We've successfully been running a small rental business for more than two years now. The income from this business helps us pay down our morgage faster, and it's also a lot fun! On this site we'd like to share some experiences and tips with others. Regardless if you're already running your own rental business, you consider to get started or you're just curious of what this is all about, this site hopefully contains a few useful and profitable tips and ideas for everyone.

Who can start their own rental business?

Anyone who owns their own flat, a matrass, a spare room, a boat, a cottage, a castle or a house can start their own rental business. It's actually a lot easier than you would think. We started to rent out one spare room and our flat while on holiday, and two years later we're renting out 3 apartments and 6 rooms. You can run the business on full time basis like us, or just rent out your house / flat when you feel like and earn good extra money to pay your morgage back faster.

Marketing

There are many ways of advertising your properties. In addition to our own website we're using several free rental websites and directories, paid advertising, local newspaper advertising and postcards. Read more about the different methods below.

Some of the free directories we are using to online marketing of our websites are listed below:

Free rental websites and directories. 70% of our bookings come from these sources. We're using these sites a lot because it's free to advertise and there are no oblications until we manually accept a booking. These sites also take care of many practical things such as payment collection from guests, customer service and some even offer insurance. Registration is easy and fast and you don't even need your own website. A good place to start is roomorama.com, a leading advertising site for flats and property owners.

Other similar websites where we advertise our flats and rooms are:

As written, it's free to put your property on these web sites, but if you accept a booking the third part website takes a comission on top of your price. The commission varies from 3% to 10% of your price. After all, that's reasonable as these websites takes care of many essential things such as marketing, secure payment collection from guests, and some even offer insurance.

Your own website can be a powerful marketing tool. There are lots of fancy solutions out there, but if you're inexperenced with web you should go for a solution that requires little configuration. Once you have your own website there are a lot of marketing opportunities. Make sure to learn the online marketing basics to get a steady flow of traffic to your site. Add your site to travel sites, search engines, directories and blogs. Don't expect thousand of visitors once your site is going live, but with persistance and regular work on your website the number of visitors to your rental site will grow over time - and with this - number of bookings.

Local newspaper ads. For us, websites such as roomorama.com and our own rental website are the most important sources of new guests and leads. However, from time to time we also put ads in the local newspaper to boost the number of bookings. This can be good to reach local customers.

Safety and trust

We've been running this business for two years and so far we've never had any bad experiences. 99,9% of people are polite, clean and they leave the property in a nice and tidy condition. Still, we know that welcoming strangers to your properties always entails a risk, and for this reason we would strongly recommend protection against unwanted events.

Insurance: Some of the sites mentioned in our marketing section above offer insurance, but in addition you should make sure your private / company insurance covers possible incidents and damage from guests.

Verification of guests: When a guest arrives, always ask for their ID and write down their passport number. If you're using a third part web site to handle your bookings, such as roomorama.com or airbnb.com, this process is automatically taken care of by the system.

Payment

Make sure the guest pays in front of their stay. This way you know you'll get your money and you'll avoid the aqward payment discussion when the guest arrives. A credit card authorization will ensure you get your money and will also enable you to collect a security deposit. In addition, this involves more trust and security for both parts. However, for small businesses, setting up a sophisticated payment system can be rather costly. We're using third part sites that handles the payment collection. These sites charge a small percentage of the amount paid, but as long as we're running on a small scale this is by far the cheapest option for us.

Tax and reporting

The profit from renting out your properties is in most countries object of taxation. More info about cost deduction, tax reporting and reporting will come soon.

More tips will come soon ;)

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How we run our rental business And how you can do the same

How we run our

rental business

And how you can do the same