How much time does it take to rent all the time in the year?

[shenandoah]

Hello,
We started renting our property in summer 2004 and are asking ourselves how much time it may take until we would rent all over the year and more than only 7 or 8 weeks per year.
Some other renters told us something about 4 years. What are your experiences in this matter? How much time did it take for you?
I think that we did everything we could do in our case (nice villa, website, marketing...) and hope now that we will rent some weeks more in 2006.
Would be nice to hear your "beginner story"
Thanks a lot for your ideas!

[A-two]

Hi Shenandoah,
Did you read the section on how to build a website from scratch? Also website reviews? I think there are some excellent tips there and it would be a good place for you to start.

Good Luck!

[alexia s.]

shenandoah,
What is your marketing? I found your web-site difficult to use but this isn't as important as choosing the right commercial sites.

[cromercrabholiday]

Shenandoah

We found that the school holidays are no problem at all but you have to work at other times of year. We are in our third season and got to 25 weeks in the second season.

Techniques that we have found useful (bear in mind that the cottage is in UK and our customers usually drive there):
- eBay at short notice - usually the auction finishes about a week before arrival, just time to get the money and send out joining instructions. You don't get much cash, but you get a lot of publicity for your money and return business. We have a link to our website in the advert and monitor hits. Ebay also gives you feedback from previous trades, so you can even check their previous record.

- mother and baby groups. This is to find the pre-school children that are not stuck with school holidays. NCT, Mama and Papas. The advantage is that if you get one happy customer, she tells all her mates in the group. We offer a 5% return discount when someone introduces a new customer.

- Church magazines. Quite hard to track down but tend to be very cheap. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I feel that people who read them will probably look after your cottage.

Good luck

John

[Linda Freese]

Hi Shenandoah

This is my 4th year renting out my properties on the Costa del Sol and I still don´t have all year rentals and doubt if I ever will! My bookings are of course much better in my 4th year than in my 1st, due to repeat business as well as word of mouth and my advertising. Some properties are rented out for an average of 9 months and others only during the summer months.

I think that the reality is that you may never get year round bookings, it all depends on the type of property you have as well as the location.

Good luck!

Linda

[Alan Knighting]

Shenandoah,

If your current marketing is attracting a good number of enquiries and booking for the high and mid season then lack of success in low season and out of season must be down to something else.

The most likely reason is that nobody wants to come to your area at those times. Why not check the availability calenders for other properties in your area to see if it is a common problem? You can't take a share in a market if the market doesn't exist. Well, you can if you are Tesco but I assume you are not.

In my opinion, 7-8 weeks in your location is much less than should be expected in high and mid season. I think you need to examine the rental listing sites you are using - there's lots of information about how to choose rental listing sites on this forum. Send a PM to Paolo and, if he has the time while he moves house, he will give you chapter and verse.

Personal Websites are very personal things. You have clearly put a lot of time and effort into yours but I don't like it, for a number of reasons. I prefer the simple, clean, uncluttered, easy to read approach, and yours isn't. I don't like FrontPage-style backgrounds, and yours has them. I don't like FrontPage-style music themes, and yours has them. Take a look at Jane Bennett's Website to see what I mean.

Others will disagree but I think that rental listing sites and word-of-mouth are the two best forms of marketing. I remain to be convinced about the value of personal websites.

Alan

[la vache!]

I agree with Alan, in your area you should be getting far more bookings. I think Paolo manages to get 50 weeks booked in some of his properties! You need to decide which market you are targeting, for example here in Brittany in order to get out of season bookings (even if its just for weekends) I targetted the French market - apart from the odd house hunter I would have hardly any guests from November to Easter if I just relied on British customers. The right rental listing(site) is very important to get your property seen. There is plenty of good advice on this website about which ones perform best, but they are all different and you will need to trial some of them (a lot offer a free 3 month trial period).
I am lucky as I have good search engine ratings for cottages brittany so my website brings in a lot of business. But if yours doesn't come on the first page of Google, Alan is right, its a 'nice to have' rather than a must have. Most of the better (and more expensive) rental listing sites let you put in as many photos and text as you would wish to have on your own site, and good search engine ratings guaranteed.
I know from talking to other gite owners in the area that those who struggle to get bookings pay out virtually nothing on advertising. There is so much competition out there now, especially in France, that visibility is everything, especially on the internet.

