Mark AdamsNo matter how appealing your villa is, it is how it is packaged and marketed that really catches the eye and captures the imagination. From the design details to the spectacular location, your villa may be catwalk-ready to parade in front of the luxury villa rental market, but you still need to strut your stuff. Here are some smart tips on how to position your villa to come out a winner in the marketing department.
Single-Family Location
For the best positioning in the luxury villa rental market you need to be located in a high-profile location. Whether you live in an exclusive neighbourhood like Hyde Park, are on a posh beach, or have an intriguing village nearby (think Notting Hill or Hampstead), a single-family location will give your villa a better cast of characters. Wherever you choose to set up shop, stick to the middle of the road if you have to while your property is still young, and if you do decide to spread out, ensure the main thoroughfare offers easy access for everyone involved.
High Quality Construction
It is important to manufacture a high-quality construction if you are going to make it into a brand. Think about using the odd French-style building with a French garden (think of the Louis XVI, but with a bit of Jason Wu) for your villa, or think about the most luxurious model manufactured in a country like Italy, and you will have a property that looks and feels like it’s genuine.
Luxury Location
Your in-tow visitors are already sure of what they are going to get when renting your villa. However, this is solely because they have selected you from among the thousands of villa rental agents currently working the market. From a marketing perspective, you need to position your villa as having the best location. If you have a pool and gardens (loungers-only) and a few surrounding houses then you have the best package in place. However, if you have a newer villa, then make it look more like it’s about to blow up (unless that is what you are really all about) and position it in the most high-profile area. Do not position yourself in a area where, if something goes wrong (a band that plays at a party next door) your villa will take a beating.
Walling Gardens
These are always a great choice, offering seclusion and privacy, plus if you are offering food and drink there, it can boost your villa rental’s visibility well away from your hotel house guests.
Older Villa Location
This is a method that has become quite popular for villa rental agents in recent times, and although it may have been there for a while, just because people haven’t been to it for a while, doesn’t mean it’s out of fashion. In this instance you would have to be very careful about where you position yourself. As with any high-quality construction, you do not want to risk anything below par looking unkempt.
A Second Family
With this method you may have to stretch yourself a little, but if you want the best villa rental opportunities it does come in handy. The main benefits are that as your villa is located somewhere quite desirable, because your villa is only for rental, you can distance yourself from most of the non-rental guests. In this case you can also be very creative and choose a villa located in a building that is closed to the world. This will mean you can maintain the privacy and place off surrounding properties as you determine what service you will offer to potential poolside and garden guests.
Get Organised
When you start to market your villa to potential guests, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to book and arrange all the meetings and invites. What’s more, if this is your first time out on the town when it comes to renting your villa, it is important to make every effort to make it as easy as possible for guests to book and arrange their preferred dates. This means you need to have a digital marketing strategy that leverages all the online services you can get your hands on and ensures that as many avenues as possible are covered.
Get Creative
In addition to having a digital marketing strategy that allows you to manage the booking process, you also need to include creative items and feel into your offers. Fruit baskets are always a nice touch, and a bouquet of fresh flowers is a great way to lighten the stress levels of the person receiving the flowers. The more creative you can be, the greater the chance that you can catch the eye of your prospective guests.
Give It a Try
Whilst you do have to be very careful about how you position your villa in relation to the marketplace, you do need to have some products to offer your potential customers. It is important for you to have a website off which you can offer your guests a virtual tour of your villa. Some are covered through your digital marketing strategy, however, you will need to ensure that you also have a separate website offering additional features and upgrades that you are able to offer to your guests.
Get on the Ball
Now you want to start thinking about the money that you will need to cover your property and operating costs. You need to cost this carefully and work out all the details. You can use a real estate agent to help you cover these sorts of things if you like, but remember to keep the costs under control, you don’t want your villa to empty out before you’ve even opened your doors.
Create a brand
Your villa is the main attraction of your business, and your brand will work in tandem with it. You need to put yourself behind your brand as a whole, a villa rental agent, before you get into the position of operating a business. Your brand needs to be set up to be a franchise type service, and you need to engender the opportunity for others to get involved so that someone else other can pick up the business where you leave out.
