forever, better that it is perfect. Ensure that you get the photographer to arrive at a time of day when the sun is high in the sky, that way the lighting to outside is good and there isn't too much sunny contrast with the sun streaming in the windows. If you would like to put out flowers and fruit, by all means but be cautious of having too much clutter. Clean and sparse works better for photos, the viewer can see the details a lot better in a minimally cluttered room.
What to Photograph
The images you are getting have really only one purpose, to provide a visual representation of your property to your prospective guests. With this in mind, try to keep the shots to that purpose. While close-ups of the kitchen taps might provide an art-like interpretation, you are often limited to how many images you are allowed to upload and so you want to maximize the effectiveness of the images. Start with a shot of every room and every bathroom. Show the focal points of the room and how they interact with the hallways, so people get a sense of how you move around in your home. By all means, take photos of the stairs and the entranceway. If people are considering bringing elderly guests, they will want to know if there is a bedroom on the main level or, if there isn't, how many steps there are to get to the sleeping areas. Photograph the extras, like the hot tub, the kayaks or even the washer and dryer. If you are marketing something that sets you apart, ensure you have photos of it that you can share, even if you don't post them on your listings, you can email them to prospective guests or put them up on your own site.
Post Production
Now that you have your photos, you have a chance to make them even better by modifying them in photo editing software. Try to resist modifying the border of the images, if you desire this kind of modification, it can be done by web programmers to show on your site. Keep your clean borders on your images, they show a lot better and when other people want to use them to promote your property, they can secure a clean bordered image. In order to confound scam artists, it is sometimes recommended that you add a watermark to your images, and this is fine, as long as it doesn't obscure the main points of interest. Remember to keep a non-watermarked copy of the images handy so you can provide them when requested. Also ensure you retain the largest and best quality version of the original in case you need it for later. Back these images up to 3 locations, you never know when you might need an offsite back up.
Now you are Ready
Good images are essential in effectively marketing a property. Bad images deter bookings. It is that simple. Armed with your excellent quality images, you are now ready to go out and increase your booking percentage significantly. Good luck!
How to differentiate yourself from your competition
Let’s face it, your property and how it is displayed on the web & in marketing, will dictate whether or not you will receive direct inquiries. Once you get an inquiry, it’s going to be how you handle it that determines your success rate.
Once your prospective interested party moves from the website to direct communication, there’s an entirely new opportunity available to stand out from the competition. From that point on it’s just people doing business with people and we tend to do business with people we like and trust.
So what does that first communication look like?
First off, you need to understand what your goal is. What’s your purpose when you get an inquiry? What are you trying to do? Just get a booking? Or are you sincerely trying to help someone determine if your property is the right fit for them? If you are not proactively leading the conversation to help your prospective guest figure out if your property is right for them then you are an unnecessary step in their decision making process. You are actually making the process more difficult. Searching for a vacation property is overwhelming for these people. Having to search through properties they are unfamiliar with and having to make a decision just based on what they see on the web is difficult. Remember, they reached out and connected with you for a reason, they are looking for help. If they already knew the property was the right one, they'd book it. The fact that they are reaching out tells you that they are close, but not quite ready to book. They need someone to help them feel confident that yours is the right property. You can provide incredible value to the customer by finding out about their trip and helping them determine if your property is the right one.
The easiest way to do that is to think of yourself as their trip coordinator. It helps to remember that people are not renting a house, they are traveling for a reason and need a place to stay. The trip is primary_and the property secondary in most cases.
Let the client go first.
This is a simple concept, but you want to make sure that before you talk about your home you need to have a reasonable idea about whether it would be the right fit for them. The only way to determine if it will be is to ask questions that get them talking and elaborating on their trip, what they will do and where they will go.
What you should try to find out:
About the trip in general
Who will be going?
What activities will they be doing while here?
How will those activities impact what they will need in a home?
Location of the activities
How will they be getting here? Fly, drive? Are their flights booked?
Are there kids coming if so, what are there ages? What do they want
to be doing?
Possible questions to ask:
Tell me about your trip
What brings you to ____________?
How much space do you need – who will all be going?
Tell me a bit about the group that you’ll be traveling with.
What sort of activities do you have planned while on your vacation?
What do you have planned while you are here?
How far along are you with your plans – have you decided how you’ll
be traveling?
Will there be children in the group? Oh, fantastic – what are there
ages?
