Making your property available for holiday letting as opposed to long term rental can offer a great deal of benefits. Rather than your property being permanently occupied by a long term tenant, leaving you no time to stay there yourself, you can select the periods of time the property is available, retaining certain weeks for your own use.
Once you have decided that holiday rentals is the way to go, you need to decide how best to advertise this. It is important to ensure that enough weeks are booked to cover your costs and maximise your investment.
The functions carried out by an agency usually cover:
A letting agent can advise on the required regulations for holiday letting. This includes the likes of gas and electricity certificates, insurance requirements and in particular the booking terms and conditions
The booking terms and conditions are a key document the guest will sign while booking the property and sets out the terms of the holiday rental, such as damage, the tenancy and each party’s responsibilities and liabilities.
Some of the key benefits of using an agent, as opposed to doing it yourself can include -
This depends on the ability of the agency of course, but a well organised, effective agency will be able to generate 25+ bookings per annum and therefore more income, even after their commission.
A holiday letting agency will be able to provide advice to improve bookings and income, drawing upon their expertise and learnings with their portfolio as a whole, and the market. This might include advice on taking pets, furnishings and decor, pricing and photography.
A holiday letting agency is essentially the marketing agency for the property. By being part of their portfolio, your property will have access to expertise in all areas of marketing such as PR, Search Engine Optimisation, website design and direct mail.
Running a holiday let can be very time consuming in areas such as answering telephone and email enquiries, monitoring and updating availability, and dealing with email and posted correspondence around payment. An agency will perform all of these tasks.
Most guests will choose to pay their deposit and balance by credit card or debit card which can be handled by the letting agency who have the facilities to process card payments. They will also have systems in place to chase late or missing payments with guests.
Occasionally problems may arise with guests, such as damage to the property, late payments or guest complaints. Wherever the problem of fault lies, an agency will have policies and resources to resolve problems in a professional and fair way.