I remember in the early days of being a short-term rental investor, an owner, a property manager. My neighbor called me up in one of the areas where I have properties. She said, Hey, Tim. Do you have any availability on your calendar? I’m fully booked and I’m just looking for a place to send this guest, so I pulled up my calendar, expecting to be pretty well fully booked, but in fact I wasn’t booked at all.

So that’s why I made this episode , so you don’t have to learn the hard way and so that you can stay fully booked this summer.

The first thing you’re gonna want to do is double, triple, check everything on your listing. Give it a refresh, if you will, and make sure it’s written to attract your summer guests. 

While you’re in there, double check that you have all of the sections filled out on all of the different OTAs where you’re listed like Airbnb and booking.com and VRBO. Make sure each and every one of those sections is filled out. They have them in there for a reason, and so the more you fill out, the better.

Your visibility should be.

The second thing you want to do is just get a good refresh of all of your local competition. So hopefully you have some sort of competitive list already saved where you can easily pull it up and you can see the properties that you’re competing with. See what they have in their titles. See if their calendar’s blocked yet letting you know that they are already getting bookings.

Look at their cancellation policies, just evaluate them to make sure that between this year and last year, nothing really big or drastic has changed in your market that might prohibit you from getting the bookings that you deserve.

A pro tip, you want to jump into Airbnb and your different listing platforms and actually look at the insights. So look at the views on your listing. You can see this on Airbnb. Just go to the insights tab. You can see how many people view your property. You can see how many people actually click on it, and you can see how many of those clicks actually convert into reservations.

And those insights tell us a lot of information. We know that if there’s not a lot of views, well then there’s something missing just in your, your basic listing, right? It’s not attractive. It’s not standing out. If there’s a lot of people viewing it and clicking on it, but no one’s actually booking, well then maybe you’re not priced properly.

Or maybe they found some house rule in there that just really scares them, or something in your rental agreement that turned them off, that intimidated them or made them decide to go with one of your competitors.

Number three, you wanna highlight summer friendly amenities. So if you’ve got a barbecue, if you’ve got an outdoor fire pit for the cool summer nights, if you’re next to a lake and you have kayaks or paddleboards, you wanna put all these things up front in your listing so that as people are scanning their options, they know, ah, that’s great.

I can jump in the kayak. I can go in the pool.

I can cook some nice juicy burgers or ribs on the barbecue at night. And to take this one step further, you’re going to want to put or highlight the best amenities in your title.

Titles aren’t really what they always were, right? We know in the past that the title really made a big impact, but now some of that information that we used to put in the title is just very visible, right On that listing, things like the location. Things like the type of property, whether it’s a house.

And so we want to use that real estate space, that title space, to put in any other top selling points that are gonna both set our listing apart, but also provide a potential guest, a little more insight to hopefully get them to click on that property and then hopefully get in and view your listing and make the decision to book.

Number four. You want to double check all of your photos. We know how important photos are. I talk about this all the time, and it’s probably not new information to you, but yet we still see tons and tons of listings that don’t have great photos, or they don’t have photos of these summer amenities in their listing.

And you’ll wanna go one step further, right? Go to some local areas around your property or go online and see if you can find some photos of the lake that’s nearby, or a place where you can rent those kayaks and put those photos in your listing as well. And don’t just put them in the listing, but make sure they’re front in those five top photos, those hero photos.

Remember, you want to compare this with your competition though. So if everyone has a kayak in their photos and you had a kayak, well then you’re no different than everyone else. So just make sure when you put these in there that you’re doing something a little different that’s going to catch someone’s eye.

Okay. Tip number five, you need to know your booking window. What is your booking window? Well, this tells you when people are likely going to book for that future date. And we know that this changes. So let’s say June is the highest peak month in your market. People are very likely going to book that month before they book.

July or before they book May. And so this booking window changes based on the date in the future. It also changes based on the amount of supply that’s coming to your market. So if there’s way more vacation rentals this year, then there were last year, well, people have more options and they know that they can wait a little longer to make a decision.

If you’ve been operating your property for a while, well then you already have a general idea of what this booking window is, right? You have historic data. You can see when someone made a reservation for a specific date out in the future. If you’re not using an automated pricing tool like Price Labs or Wheelhouse, well then they make this data.

Really clear as well. You can also check out aird.co. They will tell you your booking windows throughout the year, and so you wanna monitor that closely. But remember, you need to know this for your specific type of property. So if you have a three bedroom, you don’t want to compare booking windows with a one bedroom, for example, which is very likely gonna have a shorter booking window where people will book more last minute.

So that’s the first piece, is knowing your booking window, and then that’s gonna help you determine your prices, right? If you’re in your prime booking window for that June month and you still don’t have any bookings, but the rest of all your competition does, their calendars are blocked, well then you know that you’re very likely priced too high.

So take a look at that and a couple other things that you want to be weary of is if you’re in a market where it’s typically a week long vacation rental, people are booking for a week, but you still don’t have any bookings, we’ll consider adding some last minute adjustments to your minimum night prices.

Consider adjusting your cancellation policy or consider adding some discounts.

If you’re new to our channel, we’ll welcome. I hope you’re enjoying. You can find all of our prior episodes, sttr riches.com. We have one talking specifically about booking windows. I know that gets a little more complicated, so if you didn’t know, you can find all of our information there. 

and number six, with our listing refreshed, our settings updated, our photos looking perfect, our amenities highlighted. We need to make sure that our property’s ready, right? And so now is the time to double check your property, to do your inspections, to do those deep cleanings before the really heavy occupied part of the year comes up.

You don’t want to be blocking your calendar for those prime summer months. If there’s things that you can do now and maybe block your calendar now at a much lower nightly rate, right?

By double, triple checking that the property, the physical property doesn’t have any place that’s been overlooked, you’re gonna ensure that your guests have a great experience and they leave a great review. Because if they show up and you’ve overlooked one of those things, or the doorknobs falling off, or whatever it happens to be, and your communication isn’t great, that always.

Can help you come back, but we shouldn’t need to be coming back from something that we dropped the ball on. If a guest leaves a bad review, then it’s really going to hurt your visibility and it’ll hurt the rest of your summer and the rest of that property’s performance. We know that it takes a lot of perfect reviews to make up for one bad one.

And number seven, we want to make sure that the guest experience is fantastic. There’s a couple great ways we can do that. One is by providing a digital guidebook, which has all of our local rep recommendations and has all of the insights about our property. So as soon as that guest actually makes that booking, we’re going to send them that.

They can pull it up on their phone. They can pull it up on their computer, on their iPad, whatever it happens to be. We use one called Hostfully, but there’s a lot of different options out there. It’s going to start things off on the right foot. It’s going to get them excited about your property, but you don’t have to just mention it after they’ve made the reservation.

You can actually put this in your listing copy to help entice the guest to book your property. So you can just have something in there that simply says, we will send you a digital guidebook, which has all of our best. Recommendations, including some local hole in the wall ones, which you would never have known about if we didn’t tell you.

Airbnb and the different platforms they have built in recommendations. And of course we want to fill those out as well because that’s [00:10:00] gonna help complete our overall listing. But having a digital guidebook is something that really just steps you up from your competition. It’s going to show in your reviews and with better reviews, you’re gonna be more visible and with more visibility, you’re going to get booked sooner and at higher prices.

And so with that, there are seven tips to help you prepare for this summer. With just a little quick planning and preparation and making a few smart decisions, you can stay ahead of the curve

and until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.