Evaluating a Vacation Rental Listing Service

"Willie Loman" will say almost anything to get the sale including making exaggerated claims about the number of booking one can gain using a vacation home and rental listing service."

The landscape has changed in the vacation rental market place over the years. In fact, may people have built successful property management companies as well as vacation rental businesses off of the power of the Internet. More specifically, a minute number of listing services have provided a huge value. Along with the success of very few has come the hoards of "copy cat" services that don't allows meet the expectation of a property manger or vacation rental owner in terms of online views, inquiries and bookings.



Here are some of the promises that are made by many listing services.

1. People find us from the following search terms vacation rentals, vacation rental, vacation homes and vacation home. The implication of this statement is that if people find the listing service that it is the same as them finding your vacation rental. Note, there is a huge difference. Indeed, it is a numbers game. To my knowledge there is only one company that boasts enough traffic and enough complete and accurate listings for the aforementioned statement to be of any significance or relevance. The questions that need to be asked of these second, third, fourth and fifth tier listing services are as follows:

1. How long is my trial period?


2. How many visitors per year go to my specific destination using your service as a conduit?


3. How many other properties are listed in my destination?


4. How many of these listings have premium placement and how much does premium placement cost on your service?


5. How long has your listing service been in business and collecting advertising revenue?


6. Once I have gone through my trial period, how much will my listing on your service cost?


7. How much extra does it cost per property?


8. Am I allowed to link my personal website to my listing on your website?


9. What happens to the inquiries my property generates?


10. Are these inquiries resold to other companies and how do I know your not selling them?


11. Will you guarantee traffic, inquiries and bookings?


12. How many dollars in booking revenue can I expect for every dollar I spend on advertising using your service?


13. What is the rational behind the terms and conditions and the requirement that I comply with these terms and conditions? (Note to vacation home owner and property manager, you would be shocked to see what you agree to in some of the terms and conditions offered by certain companies.)


14. What happens to my properties information and my information in the event I terminate my relationship with your company?

Each person will have their own expectations as to adequate answers to these listed questions. Note, this is not a comprehensive list but, it is intended as a starting point when you are interviewing a listing service competing for you advertising dollars.

2. Premium listings on our website are worth thousands of dollars because everyone with a premium listing is "all booked up". Don't believe everything you hear when dealing with these telemarketers because their pay is based on the number of sales they make to people just like you. These misleading statements are common in the industry especially at the end of the month which is when the tel-sales team needs to meet goals and monthly bonuses. The easiest way to determine whether or not a sales representative is providing all the information is to ask for written testimonials, a couple of customers who have listed with the respective service and finally ask them for the retention rate of clients who use their service. Important, you should require that this information be provided to you in writing. In fact, the listing service should be proud to show you this information provided the listing that you pay a couple hundred dollars for is truly worth thousands of dollars.

3. We have thousands of indexed pages on Google. In fact, our competitors have less then us. Indexed pages do not necessarily translate into traffic or bookings. Always revert back to the primary question, "how many booking can I expect if I purchase your service?".

4. We have thousands of daily visitors to our website. This is a tricky one because it is hard to determine the origin of the traffic. For example, is it an owner going to add a property to his website or is it a person who was directed to the website during a sales call from a telemarketing center. In either case, these examples would not be quantified as quality visits to the site as far as the vendors are concerned because these two examples are not people who are interested in making bookings to a vacation rental. Rather, they are either being sold a listing and are touring the site being sold or are they are performing maintenance on their website. In other words, you have could have a community of visitors who are all interested in renting their properties as opposed to looking to rent a property. These types of visits have ZERO VALUE.

5. We pay thousands of dollars buying AdWords for our listing service. This is a great statement because the listing service can tell you the actual amount they spend on these AdWords and the number of listings on their website. You can determine the average amount per listing they spend on AdWords by dividing the total amount spent divided by the number of listing on the site. Note, feel free to ask them the for the same information with respect to the destination of your vacation rentals.

These are just a few of the statements and a few of the rebuttals I would offer to any of these listing sales folks who make these statements. Note, many might feel uncomfortable or rude when asking these questions but, remember these sales people are asking you for your hard earned money. They should give you these answers in writing assuming they are proud of their service. In short, get them to make these statements in writing.

Nothing personal Willie it's just business!