4 Tips for Building Your Vacation Rental Team
Updated: Jan 23
While your role as vacation rental property owner might not be your full-time job, managing all aspects of property maintenance and guest experience on your own can sure make it feel like one. When spread too thin, it’s easy for either the property or the positive reviews to decline, a truly slippery slope and one that’s hard to rebound from.
In order to seamlessly scale your vacation rental, it’s important to build a solid team to support you with time-consuming tasks. Hiring specialized partners can also help you save money, as a seamlessly managed vacation rental receives more positive ratings and in turn leads to increased bookings. Wondering what key roles you should consider filling when building your vacation rental team? Let’s break it down:
Connect with a thorough & reliable house cleaning service. A competent cleaning team can make or break your vacation rental. Finding a housekeeping company you can rely on to show up on time in between check-ins and who you know will get the job done right every time helps ensure each and every guest has a positive first impression of your rental’s interior. The right cleaning team will treat your rental like their own, notice anything that might be out of place, and might even offer suggestions on how to refresh or enhance the space every now and then.
Identify quality contractors in your area for upkeep and emergencies. Aside from the need to refresh and enhance your rental every so often, there is also the realm of rental repairs that needs to be covered. Whether it’s regularly scheduled maintenance or a pressing emergency during a guest’s stay, it’s critical to have a list of local contractors you can trust. Proactively reaching out to handymen, plumbers and electricians in your area to vet their capabilities and typical availability can save you in the long run, as you can rest assured that there will be someone to lean on if you ever get that dreaded middle of the night call from a guest with a plumbing emergency.
Outsource trash removal to a team that specializes in vacation rentals. When building your vacation rental team, if there is one group you know you cannot trust to be on time, it’s city services. Not only are local trash removal teams often unreliable, they are most definitely not tailoring their services to your timelines. To avoid the need for you to haul away the garbage from a large party that’s recently checked out before your next group checks in just hours later, work with a team that offers per-checkout trash removal services. Oftentimes integrated with your property management software, these teams offer customized services built for vacation rental owners, ensuring you aren’t left with a huge mess on your hands, no pun intended.
Work with a property manager or property management software. Speaking of property management software, this brings us to another helpful role you might want to fill on your vacation rental team. Whether you work with an individual property manager or team or instead decide to try a tech-enabled option such as Home Away or Beyond, investing in outsourced property management can help you truly step away from the day-to-day of managing your vacation rental. The time you gain back from outsourcing property management can instead be dedicated to business development and could be the factor that inspires your next vacation rental purchase.
All in all, building a vacation rental team is a tangible way to scale successfully. If scaling isn’t your goal, you can also look at developing a team to give you more time to dedicate to friends and family – rather than spending a Sunday morning as a pseudo garbage man.