2018 was our best rental year yet, and it was all because we did this one thing. In last week's post, I shared how one of the mistakes that we made was really not investing in our decor soon enough. This week, I'm going to share how our $2,000 vacation rental makeover resulted in having our best year yet in 2018, and it beat those previous years by a long shot! Today, I will break down what we did and the impact that it had. I'll first preface by saying that I am not an inter

Why I would do these three things differently if I were starting today... I've now been a host for over five years, but my first year as a host was filled with a lot of trial and error, and lessons learned along the way. Mistakes are definitely a part of the journey, but hopefully this post today will help you avoid some of the mistakes I made early on. Mistake #1: Not Investing in Décor Sooner The first few years we were really just kind of hodge-podging our furniture togeth

Were you aware that there are two very different sides to hosting? And, in order to be an awesome host we really must excel in both areas. As a vacation rental owner myself, I realized this about a year into my journey and once I really truly realized this, our overall performance improved significantly. In this post, I'm going to cover the two sides of hosting and how you can excel in each area. In order to really excel at vacation rental hosting, you'll need to be both a gr

On this blog, I talk a lot about what to do to optimize your listing, but today I'm going to talk about the five awesome benefits after you're optimized. As a vacation rental homeowner myself for over five years, I would say that I truly started to notice these benefits about a year or so after being completely optimized. You may be optimized today and not seeing all of these benefits, but a lot of times it just takes a little bit of time for those to really come through. Let

Not sure if you've got this whole marketing thing mastered? Well, nail down these five components and you're golden. I have been studying successful vacation rental listing and hosts for several years now, and also really learning from my own experience as a vacation rental host for five years. After really understanding what works well for a listing and for a house, I have boiled down these top five components to really a successful marketing framework. In this video I'm goi

What's the number one mistake that I see with vacation rental marketing plans? Aside from not having one at all, it's trying to do everything all at once. And I've definitely been there. That's exactly what I did when I first got started five years ago. So, if you have tried to do that too it's okay! This post will breakdown the four assessments that you can do with your vacation rental business to see where your marketing should be focused and then where you can move to depe

You've decided that it's time to branch out from the online travel agencies (OTAs), and to start incorporating more marketing tactics into your strategy, but where do you start? Is it social media? Email? Advertising? There are a lot of options out there, and it can get pretty overwhelming, pretty quickly. As a Digital Marketing Strategist for 12 years, I know first-hand all of the decisions that you have to make when you decide that it's time to build your own marketing plan