If you are planning to buy a rental home, or you're thinking about what to do with one you have just acquired, this is the place for any questions about starting out in the rentals business.
Just starting to look at marketing my holiday let - hoping to get it all up and ready to advertise by Easter, although its taken longer than I planned so will miss Easter bookings this year .
I have a few brochures from various agents with a pricing schedule for the year to get some idea of the going rates for similar sized properties in my area and I have an idea of the cost I need to cover to make it viable. I am therefore looking at setting my weekly tariff for the year (well up to end Oct when I stop for the winter). Just wondered if there is an online programme or free calendar I can use to draw up my tariffs for the year and keep it on my PC, print off etc.
Anyone use anything please? Some of the online agents offer a booking/rental calendar but you have the sign up for their services to get one, and I want something I can "tweak" myself to get my prices sorted, before I tie myself to an agent or particular website to advertise on.
Lots of people here use PIMS holiday rental management, which allows you to do an million useful things and automatically updates a lot of the listing site calendars, plus can be added to google calendar or ical or outlook or whatever pretty much. It isnt free, but it is probably the best thing I ever did signing up to it before I took any bookings. It means I have all the data I need about where bookings are coming from, enquiry to booking ratio etc, plus historical rates etc.
There is a site called half term dates I think which will give you school holidays etc which should enable you to work out your pricing more or less.
I have quite a few bands
low, mid, high and peak seasons, and then a kind of extra band in each for in or out of school holidays.
You need to think about short breaks tarifs too, and whether you will be flexible in start/end dates (which I would probably recommend).
seconded... even if you only ever use the most basic cheapest version of PIMS it will earn it's keep in terms of your time... you can do template reply letters for every stage of the booking and tweak pricing and have it work out short stay bookings prices etc (not sure if that's available on the basic version or not) and it also has reminders and all sorts of useful stuff. Those of us that use it would not want to be without it...
Nightowl
Forever going one step forwards and two
backwards......
Thirded! I have the standard plan at £99, but you may find that the Lite version at £29 gives you the bulk of features you need. You will probably need to create your own short break pricing, but as the others have said it will probably be the best decision your ever did to start with a system like this. It's run by e-Richard who is a LMH member and he will give you great support if needed. Plus you have several of the regular members here who all use it.
I started with it a few months after taking my own bookings, but it's so much easier if you start from before your first booking, as you have the opportunity to do.
Nemo wrote:You can try it as a guest on the actual site, or if you sign up and then don't like it, there is a 60 day money back guarantee.
If someone refers you, you get an extra 3 months free and they get a small discount off a years subscription.
Send any of us here who have recommended it a message, and we can give you a referral code, which is exclusive to each one of us.
Thanks Nemo! Can I put it on hold? I am really interested but I have so many other tasks to do I would not be able to focus on this right now, it would end up unfinished like so many other things.
When ever you like booboo. The offer is always there.
The only thing I would say, is if you put this to the top of your to do list, invest in it and find you like it, you may well save yourself precious time that you can put towards the rest of your to do list.
PS I wonder if anyone has tried PIMS and then given up on it? I can't imagine they have. Richard?! (Sorry Richard, I'm not intending to put you on the spot and you can refuse to reveal a trade secret. )
Nemo wrote:PS I wonder if anyone has tried PIMS and then given up on it? I can't imagine they have. Richard?! (Sorry Richard, I'm not intending to put you on the spot and you can refuse to reveal a trade secret. )
When so many people are signing up each year, its inevitable that one or two find it does not suit their way of working. Actually its usually those with only 1 property who find they don't really need a management system, but there are occasionally others. I never pester people for a reason, so this is based on minimal feedback.
e-Richard wrote:Actually its usually those with only 1 property who find they don't really need a management system
Who can these people be? It was a godsend even with one!
As you can imagine, I said that a little tongue in cheek e-richard, but that's incredibly good going to lose so few. It shows that it really does fit the bill for the majority (apart from Beachcondo ) and forever evolves, which is even better!
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