Top Tips: What could your holiday home could earn you in income per year?

1. Flight availability

If you expect guests will fly to your property then check out how many airlines fly to your area and how much they cost. Do they offer flights all year?  Are cheap airlines adding more routes to your area, or are they withdrawing them? Do they stop flying at certain points of the year? This will give you a good idea on the popularity of your area throughout the year but be careful not to assume your particular area will be busy all year if there is a large city nearby likely to draw the guests all year.

2. Typical guests

Think about the type of person renting your apartment/ villa. If it’s likely to be a family then you’ll generally see peaks of interest around the holidays. If you think your typical guest will want guaranteed sunshine then check out the annual weather reports – you’ll need to drop the price like the temperature in the colder months.

3. Key features

Generally we’ve found that to increase the chances of high occupancy rates attracting the UK market – 15 weeks or more, you need either:

• a minimum of a 2 bedroom holiday home close to the beach
• a minimum 3 bedroom holiday home with pool but not necessarily near the beach
• somewhere within an hour drive of a major airport
• somewhere with great local interest, history or activity – i.e a major city, resort, golf area etc.

4. Local estate agencies

Ask estate agents in the area what they would expect to achieve if they were to rent your home for you but don’t consider this in isolation. We market our holiday home ourselves and we manage to sell 50% more weeks than local estate agents had estimated. (By the right online marketing)

5. Look at trends

Look at Google trends and enter some relevant key words to see how many web visitors have been searching for those key words – searching for ‘holiday rentals’ shows you that the key booking season is Jan-Feb each year with an increase of guests looking for holiday rentals as opposed to package holidays or hotels. Google trends might help you see into the future a little. http://www.google.com/trends

6. Compare similar properties

Track rental sites such as holiday holiday-rentals.co.uk and see how the calendars book up for similar properties and correlate with the rental prices to see what others are earning.  Then think about how your property will fare or what you need to do to make it more attractive than the competition. Watch to see how many properties are added each month. Is the property rental market flooded or are more properties needed?

7. Check out the local news

Search for your area on Google and look at the Google news tab. It might tell you about growing or reducing visitors to the area or about a new airport about to open, a new train route or something else that might impact demand.

8. Festivals and other local attractions

Research key festivals or other major attractions in the area- ask tourist information. This could give you off season rentals. For example in Nazare, Portugal there is a huge firework display each new year that attracts a huge number of visitors to the area.