Managing vacation properties is a strenuous task. Interested renters are always reaching out to you, impatient to have their questions answered and their desired dates booked before anyone else. You also have to monitor reservation dates, check-ins and check-outs, cleaning schedules, property maintenance and more.
Thankfully, you can reduce the load and become more efficient at managing multiple properties using vacation rental software.
Managing vacation rental properties is mentally and physically demanding. These types of rentals attract short-term stay guests, so as the manager, you entertain more guests in a month than a residential or commercial rental.
This also means hundreds of hours spent communicating with interested renters, answering questions, monitoring payments, issuing invoices and updating booking calendars. On top of all that, you have to oversee the upkeep of the property and ensure that the rooms are cleaned before the next guest checks in.
Considering that these are just top-of-the-funnel tasks and don’t include back-office responsibilities, it’s easy to see how managing vacation rentals can overwhelm even the most savvy operators.
Using vacation rental software helps because it cuts down the tedious and time-consuming grunt work. Moreover, it provides tools that speed up some of your work. In the next section, we’ll cover these in detail as we discuss the benefits of vacation rental software.
Let’s quickly review the features of vacation rental software:
These sorts of tasks are often delegated to different departments in a corporate setting. But in the rental industry, it’s not uncommon for one person to do them all. So any software or technology that can allow a person to complete all of the above in a fraction of the time helps – and you can get that from vacation rental software.
Rental management software is beneficial when you have multiple properties. It’s easy to overlook one thing when you have plenty of other things to do. Using management software helps you stay focused and keep track of tasks in order of priority. Moreover, you can easily duplicate your workflows from one rental property to another.
Creating accounts and listing rental properties on multiple platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and TripAdvisor is standard practice as it allows rental owners to cast a wider net over the market and increase bookings. However, keeping an eye on all of these is challenging when managing many properties.
With vacation rental software, you can quickly toggle through several listed properties and check bookings, calendars and other essential data from one dashboard – no more logging in and out from every single platform where you’ve listed your properties.
Instead, just log in once, and you will have all the details on all your properties right there. The same applies to content updates; when you take new photography, need to update a description, or add new listings entirely, doing this once in the vacation rental software updates all of the connected marketplaces.
One of the best benefits of vacation rental software is it can positively impact your bottom line through direct booking. If you have a website, you can set it up such that renters can book and pay for reservations directly on your site.
You won’t be paying a percentage of the revenue to third-party sites like Airbnb, plus you can manage these bookings using the software.
Moreover, rental management software like CiiRUS provides additional features and premium services to promote your property online. For example, you’ll find tips and get hands-on assistance creating eye-catching property listings, from taking photos to writing irresistible titles and descriptions.
While we’re on the topic of increasing revenues, having a unified and secure online payment processing system can help boost your income.
Give renters various online payment options with an SSL encryption guarantee, which is a security certificate that verifies a secure connection between the guest’s browser and your website. If one of them is a service they recognize and trust, that is another point in favor of renting your property.
You can further expand your market to include foreign tourists by seamlessly advertising in multiple currencies, while being able to centrally process in your native currency. Integrating an approved payment processor also allows you to process payment from the external rental sites like Vrbo directly from the one central software.
Finally, managing vacation rental properties requires reliable and accurate data for making business decisions, like when to close your property, increase rates, offer discounts, invest in renovations, home improvements and more.
A vacation rental software with data analytics and reporting capabilities can show you real-time and historical information about every property you manage. For example, you’ll know each property’s peak and slow months as well as whether you’re hitting your booking rate targets. These reports will be very helpful in your decision-making.
These are just some of the benefits of vacation rental software. No doubt you will discover more as you keep using it. The ability to automate bookings, synchronize calendars across platforms, secure direct payment methods, and perform routine tasks that used to take you hours in just minutes will make your life as a vacation rental manager so much easier.
You’ll be happy to know that you can enjoy these benefits and more with CiiRUS, a vacation rental software developed to increase efficiencies and revenues in the rental industry. There’s so much to discover and love about this software, so feel free to explore its features on our website.
Want to see a demo of how it works? Reach out to the CiiRUS team today. You can also request a free trial.
Stay up to date about new features, events, & industry education