5 Ways To Increase Your Short Term Rental Income Today
I doubt there is a vacation rental owner anywhere that wouldn’t like to increase their income.
The funny thing is we all want to increase our income but we often aren’t willing to make the changes needed to increase it.
We somehow expect the income to increase without changing a thing.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually how it works. If you want to increase your income, the quickest way to do it is to change something for the better.
When I say change something, I don’t mean physical improvements.
Sure, adding a hot tub or adding an extra bedroom will increase your income, but there’s also a significant cost that goes along with them.
There are things you can change today that will increase your income with no upfront costs, and that’s what I’m going to focus on in this post.
Last year, when the pandemic significantly reduced tourism for one of our houses, we needed to make changes to increase our exposure to potential guests.
These are the ways we were able to increase our vacation rental income last year.
I hope you’ll find the 5 Ways To Increase Short Term Rental Income Today helpful.
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Allowing pets is something we resisted doing for a long time. We heard from a few sources that allowing pets would increase the number of bookings but we were nervous about doing it.
It conjured images in our heads of a bunch of St. Bernards rampaging through the living room, and since we love our houses, we couldn’t imagine doing that to them.
At least, that’s what we used to think – before Covid. Thankfully, Covid nudged us to change our views on pets.
Now, we’ve been allowing pets for a little over a year, and we’re happy to say, it’s been our best year yet.
Shortly after we started allowing pets, the number of bookings increased back to what it was pre-pandemic and we then realized we could raise our rates (check out tip #5 for a great way to set your rates automatically).
Tip: One thing I’d recommend before allowing pets is to make sure you have a cleaner that is top-notch.
If you don’t feel confident they can clean the house of pet hair, you may need to change your cleaners before allowing pets.
We also decreased the minimum stay. Let’s face it, most people’s schedules are pretty packed these days.
The number of families that can take a trip for 5-7 days is less than the number of families that can take a 3-4 day trip.
That means lowering the minimum number of days increases the number of potential guests that see your house.
We used to have a 5 day minimum and we changed it to a 3 day minimum.
Warning: Don’t get carried away with this one. DO NOT go too low. Definitely, no one-day stays because those would almost certainly be parties – and if you’re like us you want families staying on your properties.
Even be wary of two-day minimums, depending on where your property is. For the house in the Poconos, we have two-day minimums because most guests do weekend stays off-season. In Florida, we did 3-day minimum because our guests there come from out of state.
This one may not apply to everyone, but if you are in an area where weekend stays are the norm, especially in the off-season – then lowering your mid-week prices can really help out.
We did this in the Poconos since weekend bookings are typical during the off-season.
Lowering the mid-week rates attracted more bookings and significantly increased our days booked – to be fair, the change in work and school schedules because of Covid also had a lot to do with it.
For us, we consider Sun – Thu mid-week.
We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and it’s worked out really nicely.
If there’s a 1 or 2-day gap between guests and the minimum stay is set to 3 days, those 1 or 2 days are dead.
Those days will never book because it doesn’t meet the minimum length.
I’ve seen YouTube videos that recommend renting those orphaned days at the last minute while charging a premium.
To me that’s crazy!
First, we don’t like super duper last-minute bookings – they are often guests that don’t treat your house nicely.
Second, booking a 1-night stay is a no-no. Never do that, it’s an invitation for parties that will trash your property.
It doesn’t matter how much they pay for that 1 night, it is not worth it.
Instead, we offer those days to the guests staying before and after the orphaned days at a discount.
That’s worked really well, I’d say we get an extra 10 -15 booked days a year from guests extending their stay by offering them the orphaned days at a discount.
This is the safest way to get those orphaned days booked. Yeah booking those single nights at a premium would make more money but the risk of the property getting trashed by that 1-night rental is too great to even consider.
Check out our other post, How To Book Your Orphaned Nights for more details on what we do with our ophaned nights.
I would say this is the biggest one on the list. It’s a no-brainer, this will definitely increase your income.
It’s one of those things that may be a little intimidating but within a month you’ll see the benefit. We definitely did.
There are a few pricing tools out there but the one we chose to use was Beyond Pricing.
Beyond Pricing was great for us because it works with both VRBO and Airbnb, which were our two primary booking OTAs.
If you’re not sure which of the 5 on this list you should try, please try this one!
Try any pricing tool, we’d recommend Beyond Pricing because that’s what we use. But if you don’t want to use them, please do yourself a favor and try out another one.
Not using a pricing tool almost guarantees you are leaving money on the table.
Personally, after a couple of months, we started getting bookings with rates that were waaaay higher than what we would have ever set ourselves.
If you sign up using the links below, you’ll be able to try it out free for 30 days.
We saw a big increase in the rates we were getting once we started using it. Give it a try and see what difference it makes for you.
If you’d like more details on how we setup our Beyond Pricing account, check out our post Setting Up Beyond Pricing
It isn’t difficult at all, but when you’ve never used it before, a little guidance goes a long way.
There you have it, those are 5 ways to Increase Short Term Rental Income Today with no upfront costs.
I’d recommend trying all of them! If you don’t, at the very least try doing one of them (I’d recommend the pricing tool).
Which one will you try?
Let me know in the comments below. If you have other ways you think that vacation rental income can be increased add that in the comments too!
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