Maintain Your Roots While Scaling Your Property Management Business

Listen to enough vacation rental manager origin tales, as we did at Properly, and you’ll see a trend emerge. One applies to managers with a few properties and those with over 100. That pattern is as follows: it all began with a single, shining-star success.

Then a whole company grew out of that one successful vacation rental.

What’s the secret sauce behind so many shining-star premiere vacation rentals? Hospitality that is meticulous and considerate.

Place fresh flowers near the bedside. Restaurant and activity suggestions personalized to each unique visitor Welcome baskets with treats and customized remarks These thoughtful gestures certainly resulted in pleased visitors, rave reviews, and repeat reservations.

There is, of course, a catch. These considerate touches and hospitality extras become increasingly harder to carry off as a vacation rental business expands (a good thing!).

So, how can you keep a growing rental portfolio to the same continuously high level that garnered your success in the first place? How can you maintain your uniqueness without being exhausted?

Here are our suggestions for developing sensibly while retaining excellent hospitality as your one faultless rental turns into a portfolio of 50.

1. Use crowdsourcing to create your guest handbook.

Scaling your company entails expanding your workforce… and your customer base! Make use of this to construct a crowd-sourced visitor handbook.

You may like yoga and have many yoga suggestions for other yogis, but you have no clue where to go rock climbing. Bring on the hivemind! The more individuals that contribute to your guest guide, the more customized it will be for your visitors.

Tip: Download Properly’s Top 10 Guides and distribute them to your homeowners and employees as a thank you for their efforts.

Create profiles for your employees/homeowners with some basic data about their life, as well as preferred brunch places, hiking trails, sunset sites, and so on.

Examples:

• “Bluebird Cottage’s owner, Susan, is a trapeze performer who is involved in the arts community.” Here is a list of her favorite Arts & Culture activities in the city.”
• “When Jack, our maintenance man, isn’t making sure your rental is immaculate, he’s a coffee expert.” Continue reading for his list of the top ten coffee shops in the region.”

As a bonus, your visitors will have the impression that they are being welcomed not only by you but by your whole community of workers and customers.

2. Make use of social media

You already know how effective it is for marketing. However, did you realize that social media is also ideal for growing a hospitality business?

Invite guests to follow you on social media as soon as they book with you (we like Facebook and Instagram). Meanwhile, fill your feed with restaurant and activity ideas, local hidden treasures, local events, and, of course, beautiful photographs of your homes.

It’s an instant, low-effort invitation to your rentals’ community, as well as a sneak peek at the amazing experience that awaits your visitors.

Tip: Resist the impulse to publish great evaluations from previous visitors, as well as other obvious marketing strategies, on your social page. The idea is to create a feed that is entertaining, inspiring, and informative.

It’s much more beneficial to publish a photo of your sunset beach view or fire blazing in the gas fireplace. You may even ask your visitors to tag you in their best travel images. Their bright smiles will have an impact that a written evaluation would not.

This example by Alanna Schroeder of The Distinguished Guest is fantastic. This is her holiday rental on Kauai’s lovely island. You want to relive her idyllic beach day just by looking at that snapshot. (And the lovely child adds to the tenderness!)

3. Communicate your vision

Remember all those nice hospitality touches you were able to provide when you just had one listing? You are not required to make any concessions! You merely need to inform your service providers about them.

Call us prejudiced, but we believe that a visual checklist, such as the one we provide at Properly, is the best method to do this.

A visual checklist allows you to keep track of the things that are important to you, such as replacing coffee beans and paper products, ensuring the key is in place, and stunning additions such as cut flowers by the bedside, mood lighting, and tailored music for guests’ arrival.

When specifics are communicated via graphics rather than easily forgotten spoken instructions, no aspect of your vision is left to chance.

4. Trust your team

Your crew will most likely be the last to perfect the area before visitors arrive. You’re already ahead if you establish a strong workforce that is as committed to the well-being of your visitors as you are. Regardless of if you own the property, it’s a friend’s property that you’re managing, or you’re doing Airbnb rental arbitrage, your team is one of the most important factors of your success in the Airbnb industry.

Make it a point to express why your management company is so essential to you and why hospitality and attention to detail are crucial to your (shared) success from the start.

Susanne, for example, has team-building down to a science in Kelowna. So much so that when a water scarcity alert was issued in her city, her service provider rushed out to fetch bottled water for all of the guests – without Susanne even asking.