The vacation rental industry is one of the fastest growing markets in real estate. In recent years the industry has experienced abrupt growth, with the market value estimated to increase to $194 billion by 2021. Technology solutions such as vacation rental inspection software have been quick to match the rapid growth of the market, and there is now more in-depth solutions than ever before to help you maximize your vacation rental properties profit.
With the market competition increasing, vacation rental property managers and owners should look to maximize their use of technology to take their business to the next level.
Here are five reasons why vacation rental inspection software makes you a better manager in 2019.
Organization
Managing a vacation rental property means you have to continually be on top of all your bookings, guest arrival dates, maintenance team coordination, and cleaning staff schedules.
Typically, managers struggle with having so many different platforms to manage and often can forget essential dates, miss messages and fail to support guests adequately.
When you implement technology such as vacation rental inspection software into your business operations, you can schedule maintenance staff to be automatically communicated any time an issue is detected and schedule cleaning staff to come to the property straight after a guest for cleaning. You also can put any upcoming information about upcoming visitors, so that your team is aware of guests months in advance.
Another way technology can help you with organization management is through real-time communication. Everything that uploads onto SnapInspects vacation rental inspection software is available instantly. This means you could detect an issue with a washing machine, upload photos, comments and videos about the matter to the app, and your maintenance team would be able to see it as soon as you press upload.
Go Paperless With Cloud Storage
In the past, vacation rental managers have not had the option of storing significant documents online – opting to use the traditional “print and store” filing method. Managing and organizing physical copies of tenant agreements, inspections, and other vital documents is a massive task in itself, with some companies hiring employees purely to deal with paperwork.
In essence, when you store information on the “the cloud”it’s stored in a secure network of servers that can be accessed from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. The beauty of this is that you are no longer limited to using one desktop, server or location. You can quite literally operate your business operations from the comfort of your bed.
Additionally, your customers, clients, and stakeholders will be able to access their information in real-time, wherever they want. Not only does this strengthen your business communication process, but it also enhances your relationship.
Save Time With Vacation Rental Inspection Software
The average short term/ vacation rental host spends roughly 30-50 hours a month managing their property, doing maintenance and communicating with cleaning staff. This isn’t a productive figure, especially when you have a full-time job or family commitments.
Integrating a vacation rental inspection software system such as SnapInspect will allow you to reduce the time spent on business operations drastically. Everything is in one place, which means you can see what day a guest is leaving, what day to book your cleaning staff for and what needs maintenance, all on one visual dashboard.
Having all your operational business consolidated into one application saves you at least 75% of overall time spent on each property.
For example, if you spent 40 hours per week on managing your vacation rental portfolio, vacation rental inspection software would cut this down to a mere 6 hours.
Make better Business Orientated Decisions
Reports for vacation rentals have become a rarity within the industry. Its no secret as to why this is; they take an excessive amount of time, guests don’t see them, and they never seem to give you much insight into how your business is doing.
However, when you use vacation rental inspection software such as SnapInspect, reports can be generated within seconds, explicitly designed with vacation rental managers in mind.
Reports are the quickest way to gain a deeper understanding of your portfolio. View future reservations, tasks that your team needs to complete, how much a property is making you monthly and more.
The bigger your portfolio, the more you have to gain from using reports in your business operations. Instead of spending full days trying to draw data from various parts of your business, SnapInspect’s software can pull and format it in a matter of seconds.
Outshine The Vacation Rental Competition
Each factor of using technology contributes to bettering your business in a small way. Your competition may not be able to keep an eye on their maintenance expenses.
They also might not be able to run reports summarizing each properties revenue, growth and forecasted profit for each month. Whatever it is, if you’re doing it and your competition isn’t, you have an advantage over them.
By streamlining repetitive tasks with technology, you can concentrate on what’s crucial – growing your business and ensuring your guests are satisfied during their stay — for example turning one time stayers into regulars, reducing the cost of vacancies at a property.
When you make guests stay easier and display to them that you are paying attention to all details of there stay they appreciate it hugely. Those same guests are the once that refer friends, leave positive online reviews and spread the word about your vacation rental.
