Northwest Vacation Rental Owner Resources
Explained below are the most helpful resources I have used in marketing my vacation rental house:
Bob's Pacific Beach House in Pacific Beach, Washington.
PAID ADVERTISING (NATIONAL)
I've tried dozens of paid vacation rental websites and ultimately kept very few. Listed here are the sites
worth paying for.
VRBO.com: The granddaddy of the vacation rental websites with the most comprehensive list. This is my
most expensive and best-performing ad. I paid up for 16 photos to put my property in the best position.
FlipKey.com / TripAdvisor.com: FlipKey.com is owned by TripAdvisor.com. TA has the most active
community of participating travelers with advice forums and reviews of accommodations and attractions.
FK is their new venture to advertise and rate vacation rentals. The combination of in depth travel
information and traveler reviews brings great credibility to this site. Advertising on FK/TA more than
pays for itself and is growing in importance all the time.
I'm also active on TripAdvisor answering questions from travelers in the Washington state forum. After
a few months of steady activity, fellow members on the forum nominated me as a "Destination Expert".
You are permitted to promote your vacation rental in your TripAdvisor profile - a people do look these
up. You can more subtly promote your property by referring people to your blog or other websites that
link to your vacation rental.
PAID ADVERTISING (REGIONAL)
I have found that regional websites are even more important than national ones in terms of driving
traffic to my website. (VRBO still brings me the most direct leads.) The other advantage is that they are
relatively cheap. My house is on the Washington coast, so the sites that work for you may be quite
different.
PacificBeachWA.com: If your house is in Pacific Beach or Moclips, this is a must have. For only $50 per
year, it drives the most traffic to my website of any source except Craigslist.
NwCoast.com: Highly tuned to search engines. Search for "Washington coast" + anything and this site
will come up #1. It drives lots of traffic to my website and gets me a fair number of direct leads too.
Highly recommended for any property on the Oregon or Washington coasts (however, does not extend
up into the north Olympic peninsula).
BeachcombersNW.com: Also drives a lot of traffic to my website. My favorite feature here is the "area
request", where they will send out a rental inquiry e-mail to all owners in a chosen area. I see lots of
those requests come through. I liked the feature so much that I copied it on a couple of my websites.
FREE ADVERTISING
What can be better than free advertising?
Craigslist.org: Craigslist: slayer of the print medium. Seattle is the second busiest market for Craigslist
after San Francisco. I've used it to sell toys, buy a bicycle, and fill long term rental houses besides
advertising my vacation rental. Here's my technique for Craigslist: 1.) write a series of 8+ unique ads on
different topics ("My House on the Coast", "Kids Love the Beach", "Wildlife at the Ocean", etc.), 2.) post
a daily ad on a rotating basis. That gets me 20-30 visitors from Craigslist per day. An alternative would
be to post the same ad every three days - Craigslist doesn't enforce uniqueness of the ad text after
three days.
Postlets.com: This is a tool that generates a very attractive, brochure-like ad to post on Craigslist. The
ad can be found directly on Postlets.com itself. It's free! Why not use it?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Here are some quick tips for attracting search engine visitors to your
site. On every page of the site, fill in the following: the title with a full sentence (replace "Home" with
"My beautiful vacation rental beach house in Pacific Beach, Washington (WA)"), the description field
with a summary paragraph, and the keywords field with a list of relevant words. The title is seen in the
title bar of the browser. The description and keywords are hidden from the user, but search engines
still use them. Beyond this, you want fresh content and frequent updates - at least twice per month.
Google Local Business: Google's local business listings appear at the top of the search results, if the
user identifies a city plus a phrase (such as, "your town" vacation rental).
Videos: Videos rank highly in search results and get indexed frequently. You might see your video
zoom to the top 10 of search results for your town within a week. Take a video of your rental and submit
it to TubeZilla.com, which will redistribute the video to dozens of video websites (YouTube.com and
more).
Blog: Start a blog - a running public diary about your vacation rental and area. I've noticed that blogs
rank highly in search results. End each blog entry with a link to your vacation rental website. Another
benefit my blog has brought me is that my neighbors have noticed it and told me things about the area
that I was unaware of.
Social Networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter): You can link your blog to social networking sites, such
that your new blog entry will appear automatically on them. On Twitter you can subscribe to be notified
about any mention of your town or vacation rentals in general to give you ideas to write in your blog.
