Make the Most Money From Your Vacation Home Rental - Tips From a Homeowner

In two months we've booked out our Palm Springs vacation rental home for almost $20,000. These bookings are largely during the summer months which is the slow season when no one expects to be busy. Would you like to do the same with your second home? A few tips to help you on your way.
(1) Manage it yourself. We originally contracted with a small vacation rental property team...until we found the owner stayed in our property when it was vacant. By cutting out the middle man and doing it all ourselves, we took back 20-25% of the booking revenue as well as drive much higher traffic to our property than we'd receive from a large property management team.
(2) Do everything online. We created a merchant account and use a new site called website called Owners Reservations for all of our quote creations and bookings.
(3) Accept credit cards. Hotels are your competition so you must be as flexible. We accept all credit cards and for the security deposit we do a $1000 credit card authorization as opposed to requiring someone to send us a check for a deposit. We also don't charge guests the credit card transaction fee. To us, that is the cost of doing business.
(4) Advertise, advertise, advertise. There are several great websites focused on the Home Rental Market and we get many inquiries from all of them. We advertise on HomeAway, Vacation Rentals By Owner, FlipKey, VacationHomeRentals, and Craigslist. Make sure you have all important information but maintain brevity - while your second home renovation may have been your work of love, no one wants to read all the details. Use the calendar so that prospective guests can see when you are open and occasionally utilize the Special Deal option (Typically $20 a week on HomeAway as an example) to promote a special of