Software to Boost Your Profits & Career in Property Management
The way that your day to day role as a property management employee should be changing at this moment as the industry has taken a completely new twist in the short-term lease area of the job. I would really like to share with you my experiences in on the big changes that have been happening in my company.
At the same time, writing about this helps me put things into perspective as sometimes writing helps to gather all your thoughts. The aim is to help those in the same business as me and myself when I read this again because when I do, I hope I get inspiration and maybe even spot a few gaps in my new analysis of the way my job is changing.
The traditional way in which property management works is to manage people’s households or buildings which they are not using their place or to rent the place out on behalf of the owners on long term lease contracts.
Advancing your career in this line of work means learning the ways in which short term lease or vacation rentals. In turn, you will become a valuable asset to any property management company.
Of course, if you already have a career in property management, then your role of a property manager is about to change or has already changed. The introduction of vacation rentals has arrived and those that have simply been managing the odd phone call for those renting properties and managing a few cleaners, gardeners, and maintenance personnel have suddenly found their workload double, triple, or even quadruple.
What Has Changed for The Average Property Management Personnel?
Vacation rentals or short-term lease websites have had a huge impact on the property management business. The number of websites that allow people to list their property on a website for free as available for rent for as little as 1 day has increased ten-fold since just a couple of years ago.
Now, these sites are exactly the same websites you would see when booking a hotel such as on agoda.com. Except, the difference is the properties are not hotels. They are people’s homes or holiday homes available for rent.
It is literally as easy as this – list your property, set the price, and then sit back and wait for people to book. Once your guests have finished their stay, they will leave a review; a positive one if you did your job correctly – and positive reviews mean more bookings!
To advance in your career these days you need additional management skills in your locker. If you have already dealt with timeshares, then you should not have too much of an issue getting to grips with property management of vacation rentals.
The big changes you need to learn or improve upon include:
- Your workload is about to increase
- You need to have more efficient databases
- You will need to double/triple your customer service
- You will need to learn to deal with people more
- You may need to increase your workforce
As a property management company owner, if you are going to go into this niche area of the property management business, then you will need to devise systems and train your employees to adapt to these systems so you can get those good reviews, which will result in more bookings and bigger profits.
This list provided in this section is not a complete one by any means of all the additional skills you will need to learn to become a successful property management expert, but they are the key components required if you want your business or to help the firm you work with increase its bottom line via vacation rentals and short term leases.
New software will almost certainly need to be introduced, and in many cases, there are plenty of property management companies out there that have now started to employ the use of vacation rental software.
Why Have Vacation Rentals Had Such A Big Impact on The Industry?
To put it simply, there is so much more profit in short term rental these days that most property management companies would be foolish to overlook the opportunity. The profit margins are huge compared to yearly leases.
Just to put this into perspective let’s look at some numbers. We had a property we were renting in a place called Hua Hin in Thailand. It cost $1,500 ($18,000 a year) a month to rent on a yearly contract. It became empty and was honestly in need of some décor. However, the owner was not in a position to spend a large amount of cash. Luckily, we had a bright individual that came up with an idea to lease the place on the FlipKey vacation rental website.
Since then we have on average had an 80% occupancy rate here. We rent the place out at different rates, but let’s say on average we have been leasing the place out on daily, weekly, and fortnightly bookings on FlipKey for around $110 a night. We make over $30,000 a year on this property now and all we did was give a lick of paint and perform some minor maintenance changes.
That is $12,000 per year additional money. Although it has taken more time to manage guests, cleaners, and inquiries from people using FlipKey interested in the place, the manpower costs come to around $1,000 a year including cleaners!
At this point, we changed our entire business model and began listing a large number of our empty properties on various vacation rental websites, and we even created a travel agency style booking website using Lodgify vacation rental software.
How Can I Learn More About Vacation Rentals for Property Management?
For the most part, if you are going to use a vacation rental property website, then there are always plenty of resources available on their websites. They provide guides on how to be a good host and how you should treat you, guests.
Admittedly it sounds very easy and extremely straight forward just renting a place out using a vacation rental website but believe me it isn’t. There are so many different areas to manage and you will need to figure out a system that makes sure mistakes are not made because some guests can be fickle.
I have found a great place where you can download vacation rental ebooks that give you a wealth of information on how to correctly manage a vacation rental. I would highly recommend downloading this material and using it to prepare for your business’s vacation rental adventures for the future.
As a final note, not all of your customers will want their property used as a holiday home so your business will carry on as usual in some departments, but for those properties that you can use vacation rentals as part of your overall property management business management strategy, you and your client can reap the rewards.
