The internet has proven to be a natural tool for prospective real estate buyers. You can view homes now through MLS listings that provide multiple photos, room sizes, heating and cooling features, landscaping, and more. Gone are the days of getting in a car and driving from house to house with a real estate agent who is guessing your tastes.
The same goes for vacation rentals. Resorts have long marketed their facilities online, but use of the web for individual seasonal rentals is starting to accelerate. It has proven to be successful enough that venture capital has entered the arena and several of our own vacation rental websites are being acquired and consolidated.
The biggest player in the consolidation market so far is HomeAway, a two-year-old venture backed by $ 160 million in venture capital dollars and has engaged in a series of acquisitions, rapidly creating a critical mass in the market. online seasonal rental business. Homeaway’s most recent and largest purchase has been VRBO, or Vacation Rental By Owner.
VRBO claims 60,000 individual listings and more than 20 million site visits per year. Other acquisitions that created HomeAway’s business structure include CyberRentals.com, GreatRentals.com, A1Vacations.com, TripHomes.com, Holiday-Rentals.co.uk in the UK and FeWo-direkt.de in Germany. These and other properties give HomeAway a catalog of 60,000 rentals in 90 countries. In two years, they have grown very quickly.
Vacation Home Rentals continues to be present on the web with more than 14,000 ads, mainly in the states of California, Arizona, Hawaii and Florida. Vacation Rentals also maintains a strong web presence, investing heavily in search engine marketing. Its home page lists virtually every state and several continents with countries listed below them.
On all of these sites, seasonal rental property owners pay a fee to list their property and post photos, floor plans, fees, etc. On HomeAway, the cost is $ 300 to list your property for one year. There is no charge for clients who wish to rent. Generally, sites simply provide referrals and rental arrangements are negotiated between the landlord and the vacation tenant.
An example of such a rental property is Moose Back Lodge, which maintains a listing on HomeAway and other major rental sites, as well as its own website: http://www.moosebacklodge.com. Many owners maintain their own websites in addition to securing listings on rental directory sites, allowing them to provide a kind of online “calling card” for the property that is not tied to a particular directory format. Direct websites, operated by the owner, provide opportunities to allow the personality of the property to be reflected in the design and information presented on the site, as well as the ability to better control the content.
There are also real estate agencies offering regional rentals in popular vacation areas. States like Maine, North Carolina, Florida, and many others will have real estate companies that will handle vacation rentals as a sideline – managing properties for absentee owners. These websites typically have excellent photo and text descriptions of their properties, along with a calendar of available dates. In many of these cases, rental arrangements are made through the agent.
Then there are the facilities in the tourist areas that handle their own marketing. These include major and minor resorts and B & Bs. Often times, a small facility, such as a B&B, will link to a regional B&B marketing website or a local chamber of commerce. There are also large developments built around recreational facilities like lakes or ski resorts that handle seasonal rentals for people who buy the condos and houses built as part of the development.
Planned recreational area developments are often second homes for their owners, but also profitable properties. In larger ones, the developer will often have a permanent office for both sales and seasonal rentals. In these cases too, the rental agency acts as the property manager and handles both the rentals and maintenance for the owners.
