LETTING HOLIDAY HOMES AND SECOND HOMES

Things you need to think about when choosing your holiday property letting company:

1. What is the quality like of the other properties that the company features in their brochures and on their website? Is it roughly the same, better or substantially worse quality than your own? The "environment" in which your property will be seen will have an impact on how much you are likely to be able to charge.

2. How effectively will the rental company market your property for you? Are they going to do it honestly and are they going to make your property look as good as they can without misleading potential customers?

3. How effective will accompany be at maximising the length of season that your property will be rented out for? This can have a significant impact on your overall revenue.

4. What level of repeat business does the company have? As with any service business this is the best indicator of how well they deal with customers and how satisfied those customers are after the experience.

5. Does the company have good backup in terms of advisers and administration services?

6. Do they have a web site that is dedicated to owners where things like special offers and additional advice can be found?

7. Do they have a good service when it comes to taking bookings and are they able to take bookings online as well as at their call centre?

8. How will they market your property? Normally one would expect this to be through brochures, promotion of a web site, advertising, direct mail, and public relations. If they are not able to “tick all of these boxes” and show you that they can market your property effectively you should perhaps look elsewhere.

How does the pricing work?

Prices are normally worked out on the basis of two seasons: a summer season runs from early April through to the end of October and in the winter season that runs either side of this.

As one would expect, certain key dates in both the summer and winter (usually school holidays and big events like Christmas) command significantly higher prices than the "shoulder periods" which are the less popular times in between.

Prices are often set based on the sales history of the market. The bigger companies use their booking history to project where the greatest demand is going to be in terms of both dates and also geographical location. Therefore depending on where your property situated they will project the likely prices you can achieve across the year and reflect this in the prices that they recommend you try and charge. The prices that you will ultimately see printed in their brochure will be higher than the prices being paid to you as it is the difference that pays for their administration fees, marketing costs and profit.