Hello and thanks for visiting my site. Whether you found my site through my blog or my blog through my site, I just want you to know that I’m glad that you’re here and reading these words. Because I’m about to give you a great tip to save money on vacation rental properties.
Ready to save money?
But before I get to that, it’s important to understand a little bit about my history in the vacation rental business. I bought my first property (The Cabin at Eagle Creek) in 2007. It was at the top of the market, and I hired a firm to run the property for me, end to end. I paid them a very healthy commission to do so. This firm made a long series of mistakes in running my property, so I found someone to manage it at a lower fee who was running properties through VRBO.
That was right around 2009, and it was the first time I had heard about VRBO. At first, I was concerned. I said to myself, I’ve never heard of VRBO, so I wonder if anybody else has either. Lo and behold, people found my property in droves through VRBO! And had this property manager not entangled me in a couple of double bookings—the bane of our existence—I would have kept her on board. So, in the spring of 2009, I took over managing my property myself.
From there, things really took off, and since I wasn’t paying a management fee, I finally was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I always said that if I had a couple of these places, I could quit my day job. (I’ve never wanted to have a day job!)
Everything was great for many of years, so much so that I was able to buy a second property (The Chalet at Icicle Creek) and then a third (The LakeView at Cedar Brae). But it was around the time of my third purchase that the wheels started to come off the bus.
Between the purchase of property one and property two, I had written a book—Vacation Rental Cash Flow Avalanche, available on Amazon—where I touted the value and benefit of VRBO and explained how it had changed the direction of my life. However, about a year ago, VRBO went from charging property owners $1,000 dollars per year for listings to $349 dollars per year. Great, right? No, because the site also began charging guests a service fee—anywhere from 5–12% per booking.
Shocked at VRBO’s fees? So were we.
What this meant was that VRBO (which had just been bought by Expedia, which had been monitoring for years how Airbnb was running its business) would go from collecting $1,000 dollars per year from each property to about $18,000 per year per property. That’s an 18-fold increase in VRBO’s profits for doing exactly what it was doing before. (Wouldn’t we all love an 18-fold pay raise for doing exactly the same job?)
Now, VRBO will contend that it isn’t charging owners this fee, it’s charging users this fee—but that would be a bit of a stretch. The fact remains that if owners could have raised our fees $100 per booking, we would have done that a long time ago. But as owners, we understand that people look at the total price of the booking and decide whether they can afford it or not. So what ended up happening is that we owners had to lower our rates on VRBO to make the total stay more affordable. But even that doesn’t always help because PEOPLE HATE FEES. People don’t mind their cable bill but they do mind a bunch of ridiculous fees that they don’t understand.
What can we do about it? Many of us have created our own websites that don’t have any service/booking fees going to a third-party firm that isn’t doing anything more than helping you to find me. But now you’ve found me, and I’ve found you, and you can book my properties free of any service fees.
Therefore, if you would like to save money on future vacations, know that most properties on “the booking sites” also have their own website. Before you rent a property and pay a booking fee, simply Google the property or the owner to find them through their own website. This is not only going to help you but it’s going to help the property owner as well.
So now I just saved you some money—maybe enough for a lovely dinner during your vacation. I hope this information serves you well. And again, we can’t wait to have you come stay at one of our three beautiful properties!