VacationRentHouses.com (former BHRBO.com): There are hundreds of free vacation rental websites out
there and I've listed my house on many of them. VacationRentHouses.com is one of the few that has
actually brought me any leads. In fact, it brought the whopper of all leads: a corporate tenant who
stayed 4 1/2 months during the off-season, covering all of my costs during that time. Another lead was a
family with an Internet business: they could live anywhere and moved around without furniture. They
were interested in renting for three years, but ultimately chose another area.
VacationRentals411.com: This is an established site that ranks highly on search engines. They offer free
listings or premium. This is another of the very few free sites that have actually brought me leads.
Corporate Intranets: An acquaintance of mine at Starbucks listed me on their corporate intranet. This
has brought me a handful of leads, one reservation, and lots of traffic to the website. I offered her an
attractive discount to continue to renew my ad. I'm going to offer the same deal to past guests willing to
advertise my rental on corporate intranets or lunchroom billboards.
NorthBeachVacation.com, OlympicCircleTour.com, NwVacationSpots.com: You can create your own
websites! It doesn't require programming skills, just time and good writing and good photos. I host my
websites on Yahoo and build the sites with their Yahoo SiteBuilder tool.
ADVICE / EDUCATION
Yahoo vacation_rentals group: This must be the busiest forum on the Internet for vacation rental
owners with dozens of new postings per day. Lots of good advice there. I learn something new every
time I look it up.
HomeAway owner community: Lots of good advice here from vacation rental expert, Christine Karpinski.
Participation from owners is quite limited, however.
PARTNERSHIPS
I've learned that there is a certain population of travelers who will not deal with a private vacation rental
owner, not trusting to send money to a stranger. They want to deal with a company, in case a dispute
were to arise. You can tap into this market through two partnerships I have found and signed up my
own house for. Both options tap into the marketing and advertising of a larger organization, in
exchange for a fair commission that is much lower than full property management would be.
Sunspots Outreach Program
SunspotsResorts.com
Sunspots is a property management company for vacation rentals, small inns, and condo resorts that
has established a unique partnership program for self-managed vacation rentals. Sunspots will promote
your property alongside their large portfolio of fully managed properties. You gain the benefit of their
extensive investment in technology, big advertising budget, and staff of web developers, writers,
editors, photographers, marketeers, customer service, and commissioned salespersons. Sunspots
owns hundreds of promotional website domains served up from their robust technology platform. Take
a look, for example, at OceanShoresSunspots.com for the richness of these websites. Sunspots is
expert at driving traffic to these sites through search engine optimization and online advertising.
More Info: Email Inquiry, Outreach Program Brochure (pdf).
Vacation House Destinations - Vacation Membership Club
VacationHouseDestinations.com
VHD is a unique vacation membership club that works with private vacation rental owners. Because the
club does not own the properties in its portfolio, memberships can be kept affordable. VHD will inspect
your property, take professional photographs, and write its own ad copy. Members are promised
verified, luxurious accommodations, gaining the benefits of a private vacation home without the burden
of ownership. Owners benefit from a population of guests who are known to the club and are anxious to
stay in good standing with the club. VHD handles all interaction with the guests and coordination with
cleaning your staff.
More Info: Email Inquiry.
ALTERNATIVE USES FOR VACATION RENTALS
HomeExchange.com: This is the busiest website for arranging home exchanges. It's really easy to make
an exchange with fellow vacation rental owners, since the exchange can be non-simultaneous. We
have an annual exchange going with a family who own an Idaho mountain condo for our Pacific Beach
house.
Corporate/Month-to-Month Rentals: Some owners focus exclusively on the corporate/short-term rental
market (see OlympiaFurnishedHomes.com, for example). These properties have a one month minimum
and guests will stay up to 12 months. Vacancy can be very low, with the next tenant scheduled before
the current one moves out. People rent these furnished houses for many reasons: short-term work
assignments, extended travel, extended visits to relatives, divorce, remodeling, relocation, or waiting
for a house to be built. If your rental has wireless Internet, you can tap into the growing market of
people who can live and work anywhere, and who might enjoy an extended stay at a vacation
destination. Craigslist has a sublets/temporary category for these rentals. Search for "furnished":
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sub/ (Seattle sublets and temporary)
LEGAL
Robert Penfield - An experienced attorney in Washington state real estate law, whom I can highly
recommend:
Penfield Legal Services, PLLC
Attorneys and Counselors at Law
Direct Phone: 425-443-0277
E-mail: Robert@PenfieldLegal.com
Explained below are the most helpful resources I have used in marketing my vacation rental house:
Bob's Pacific Beach House in Pacific Beach, Washington.
