Short-stay satisfaction: how to make a short-stay property work for you

If you own an investment property in a tourism area you may be able to earn a better return if you rent it out as a short-stay holiday property rather than a permanent letting.

Certainly this has been the experience of Janet Field, who owns a rental house adjoining her own home in the West Australian seaside resort of Busselton.

She reckons she has more than doubled the revenue from Blue Waters Beach House since she furnished it and offered it as family holiday accommodation at the start of this year.

Of course her expenses have also risen as she now has to cover cleaning, electricity and maintenance of furniture and fittings.

The move was partly triggered by a lack of tenants, courtesy of the global financial crisis, after the property had been permanently let for three years.

As well as extra money the venture has also brought Janet and her family much satisfaction, as many of the holidaymakers are very appreciative and give positive feedback.

To get her holiday let business up and running Janet signed up with www.stayz.com.au, which boasts over 25,000 listed properties and an average 600,000 visitors each month.

“Stayz has been fantastic – they have an easy-to-use system which helps me manage my business,” says Janet, who has built her own website, www.bluewaters-beachhouse.com and uses social networking sites such as Twitter to further market her property.

To list your property on Stayz you pay an annual listing fee of $164 plus a nightly booking fee of $13.90 or 10%, whichever is cheapest.

You have complete control over your own listing and customer support is also available, says Kirsty Shaw, Stayz general manager.

You access your listings through your login to the owner administration system. Undoubtedly your holiday letting business will do better if you display your property in the best possible way.

Shaw has the following tips for success:

1. Use the best photos available. Remember, the images on a listing can make or break an inquiry coming through to you.
2. Sell the benefits of staying at your property, including the kind of people it suits, its location and things to do in the area.
3. Make sure your calendar is up to date – it’s frustrating for customers if they can’t check availability. They may well decide to look elsewhere.

Other similar sites charge differently. For example, listing on www.takeabreak.com.au does not incur upfront fees, but it does charge a success fee of 10% for each booking after guests have stayed and paid.

This site has over 12,000 property listings and receives over 350,000 visitors a month. At www.holidayrentals.com.au you can get a 60-day free trial listing to test the site’s effectiveness.

Then you can choose from four different listing levels costing between $44 and $121 a year, or you can opt for a free listing but pay an $11 per night booking fee.

Check out other sites on either Google or Bing. From a tax point, if your holiday property is available for commercial rental all year round, and is actively marketed as such, you should be able to claim all the deductions you would for any rental property. (see www.ato.gov.au for more information).

It you want to partly use your property for your own vacations, you cannot claim deductions for any expenditure incurred in the periods when the property was not available for commercial lease.