Having your own website

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
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John Borg
Posts: 183
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 2:33 pm
Location: Malta
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personal websites

Post by John Borg »

Seeing that the sites we all use to advertise our properties give you limited space and photos, I created a personal site for added photos and information. When a potential client makes an enquiery, I give them all of the info they require, plus I refer them to my site, www.dewberryvilla.cjb.net . I have had a good season, so I think it must be working!
Malta – always in the sunshine!
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Sue Dyer
Posts: 2562
Joined: Sun Sep 19, 2004 2:26 pm
Location: Belford, Northumberland

Post by Sue Dyer »

We dipped our toes into the holiday rental around 3 years ago and made enquiries with agencies. We were horrified at both how little they were going to charge guests per week and how much cut they would take and dictate when we could use our own property!

As I'm not too bad at putting websites together myself (with Microsoft FrontPage doing most of the work) so I created a web for the cottage. However, this gets very few direct hits for this I rely on a couple of internet cottage listings sites which only charge around £75 per year. I get 100% of my bookings through this method. I picked an agency which comes up top on google when I put in "cottage, northumberland". or your own location)

The listing sites puts up basic info but I find most people will click through onto my site which has lots more info re the cottage, village, nearby and full details of price and availbility.
We've been booked from Easter right through now and just have a week left in Oct and a couple in Nov - It also means we can keep our prices down a bit as we don't have the agencies mark up. It works for us anyway!
ChrisR
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Sep 21, 2004 4:05 pm
Location: Orlando, Florida
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Post by ChrisR »

In my opinion your personal website is invaluable. It is ideal for people to view who are recommended by previous guests. I certainly would not want to direct potential guests to a site showing lots of other homes that they could choose from!
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