PAID ADVERTISING (NATIONAL)
I've tried dozens of paid vacation rental websites and ultimately kept very few. Listed here are the sites
worth paying for.
VRBO.com: The granddaddy of the vacation rental websites with the most comprehensive list. This is my
most expensive and best-performing ad. I paid up for 16 photos to put my property in the best position.
FlipKey.com / TripAdvisor.com: FlipKey.com is owned by TripAdvisor.com. TA has the most active
community of participating travelers with advice forums and reviews of accommodations and attractions.
FK is their new venture to advertise and rate vacation rentals. The combination of in depth travel
information and traveler reviews brings great credibility to this site. Advertising on FK/TA more than
pays for itself and is growing in importance all the time.
I'm also active on TripAdvisor answering questions from travelers in the Washington state forum. After
a few months of steady activity, fellow members on the forum nominated me as a "Destination Expert".
You are permitted to promote your vacation rental in your TripAdvisor profile - a people do look these
up. You can more subtly promote your property by referring people to your blog or other websites that
link to your vacation rental.
PAID ADVERTISING (REGIONAL)
I have found that regional websites are even more important than national ones in terms of driving
traffic to my website. (VRBO still brings me the most direct leads.) The other advantage is that they are
relatively cheap. My house is on the Washington coast, so the sites that work for you may be quite
different.
PacificBeachWA.com: If your house is in Pacific Beach or Moclips, this is a must have. For only $50 per
year, it drives the most traffic to my website of any source except Craigslist.
NwCoast.com: Highly tuned to search engines. Search for "Washington coast" + anything and this site
will come up #1. It drives lots of traffic to my website and gets me a fair number of direct leads too.
Highly recommended for any property on the Oregon or Washington coasts (however, does not extend
up into the north Olympic peninsula).
BeachcombersNW.com: Also drives a lot of traffic to my website. My favorite feature here is the "area
request", where they will send out a rental inquiry e-mail to all owners in a chosen area. I see lots of
those requests come through. I liked the feature so much that I copied it on a couple of my websites.
FREE ADVERTISING
What can be better than free advertising?
Craigslist.org: Craigslist: slayer of the print medium. Seattle is the second busiest market for Craigslist
after San Francisco. I've used it to sell toys, buy a bicycle, and fill long term rental houses besides
advertising my vacation rental. Here's my technique for Craigslist: 1.) write a series of 8+ unique ads on
different topics ("My House on the Coast", "Kids Love the Beach", "Wildlife at the Ocean", etc.), 2.) post
a daily ad on a rotating basis. That gets me 20-30 visitors from Craigslist per day. An alternative would
be to post the same ad every three days - Craigslist doesn't enforce uniqueness of the ad text after
three days.
Postlets.com: This is a tool that generates a very attractive, brochure-like ad to post on Craigslist. The
ad can be found directly on Postlets.com itself. It's free! Why not use it?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Here are some quick tips for attracting search engine visitors to your
site. On every page of the site, fill in the following: the title with a full sentence (replace "Home" with
"My beautiful vacation rental beach house in Pacific Beach, Washington (WA)"), the description field
with a summary paragraph, and the keywords field with a list of relevant words. The title is seen in the
title bar of the browser. The description and keywords are hidden from the user, but search engines
still use them. Beyond this, you want fresh content and frequent updates - at least twice per month.
Google Local Business: Google's local business listings appear at the top of the search results, if the
user identifies a city plus a phrase (such as, "your town" vacation rental).
Videos: Videos rank highly in search results and get indexed frequently. You might see your video
zoom to the top 10 of search results for your town within a week. Take a video of your rental and submit
it to TubeZilla.com, which will redistribute the video to dozens of video websites (YouTube.com and
more).
Blog: Start a blog - a running public diary about your vacation rental and area. I've noticed that blogs
rank highly in search results. End each blog entry with a link to your vacation rental website. Another
benefit my blog has brought me is that my neighbors have noticed it and told me things about the area
that I was unaware of.
Social Networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter): You can link your blog to social networking sites, such
that your new blog entry will appear automatically on them. On Twitter you can subscribe to be notified
about any mention of your town or vacation rentals in general to give you ideas to write in your blog.
VacationRentHouses.com (former BHRBO.com): There are hundreds of free vacation rental websites out
there and I've listed my house on many of them. VacationRentHouses.com is one of the few that has
actually brought me any leads. In fact, it brought the whopper of all leads: a corporate tenant who
stayed 4 1/2 months during the off-season, covering all of my costs during that time. Another lead was a
family with an Internet business: they could live anywhere and moved around without furniture. They
were interested in renting for three years, but ultimately chose another area.