What To Avoid When You Are Done
At the end of this article we have given a nod to the reality of why you should need the help of a professional agent to market your villa. This may be at least partially so that you can avoid falling into the trap of making mistakes that can have major repercussions when it comes to your villa rental business. For the full list of mistakes that you should avoid, we suggest that you read the following:
Avoid being Too Cheap
If you are to offer your guests the highest quality villa that you are fortunate enough to own, then you must not give a lesser quality villa as this could have serious implications when it comes to attracting customers. For example in the case of a villa that is a holiday let and which does not have a full set of amenities, you may get guests who are only interested in the photos and prefer someone who can show them rather than having to look around for themselves.
Avoid Being Too Aggressive
When you are out on the market trying to rent your villa, you need to make sure that you do not become too pushy with guests. It’s great to surprise people, but you also need to show them that you can offer more than they might expect to find.
Avoid Not Charging Enough
It is important to set a fee that is as good as you can provide, however, if you are to operate in the long term, you will need to think about how each minute of your time is worth. It may be that you are providing a team of villa cleaners and a chef that will be using your villa and they are for the ground. What is more, they will be using the property at a time that you specify, between 9am – 5pm if that is the case. If you are only renting your villa out for five days, you may be able to leave it very late on Friday and Sunday for the cleaners and chef to use it at their specific time. However, when you are only renting for only two or three days a week, then you may have to adjust your fees to attract other business.
Avoid Being Too Organised
When you are out on the market, you want to show your guests that the villa comes with all the wherewithal that it needs to be a wonderful stay. You also want to show them that you have thought through the whole process and it does not feel as if you are doing their legwork for them. It is important to be able to effectively communicate the information in an easy and concise manner.
Avoid Being Too Pleasant
You need to ensure that you do not overly engage with your prospective guest and let them get away with things such as being a bit rude or not being wishy-washy. What you want to do is to make sure that your guests get a perfect experience when it comes to booking your villa and they love the experience. You want it to feel like an offering rather than an obligation, and your guests are most likely to want to rent your villa if they feel as if they are getting the best deal they could get out there.
Avoid Being A Little Too Persuasive
There are ways in which you can be persuasively when it comes to your villa rental business, but it is important that you do not go too far with them. It can be great to have the ability to have been able to get people to book ahead of time, but it is important to be able to manage this and not push people too far. You want to be able to have a Villa Rental Agent who is effective at this, and they need to know how to show your properties to the best advantages.
Avoid Unnecessary Helicopter Arrivals
If you are going to have helicopters landing within 15 minutes of the villa being booked, it’s likely that it will be for guests that are more affluent than others. This is going to cause issues on your booking rates again, and it is going to also mean that you may not be able to even get enough to cover your operating costs with these guests. It is, therefore, important that you have a reasonable time frame for arrivals of helicopters that are closer to your villa.
Avoid Not Collecting the Money
You will need to have a business bank account set up already if your guest is to pay their funds into the account. There is no point in having a guest that you have also paid only to have them delaying paying until the last minute.
Avoid Researching Your Guests
When you are building your business of Villa , you need to make a database of the guests that you have shown your villa to, and you also need to store these details. What you want to do is ensure that you have these details and that they are correct. What you need to be able to do is record their details, their intentions for booking and the reasons that they booked your villa. This will let you know whether you have succeeded with your business venture, and if you are able to further the business in the future, it will also help you to grow it.
Now that you are done reading this book, you should have a pretty good idea of what it takes to be a successful Villa and what to avoid at all costs. We have outlined the problems and pitfalls below for you in the hope that you will have avoided some of the above mentioned mistakes.
Contractor Neglect
This is an issue that can be avoided by simply having someone skilled who can repair the property if it does not work well. For example, if you are renting out a villa that needs some repair work or some renovation, you will want to have a qualified contractor that can rectify this situation for you. You will also want to do the groundwork necessary to have the repairs completed as quickly as possible. It’s easy to look back and feel that the work you did was an afterthought only because of your contractor’s negligence.