Why find all of this out?
If you know more details about their trip then when you start to talk about your property you can lead with the things that matter most to the caller. You can talk specifically about how features of your home will compliment their activities and more importantly, avoid talking at length about things you might think are important, but they will not. Why go on about your fabulous patio if they prefer the indoors? Why talk about your big screen TV and surround sound if they plan on unplugging and reading a good book?
Let the client go first and avoid wasting their time talking about things that don’t matter to them.
What this process will do is it will help the caller get a better feeling that the property will be the right one.
It will help them to pay closer attention to what you are saying about the property because they will hear benefits that matter to them, not just ones you think matter to them.
It will make it easier for the client to make a decision and for you to ask for that decision (you will both know it’s a fit).
When you know about their trip you will typically have some additional leverage that will come in handy should they come up with an objection.
Find out more about what they are doing and it will be easier to highlight features about your property that will compliment what they are planning during their trip. Do that, and you stand out from similar properties they may be comparing yours to.
Brand Protection
With the number of large vacation rental marketing websites, sometimes referred to as Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), to choose from a vacation rental owner might think there is no need to have their own web site. Unfortunately this could not be further from the truth. Even if you choose to list your property with all of the large listing companies there is still a very big problem with putting all of your eggs into that one basket. You are essentially surrendering your brand.
When you list your property with the OTAs of your choosing, the OTA now controls your images, your rates (in the case where you allow them to modify them to suit demand), your description, but most importantly, your guest and your business cashflow. If the OTA takes the booking for you, now they have your guest in their system, they have the guest's money and they are now able to market directly to that guest. You can be sure they are not only marketing your property and in fact chances are they aren't marketing your property at all. You've lost your branding completely.
Guest Retention
Let's look at the loss of the guest and how hard it is to retain customers using OTAs. You worked hard to make your property appealing to your prospective guest. You possibly even answered questions about your property. You’ve created demand that makes your property unique and sets it apart from the many other listings. The guest agreed to book with you, except they didn't. They chose to book through the OTA and it's brand. Essentially you have done a lot of work to secure a client but instead of branding your communication so you might be able to appeal to that guest to return to your unit, you are now turning that guest over to the OTA so they can market to them directly. The OTA will be marketing your property, but in addition, every other listing that appears in your category! They are undermining everything you did to get that sale; you’ve lost direct access to your guest just as quickly as you gained them.
Controlling Income from Inventory
If you surrender your brand (you and your properties) to any site or sites that take payments, hide the customer data and take and control your revenue stream, you now no longer have access to the income derived from bookings until after the guest arrives and the OTA pays you the booking value. Even in the event that you require some of the income to do updates to the property or to prepare the property for the guest, you do not have access to the money. This constricts your cash flow which as a business owner can be one of the most difficult things to overcome.
Diversifying your distribution is the best and only way to overcome this loss of business control and identity. Yes, by all means, use the OTAs, use all of them if you like. You can even direct traffic from your own personal website to the OTA booking system and allow them to manage the guest. Taking them through your site allows you to capture the guest information so that you control that guest and are able to market to them for future bookings. You can also control which of the OTAs you send the guest to, thereby being able to choose which one is the right for that time (best service, least expensive, most provided etc.) If, in the event you choose to, you can also then take the booking and control the cashflow yourself. While it might be more work to have a booking system on your own site, the value of the brand recognition and the preservation of the guest for future marketing purposes is truly invaluable. Add to that your ability to control the revenue and make use of a non-refundable deposit for instance allows you to take advantage of cash flow previously unavailable to you when using an OTA that holds payment until the guest arrives.
Simple Websites
While you could develop an online system to manage your bookings through your web site, this is not really necessary. Controlling the booking process from beginning to end is a great way to maintain your brand identity. If that is too much for you and you want to use the already existing services the OTAs provide you, that is fine, but you can still preserve the guest by using your own web site, and securing the information and interest you developed through the medium you control.
Retaining the guest's information also makes it easier for them to post reviews to your social media accounts, online review locations, and most importantly, on your web site. This of course will further enhance your brand and generate more repeat bookings.
Take control of the guest through your website. Market directly to them, record their information and use it to market to them in the future. If they came to stay at your property and enjoyed it, there is a good chance they will be back to stay again. That is the value of your own brand, your own web site and your own marketing power. Don't give that over to the OTAs.