VacationRentals411.com: This is an established site that ranks highly on search engines. They offer free
listings or premium. This is another of the very few free sites that have actually brought me leads.
Corporate Intranets: An acquaintance of mine at Starbucks listed me on their corporate intranet. This
has brought me a handful of leads, one reservation, and lots of traffic to the website. I offered her an
attractive discount to continue to renew my ad. I'm going to offer the same deal to past guests willing to
advertise my rental on corporate intranets or lunchroom billboards.
NorthBeachVacation.com, OlympicCircleTour.com, NwVacationSpots.com: You can create your own
websites! It doesn't require programming skills, just time and good writing and good photos. I host my
websites on Yahoo and build the sites with their Yahoo SiteBuilder tool.
ADVICE / EDUCATION
Yahoo vacation_rentals group: This must be the busiest forum on the Internet for vacation rental
owners with dozens of new postings per day. Lots of good advice there. I learn something new every
time I look it up.
HomeAway owner community: Lots of good advice here from vacation rental expert, Christine Karpinski.
Participation from owners is quite limited, however.
PARTNERSHIPS
I've learned that there is a certain population of travelers who will not deal with a private vacation rental
owner, not trusting to send money to a stranger. They want to deal with a company, in case a dispute
were to arise. You can tap into this market through two partnerships I have found and signed up my
own house for. Both options tap into the marketing and advertising of a larger organization, in
exchange for a fair commission that is much lower than full property management would be.
Sunspots Outreach Program
SunspotsResorts.com
Sunspots is a property management company for vacation rentals, small inns, and condo resorts that
has established a unique partnership program for self-managed vacation rentals. Sunspots will promote
your property alongside their large portfolio of fully managed properties. You gain the benefit of their
extensive investment in technology, big advertising budget, and staff of web developers, writers,
editors, photographers, marketeers, customer service, and commissioned salespersons. Sunspots
owns hundreds of promotional website domains served up from their robust technology platform. Take
a look, for example, at OceanShoresSunspots.com for the richness of these websites. Sunspots is
expert at driving traffic to these sites through search engine optimization and online advertising.
More Info: Email Inquiry, Outreach Program Brochure (pdf).
Vacation House Destinations - Vacation Membership Club
VacationHouseDestinations.com
VHD is a unique vacation membership club that works with private vacation rental owners. Because the
club does not own the properties in its portfolio, memberships can be kept affordable. VHD will inspect
your property, take professional photographs, and write its own ad copy. Members are promised
verified, luxurious accommodations, gaining the benefits of a private vacation home without the burden
of ownership. Owners benefit from a population of guests who are known to the club and are anxious to
stay in good standing with the club. VHD handles all interaction with the guests and coordination with
cleaning your staff.
More Info: Email Inquiry.
ALTERNATIVE USES FOR VACATION RENTALS
HomeExchange.com: This is the busiest website for arranging home exchanges. It's really easy to make
an exchange with fellow vacation rental owners, since the exchange can be non-simultaneous. We
have an annual exchange going with a family who own an Idaho mountain condo for our Pacific Beach
house.
Corporate/Month-to-Month Rentals: Some owners focus exclusively on the corporate/short-term rental
market (see OlympiaFurnishedHomes.com, for example). These properties have a one month minimum
and guests will stay up to 12 months. Vacancy can be very low, with the next tenant scheduled before
the current one moves out. People rent these furnished houses for many reasons: short-term work
assignments, extended travel, extended visits to relatives, divorce, remodeling, relocation, or waiting
for a house to be built. If your rental has wireless Internet, you can tap into the growing market of
people who can live and work anywhere, and who might enjoy an extended stay at a vacation
destination. Craigslist has a sublets/temporary category for these rentals. Search for "furnished":
http://seattle.craigslist.org/sub/ (Seattle sublets and temporary)
LEGAL
Robert Penfield - An experienced attorney in Washington state real estate law, whom I can highly
recommend:
Penfield Legal Services, PLLC
Attorneys and Counselors at Law
Direct Phone: 425-443-0277
E-mail: Robert@PenfieldLegal.com
NwVacationSpots.com
Featuring Quality Vacation Rental Homes around the Northwest
Plus Favorite Northwest Destinations
Featuring Quality Vacation Rental Homes around the Northwest
Plus Favorite Northwest Destinations
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