Should I Use a Holiday Rentals Website

Spain is the most popular destination for foreign property investors as thousands of people are attracted each year by the warm and pleasant climate, great food and laid back lifestyle. If you are the fortunate owner of a holiday home in Spain, or indeed any other country, then you have probably looked into renting out your investment at one point or other in order to make it pay for itself.

If, like most people, you only use your second home for a few short weeks a year, you will have normally considered two options for its use during the course of deciding whether or not to purchase, these being: keep it private for yourself, friends and family only or full blown rental with paying guests.

Renting out your foreign property is not as daunting as it sounds and these days it is easier than ever to get your holiday home working for a living. There are generally three options open to you for holiday home rental which are - generate rentals yourself, have a rental management company generate rentals for you or a combination of both.

Generating rental income yourself

There are many methods of marketing your rental property if you decide to do it yourself, a few of which include:

• A classified ad in local newspapers
• Your own website
• Distributing posters and flyers
• Advertising on work notice boards
• Placing adverts on holiday rental websites

By far, the easiest and most cost effective method of marketing is to create and upload an advert for your property to one of the holiday rental websites as these eliminate the expense and time involved in creating and marketing your own website. These sites are designed to create maximum exposure for holiday home and, usually for a fee (which varies depending on their popularity and exposure rate), can normally bring in the bookings.

Rental management companies

A quick search on the internet will bring up many property management companies in the country where you holiday home is located who will offer their services to varying levels, i.e. basic, intermediate or full. Whichever company you choose the services are pretty much the same in that:

• Basic services are generally just cleaning and basic property management
• Intermediate packages include the services of the basic package but with the added benefit of guest services i.e. meet your guests with keys and further property management features such as point of contact and key-holding
• Full service packages normally include all of the features of the other packages but will also include all the advertising and general marketing of your property relieving you of the problem of dealing with anything. The full service offered by the rental management companies can sometimes work out quite expensive, as a percentage of each rental obtained plus the cost of advertising is normally paid over and above the annual fee charged.

Author Info: Written by Mark Buckingham for RentAccomSpain. Rent or buy your perfect Spanish retreat direct from the owner. Find properties to buy in Spain at PixelVillas.