[Clexane]

shenandoah,

I am not sure you can ever expect all year rental - if you do I would consider it a pleasant suprise rather than a expectation. About what seems to be your rental listing sites (from your website) Abritel is a good call but the rest you may find not so helpful for the area (we are in Provence and found homelidays a waste of time - cheznous highly overpriced). Try to consider holiday rentals which draws on English speaking countries rather well and Perfect Places - which has a low enquiry rate but an incredibly high conversion rate and brings in rather out of the ordinary nationalities (it has a three month free trial).

Your website is an incredible amount of work but it seems very busy and hard to follow - trying to be all things .... you may want to look at simplification and perhaps seperating out the different languages into their own subsections ie one language per page.

Hope this helps

[paolo]

A 4-bedroom villa with pool in Provence will not be rented all year, but may aim for 6 months if it is particularly charming, or 3-4 months if it is nothing out of the ordinary. Location is obviously a key factor.

I do rent most of the year but I have two small village houses for 2-4 people, so I am not targeting the same market - i.e. families.

[shenandoah]

Thank you all for your honest critics! This will be helpfull for me.
I never thought that I will rent all over the year, but if we could rent between 4 to 5 or 6 months a year this would be fantastic. Guess I will have to look for new holiday-listings and not to renew with abritel and homelidays. I also should invest quite a moment to relook my website, but have no idea yet how to enhance...
Which listings do you prefer or from which listings do you get the most guests? This would be interesting to know.
The first year I was on the cheznous.com listing but dit not get one inquiry! I also think that they are really too expensive.
Well, I will think about all that.
Thanks a lot to all of you!

[Car & Bill]

Does anybody rent their holiday home through Brittany Ferries holidays? They seem to be very expensive, but are they worth the cost?

[ashtondav]

My place is a 2 bedroom apartment in Spain and we have been renting it out for 2 years (2005 was the second summer season).

We had 27 weeks of bookings this year. However I have conducted exhaustive price/availability comparisons with similar apartments advertised on the major websites to understand how we can "tweak" the offer to fill the weeks.

Heavy discounting for non peak weeks has been essential. For example in the first year I was achieving less than 50% occupancy in winter months despite heavy reductions on the basic winter weekly rent. Because most people rent my place for 7 days, I was also incurring cleaning and laundry prices at the same rate as in Summer!

This year I simply gave a 50% discount on the winter weekly rate for a 4 week stay. This has resulted in a booking for the whole of January and February (and yesterday i took a booking for the whole of January 2007 - with a 10% price increase ).

The long stay guests also pay for electricity. I am fortunate in as much as my village tends to attract the older visitor and to be honest I would rather have the place occupied, heated and looked after by a couple than have it sit empty. By avoiding the weekly cleaning and laundry charges I make a fair amount in low season (and have less damage from kids' mess, sand, suntan lotion etc endured during summer months).

I think you have to be realistic about the target market for out of season visitors - they will either be older couples or young couples with pre-school kids. Either way they will only be looking for (or prepared to pay for) one or two bedrooms. Also location is important - South of France/Provence can be pretty chilly in winter time. Price accordingly, or board up and focus on the high and medium seasons.

Cheers and good luck!

Tudor
www.frigiliana-apartment.com

[Alan Knighting]

Does anybody rent their holiday home through Brittany Ferries holidays? They seem to be very expensive, but are they worth the cost?

No! through Brittany Ferries Holidays but Yes! through Owners in France which is part of the same organisation.

Being a brochure plus Website it is more expensive than a Rental Listing Site. Over the years it has been quite consistent in producing "good" enquiries but on a pound per booking basis it doesn't rate with the best Rental Listing Sites. A couple of things help to balance the scales. Each year I get a return crossing for £50 and my clients get discounted rates on all crossings.

Alan

[Fraise]

Oh Alan,how long have you had your website? I just went to have a peep

[Alan Knighting]

Oh Alan,how long have you had your website? I just went to have a peep

In this case it's just a page on the Owners in France Website; property ref AT000756 if you want to have a look.

Alan