Lay My Hat

It is Shepherd-Speak. I heard him keynote at the VRMA conference in San Diego last October. He hijacked the original published topic to turn on the attending managers and say much the same.

This is a really interesting thread. I have just bought a new cottage and m just completing the renos before listing it. I'm fairly confident about getting it rented for july and august beacuse our last minute mrket is massive, but mildly anxious for the low season. Osprey Cottage rents really well ...

Have they been around a long time? Their services page shows advertising prices for 2006 and copyright notice dated 2008. Jimbo - I am with you on the amount on how irritating it is to see so much material being used on other sites. I continually see my blog posts - sometimes in their entirety - rep...

This is terrific! May I reproduce these recipes on my blog with credit to you, of course? I also run a rental management agency and would like to give my owners these ideas too. We are working on a new environmentally conscious programme we are hoping our owners will adopt. Thank you for sharing the...

Like Wendy, we use a keyless entry deadbolt and change the code to the last 4 digits of the guests' phone number for each rental. That way there is less likelihood of them forgetting it. Ours is a Weiser Powerbolt: http://www.weiserlock.com/products/smartseries/powerbolt.aspx I'd love to be able to ...

I too had no idea where Crieff was and wondered if, instead of using the address in your h1 header, you used something like: Self Catering in Crieff - Beautiful Scottish Highlands This should help your SEO as well as offering an easy to see location without site visitors having to read the text to f...

These are really interesting points and I have to admit I hadn't really considered any of them when I embraced Pinterest at the outset. I just read the Halford article and all the very relevant and reasoned comments following it and have better insight into how photographers feel. I relate this to t...

Hi Steve Just a couple of things on a first pass. I found it quite easy to navigate in general. The first thing I want to see is pictures because if they don't grab me I would just move on. I clicked on the cabin exterior images expecting them to enlarge but they linked to your booking page which wa...

It's interesting to see that Home Away has embraced Pinterest and is using it to showcase some of the best features in their listed properties. I wrote a blog post http://cottageblogger.com/2012/01/how-pinterest-can-boost-vacation-rental-buzz/ about this today and am keen to find out if anyone here ...

I have no problem about posting the exacat location of my cottage but many owners in our region (rural Ontario) do not like to have their location that specific. The reason is the nature of cottage country means that many properties are vacant for much of the year, and in winter may only be accessib...

In our agency work (we manage over 160 cottages on behalf of our Canadian owners) we deal with hundreds of enquiries a week - sometimes hundreds a day in high season. Our rental clients are mostly based in Toronto which is highly multi-cultural. We've found that certain cultures seem to be much 'rud...

When we first started out in this business we were living in UK and bought our place in Ontario. Our near neighbours ran a small resort and were used to meeting and greeting their own guests. They managed the changeovers on our place really well and were on hand to deal with any issues. However, hav...

Interesting. I've been exploring some options for presenting information in a better format and this is worth taking a look at.

We realised last year that when we offered weekly rentals from Saturday - Saturday we lost the opportunity to rent a weekend at either end, so now do a Friday - Friday week in low season. One of our agency owners rents Monday - Friday and Friday - Monday in high season as well as Friday to Friday we...

Most of our agency properties are fairly remote and often unoccupied for long periods - for example when they are closed up for winter. We have to be very wary of offering even an address for a drive-by because of security issues. However, where an owner is OK with a viewing we take identifying info...