Owning a rental is a challenge in many ways, and you want to ensure you’re making enough money to keep the wheels turning. However, with short-term rentals, you have difficulty keeping it occupied all the time and all the admin work that you need to do behind the scenes.
However, in America alone, 2019 saw America spend around $930 billion on domestic travel. Having a rental business, whether that’s to offer vacations or for those working temporarily in the area, it can be a real money-maker, meaning there is little room for error, especially if you’re trying to make it a profitable business.
If you run a short rental business, there are undoubtedly many tools and software to consider to make your day-to-day work life a lot easier. So, here are three software options to consider for your rental company.
Lodgify for Vacation Management Software
With short rentals, you might have more than one property available. If that’s the case, then trying to manage them at once can prove to be complicated. Not only do you need to ensure management of the cleaning when customers check out but taking bookings and communicating with leads.
Moreover, there’s a lot to manage with just one short rental, so if you have many of them, this might lead to mistakes being made and specific tasks being forgotten. So, software like Lodgify can be beneficial.
A vacation rental management software can oversee everything that you possibly need for your short rental, all in one place, meaning fewer tools and software to move between to get the job done.
According to Workamajig, 93% of organizations use standardized project management practices. So, there’s a real benefit to using management software, in general, to help balance the many spinning plates that are your short rentals.
Multi-Calendar for Bookings
With the multi-calendar aspect of the software, you’re able to collect all the bookings from your website and any other sites where you advertise your rental, like Airbnb or Booking.com, for example.
These are all available from a central dashboard, meaning you can check for double bookings and accept reservations in a more simplified system. It also means less chance of a human error being caused when booking the exact dates or rentals twice.
Manage Your Teams and Tasks
With this software, you can also manage any team members that are part of the organization and delegate tasks where necessary. It’s essential to keep all your staff happy and ensure that everyone is doing their fair share.
Therefore, a more organized and managed system for monitoring your team will provide you the most out of the working day.
Simplify Guest Communications
Communicating with your guests is essential because the services as a short rental don’t just end as soon as the customers have checked in. So, you want to be in regular communication with the guests, even if a lot of it is automated.
Means of communication can be email and SMS, which can be drafted and sent out via this management software. However, providing round-the-clock support can be challenging to maintain, so that’s where automation can be helpful.
Collate Your Finances
Of course, any business, when it comes to their finances, is one area that needs your full attention. Luckily, Lodgify allows the user to keep better control of any payments on the statements.
Having this data can ensure all payments have been made and the relevant expenses have also been registered, which comes in handy when chasing payments.
Deal with Reservations Remotely
One of the best things about technology nowadays is that much software today can be worked with remotely. Working remotely means that as a short rental business owner, you can manage reservations on the go, rather than having to be in an office all the time.
In addition, total freedom to access your dashboard with just a WIFI connection is undoubtedly handy.
Perkbox for Employee Benefits
Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 41% of employees are happy most of the time at work. While this might be down to many factors, one of the common issues with businesses is how well they look after their staff.
Furthermore, it’s important to remember that your staff is helping keep the business afloat, and without them, you probably wouldn’t have gotten quite as far or been as successful as the company is now. So, it’s good to reward your staff and to offer them benefits that will encourage them to stay.
By reducing your staff retention rates, you save yourself a lot of time, hassle, and, most importantly, money to recruit those individuals. In addition, Perkbox is software that helps give your employees the best benefit scheme available. It not only enhances your employee’s experience but it offers flexible benefits that can adapt from one staff member to the next.
Moreover, Perkbox has found that a staggering 75% are more likely to stay with their employer due to the employee benefits package they receive. So, if you don’t have an employee benefits scheme in place that quite matches up to what this platform offers, then it’s certainly time to consider it.
Help Your Employees Stay Healthy
Encouraging your employees to stay healthy is good for business because the fewer sick days your staff have, the more productive the company can be in general.
This software offers access to packages that include free access to workout videos from qualified trainers and discounts on various fitness apparel. There are also discounts on gym membership, whether that’s Gym Box to Virgin Active.
Provide Financial Support and Wellbeing
With financial support and wellbeing having a significant impact on an employee’s happiness, there are also plenty of options available through Perkbox, such as free weekly treats from places like Greggs and Caffe Nero to lighten the load off their wallets!
Entertainment and Emotional Wellbeing
There’s plenty of shopping discounts with companies in fashion, sports, and technology for entertainment and emotional well-being. However, an employee’s mental wellbeing can be detrimental to the business if it’s not appropriately managed and remains inadequate for that individual.
Therefore, Perkbox has plenty of package benefits, such as unlimited access to a free 24/7 confidential helpline and free sessions with qualified therapists, to name a few.
There’s a lot of responsibility as a business owner to keep your staff happy in their job and feeling valued in general, and Perkbox is a great software that can help make that happen.
A SaaS Knowledge Base for Customers and Clients
Managing everything at once is complex, and many of your customer agents might find themselves providing the same answers to questions that potential customers are asking. Therefore, there’s a need for a shared knowledge base within any business used by internal staff and a public domain for your customers.
Document 360 is a great one for storing all the relevant and helpful information for your staff to manage and access from a central location. In addition, this can allow a knowledge base to be built for the business so that when onboarding new staff or finding the answers to questions that the team doesn’t know, it can be found easily through this software.
For customers, it’s an excellent opportunity to look for the answers to questions they might have and not get the solutions. This may be during out-of-office hours when a potential lead has come onto your vacation rental site to book potentially. Having a knowledge base that’s made publicly available can help convert some of those leads into sales.
With this SaaS knowledge base, it’s already powering some big businesses like Microsoft and Stackify. Document 360 can help tailor the knowledge base to fit the needs of your short rental company, and it offers a free trial for those that would benefit from one.
Any business can benefit from implementing specific software into their business processes, so make sure that you focus on doing the same for your short rental properties this year. Regardless of how many you own, it can be great to have software that can help manage them easily.