Best-selling Authors Show You How to Make Money from your Second Home!
How to Make Your Vacation Property Work for You!
Until recently, if you wanted to rent your second home to vacationers, you had no choice. You had to sign a contract giving an exclusive listing to a rental agency or property management company and pay thousands of dollars each year in commissions and fees. That's 15% to 50% of your rental income right off the top.
Well, those days are over, thanks to a new book/CD "seminar-in-a-box" package from best-selling authors Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner. The package is called How to Make Your Vacation Property Work for You!: The Quick & Easy Guide to Advertising, Renting, Managing, and Making Money from your Second Home (FireCrystal Communications, 2004).
Here are all the techniques, tools, and information you need to market your vacation property, get your own bookings, manage your property from afar, and save literally thousands of dollars in commissions each and every year. Plus time-tested forms, checklists, sample correspondence, and software to make the job as easy as possible. It really is like attending an all-day seminar without the time, effort, and expense of travel.
From the very first page, you'll know you're in good hands. Alfred and Emily have been working together since their college days on the Princeton campus nearly 35 years ago. They are the authors of over 60 books, with combined sales of over one million copies. A reviewer for the New York Times called one book "a tour de force." Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Software Catalog) described another as "definitive." Writing in the Washington Post, Brit Hume hailed yet another Glossbrenner title as "one of the all-time best books." And most touching of all, a reader of The Art of Hitting .300 by Charley Lau and Alfred Glossbrenner posted an Amazon review that began, "I owe my self-esteem to this book."
For many years, Alfred was the online columnist for PC Magazine and Home Office Computing. Emily was the lead author of Search Engines for the World Wide Web, now in its fourth edition and retitled Google and other Search Engines (Peachpit Press, 2004). The Glossbrenners are also the authors of The Smart Guide to Buying a Home (John Wiley & Sons) and Making Money on the Internet (McGraw-Hill).
Equally important, these two professional writers have owned a vacation rental property for over a decade, and they have successfully applied their Internet skills, knowledge, and experience to rent and manage it themselves. They know what they're talking about. And they know how to present things in clear, enjoyable prose.
Here are just a few of the things you'll discover in the Glossbrenners' book/CD package for vacation rental owners:
· You really can do everything yourself. The CD that comes with the book contains all the forms, sample correspondence, checklists, and software you need to make things as easy as possible.
· If you're nervous about going it alone, you can sign up with a property manager and still apply the book's techniques to boost your bookings and rental income. You might even be able to negotiate lower commissions on the rentals your efforts bring in.
· There are literally hundreds of Web sites focused on vacation rental property listings. It's crucial to select the right ones for your property. Alfred and Emily show you how to do this.
· The cost to advertise a vacation property is very low. For as little as $120 a year, you can post a listing with lots of text and three to four color photographs. But you've got to create an effective listing that stands out from the competition. The book offers professional advice on how to write a property description that really sells and how to take truly inviting pictures.
· Of course, a single listing probably isn't going to be enough to give your property the exposure it needs. The Glossbrenners strongly recommend that you start by posting ads on the four leading vacation rental sites. The total annual cost will be about $600. (Buyers of the book are entitled to an extra month free on each of the four leading sites, a $68 value.) With those sites as your base, you can branch out to include selected special-interest or regional sites if you find that you are not fully booked.
· Building and maintaining your own Web site for a vacation property is a lot of work and may not even be necessary, depending on the nature and location of your property. If and when you decide to create your own site, two features you should be sure to include are an availability calendar and guest book, both of which are offered free by Rentors.org (http://www.rentors.org).
· When you visit the Rentors.org site, click on "Tips for Vacation Homeowners" to access the archive of the group's newsletter. Each issue is packed with information designed to help you manage and market your property more effectively. Published six to eight times a year via e-mail, the newsletter is sent automatically to everyone who signs up for the calendar and guest book features.
As two of the leading experts on do-it-yourself vacation rentals, Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner field lots of email messages and phone calls from current and prospective vacation-rental owners. "It may be an overstatement," says Emily, "but we've been amazed at how many people have insisted that our book/CD package has literally changed their lives. By eliminating the expense of agency commissions, it has altered their financial equations and enabled them to buy a vacation property-or multiple properties-they otherwise had no chance of affording."
One couple told the Glossbrenners that by showing them how to successfully rent and manage their vacation properties, the book/CD package had given them the confidence to retire years earlier than they had planned. "We love hearing stories like that," says Alfred, "because it means that all the time and effort we've put into creating this package have been worthwhile."
For more information about How to Make Your Vacation Property Work for You!, including the complete table of contents, an excerpt, reader comments, and ordering information, visit the Glossbrenners' FullyBookedRentals.com Web site (http://www.fullybookedrentals.com).