Sometimes you will want to rent a villa on the basis that it’s not all that beautiful. You may have rented another villa in the past where it’s been fully refurbished and it had been incredible, so that is what you will want to replicate here. That will require that you have someone to work on the property. Do your research to find a good contractor that is well-known for doing the job you want:
You need to look at various contractors and compare their quotes – you want to use a contractor that charges a reasonable price, but you also want someone that you can trust as well. When decorating, you want to get someone with experience to compliment your desire for an authentic, comfortable setting. You also want to make sure that they are anything but cheap.
You also want to get references from previous clients, and ask to see testimonials from them. If a contractor has a lot of testimonials, then this could be a good sign that they are a good contractor who has a good reputation. You need to use your verification from previous clients as a filtering device. In addition to the testimonials, the references and testimonials from previous customers should give you a good idea of whether the contractor is a good choice for your villa.
Do’s and Dont’s?
PROPERTY surveys and first time buyers :
While we know that your buyers are more likely to look at the property prior to purchasing, it is also very sensible to have a professional survey of the property completed prior to renting it out. This will give you a much better idea of the overall condition of the property and the overall costs involved in restoration or the alternative options of selling the property when you return from holiday. A professional surveyor will be able to access the entire inside of the property, look at the structural integrity of the property as well as the exterior condition of the house. If the house is made of wooden frame, the surveyor will be able to give an estimate of the cost of replacement and restoration of that wooden frame. Naturally, this information will help you make a much better decision on what you wish to do if the villa is to be scrapped in the near future.
SUPER vision :
It is a good idea to have someone oversee the restoration or renovation that you have initiated and will be left. This person ought to be someone who has the authority to complete any, and all repairs that need to be done if the previous tenant was someone who was not up to date with maintenance or repairs and is left behind. It’s also a good idea to select a manager and then rotate all of the work from them and then assign the job to the title of CADRE Keep the restoration project on track, and make sure to get the work done on time. If the previous tenant is unable to finish the work, having the help of another, experienced person to assist you will make all the difference.
Schedule out the work :
As stated by the previous example in the SUPERvision section, you should already have worked out a timetable for the return of the person that was renting the villa. If it’s a renovation that was not as planned, the surveyor should be able to give a clear indication as to what is done and what remains to be done. It is also wise to set out time allowance for the repairs of the construction, materials, fixtures or furnishings and the garden.
Make sure you have all of the papers for the house or home :
When you look at renting a villa abroad, you will need to have all the papers for this property. This will include Emergency contact details and a copy of your passport. It is a wise idea to copy all of these documents for their house of own home, these will need to be displayed in the villa for rented purposes. This is a simple guarantee that an action will be taken if something is not in order.
Pleasure and Cleanliness of the villa :
You should of course look at the property for comfort and convenience in terms of size and aesthetic appeal. You need to look at the access to the house to see how it is laid out as well, the location of the villa and the neighbourhood of the villa. Once you have decided on the villa and you are prepared to rent it out, you will need to then move forward with the necessary preparation.
Make sure you have all of the necessary insurance for your property and insurance details in print . You also need to look at any deposit and contact details for any of the facilities that are in the house such as a pool, wifi and phone. If you require a second phone line in the house, for example, you need to look into those details. If you are renting a villa during a pre-booked period, you will need to ensure that you have a copy of the rental contract.
Let us take a look at the villa’s layout and the surroundings that the villa is in. You will want to take a look at the views over the property and the neighbourhood that is close by. There are certain off-street parking facilities for the entrance to the house, but you should also take a measure of the public parking facilities, including whether there is private parking close by, if there is, then you might want to ensure that you deal with that parking for your intending tenants.
The villa itself will have some areas that will need repairs, such as the roof, tiles and possibly some of the walls. It is known that many people need to renovate their homes before relocating. If you decide to go this route, you need to be sure that you set the right oral or written agreement with reference to any renovations to be done to the property. If the villa or the property is to be sold, you need to have a clear cut document or agreement.
The timeline is also very important for you. You need to ensure that the property is advertised on the property for sale, and that you have your own solicitor into your book of reference. The solicitor you use should be experienced in selling real estate or renting out property. When you are ready to
