Four Proven Reasons Why Your Short-term Rental Needs a Property Website
Not only are we spelling out the why, we also provide you with a customized service to build your property a powerful website. Here are a few reasons, beyond the bottom line, why it’s advantageous to have a custom property website for your short-term or long-term rental property:
Reason #1: Conquer those conversions
For our purposes, conversions mean the number of people who actually book your residence vs the total number of people who view your residence. Do you know what is and isn’t working with regards to conversions? Do you have access to analytics to account for the reasons people aren’t booking your listing? Is your listing competitive with other properties? Do guests get discouraged because of added fees by third-party booking sites?
With a customized property website and effective integration of Google Analytics, you can answer ‘yes’ to these vital questions. Our custom websites are designed for short-term rental owners and property management companies, and offer critical tools that are built in so you have access to real-time data and can analyze and adjust your listing accordingly.
Reason #2: Tell your story
Feature dumping about your property is just so transactional. Sure, it’s nice to know what amenities a property may have, but renters want to know how the property feels. Standard platforms like Airbnb and VRBO are limiting; you’re only permitted to create a plain text page in a standardized format to attempt to make your property stand out. Within the confines of these templates, it’s tough to articulate your property’s benefits without design appeal. Sure, you know your level of service and amenities but are potential renters realizing it? Information gets lost. Third-party platforms are minimize YOUR story! Why limit your property description to a little box and numerous lists? With a customized property website, you can artfully and creatively relay the story, benefits and services you offer– and through your words and images better connect with your guests and remove any of the middle-man challenges that are abundant with OTAs. In other words—the renters become your direct customer and you can potentially kick those third party rules and fees to the curb.
Reason #3: Drive traffic to your own custom website
While we don’t love the staunch format of OTAs and third-party vacation rental sites, they do offer some benefits. The main one is that they’re a fantastic marketing platform. Today’s traveler is seeking a dream, a totally unique experience though. They love to surf the web and discover the next “perfect place” to land for their inevitable adventure. So, third-party rental sites can be helpful for property visibility, but the savvy traveler will often dig deeper, attempting to find out more about your enticing property, and once they land on your website there’s a good chance they’ll book directly with you.
Reason #4: All-in-one customization
Your customized website will be your one-stop property marketing central. Unlike with OTAs, you get to tell your property’s story. The clean, modern site includes features and functions that streamline the rental process and you can add features like property video, 3D tours, interactive calendars, custom branding, customize fonts and colors, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), insightful analytics and even story-telling blog content. Don’t just rent your property, elevate your property into a brand.
One of the biggest advantages of your site is the ability to have renters book their stay directly through you. It’s easy to seamlessly incorporate booking capabilities like BH Pay (coming soon), which only adds applicable state taxes to a guest’s reservation total, avoiding 3rd party add-on fees payable by your guest.
We can, in as little as a week, have your website built, launched and ready for direct bookings. Sound intriguing? Contact us at gerda@boutiquehost.com, we are ready to help your property work for you.