#1 Free Learning Resource For Vacation Rental

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When I got into the vacation rental business in the 1990s, it was simple. You just advertised in a local paper or put a sign outside the property.

That worked pretty well. After all my place was one of a very few available for summer rental in our area. Most guests came year after year and weren’t too demanding. After all, where else would they go?

Now there are hundreds of properties vying for the rental market. Print publications are no more and by-laws prevent the signage. Travellers have more choices than ever before and want instant gratification.

So, the global market has changed and is moving rapidly. To be seen, we have to work even harder at marketing or we’ll just get lost in the crowd. This might mean listing on several – or dozens – of listing sites, and spending hours manually updating each one to keep availability, pricing and amenities accurate.

My guest in this episode, Vanessa de Souza Lage, recognizes the work involved in this. After all, she started in the business in what she calls the ‘golden age’ of vacation rentals. Before Airbnb; before regulation; before the European recession, and as a rental agent, at one point managed up to 10,000 properties globally.

But she saw the changes coming and was ready to adapt and embrace the new world of technology to maintain a successful brand. So, in 2014 Rentals United was born to help owners and managers get bookings from many websites for the least amount of effort.

This is channel management and Vanessa explains how it is can be implemented to automatically distribute your vacation rental availability and pricing across a wide rage of global and niche sites.

As a done-for-you service, there’s still a fair amount of work involved in setting it up, but once done, Vanessa explains how it then runs on rails.

Free download – Channel Management 101 – Questions to Ask and Data to Collect

Vanessa talks about: