Where do you get most of your rental inquiries?

[Shutters]

We advertise our house "Shutters by the Sea" in many places. Our own web site, Royal Beach Resorts, VRBO, Gulf Coast Rentals.com, Rent 101.com, and Find Vacation Rentals.com, each with varing degrees of success. Our own web site brings us the most inquiries, followed by VRBO and then all the rest. I'm curious what results everyone else out there is getting. What listing service generates the most inquiries for your rental home? If you use mulitple listings do you track where the inquiry came from? Thanks for everyone's input.

Shutters

 

[Mermaid]

We haven't advertised our place yet, but when it's done we'd like Kurt to do his virtual tour, which would put us on the SoWal advertising list. Then, on the advice of our friend Gotothebeachmom, our condo is going on www.greatrentals.com. GTTBM said that was an excellent source of rentals, much better than VRBO. She's had a really good success rate with that website.

 

[Shutters]

Thanks Ms. Mermaid. I'll check them out.

 

[peapod1980]

Then, on the advice of our friend Gotothebeachmom, our condo is going on www.greatrentals.com. GTTBM said that was an excellent source of rentals, much better than VRBO. She's had a really good success rate with that website.

Thanks to both of you! I've just saved this site to my favorite places, and I'll also refer other people there.

 

[DBOldford]

Our management company prints a pretty extensively mailed brochure and they are sort of the only game in town at our beach. But when we had Kurt update the virtual tour and advertise it on this Web site, our booking increased significantly. We are always booked from one year to the next during the high season (spring through first of August and Labor Day). We renew with Kurt every year for this reason. I also notice that our guests seem to tell their friends about the house. We send a Christmas card to everyone who rented with us for that year and I have noticed groups of people in the same suburban areas of three major SE cities.

 

[barefootguy]

We've listed our property with a whole bunch of sites, but I'll list some of our big hitters here. We started listing our house in March of this year and here's some of the results:

www.vacationrentals.com -- 70 inquiries, 2 confirmed rentals
www.findvacationrentals.com -- 65 inquiries, 4 confirmed rentals
www.cyberrentals.com -- 42 inquiries
www.vacationhomes.com -- 21 inquiries, 1 confirmed rental
www.vacationspaces.com -- 22 inquiries
www.greatrentals.com -- 21 inquiries, 1 confirmed rental
www.weneedavacation.com -- 16 inquiries, 2 confirmed rentals
www.vrbo.com -- 6 inquiries

VRBO was highly recommended by friends, but it didn't benefit us at all this year. It just cost us the most. Our friends though still get a lot of inquiries from them. Maybe it's due to them having lots of homes, and we just having one?

 

[Paula]

We've only used VRBO and I'd say 2/3 of our rentals come from them and 1/3 from our agency and we've been booked most spring/summer/Sept. It has been helpful to see what other people are using. I've considered adding another online rental place, but we haven't needed it. I'd love to create our own website, though, and I think that's what I'll work on this winter.

I'm most interested in figuring out how to get some winter rentals, but that has been quite the challenge. In some ways, rates are so low in winter it's no big loss not to have winter rentals, but it would be nice.

 

[Mermaid]

Paula, Shutters and Gotothebeachmom both have their own websites, if you need to see any great examples! In the next week or so I have to start thinking of what our little write-up will say. So far I have writer's block.

 

[Miss Kitty]

Paula, Shutters and Gotothebeachmom both have their own websites, if you need to see any great examples! In the next week or so I have to start thinking of what our little write-up will say. So far I have writer's block.

Need some help? hee hee hee

 

[Mermaid]

Need some help? hee hee hee

Naw. I'd wonder about the clientele we'd attract. Meow!