Topic: Rentability / Please can we have an idea of where our hits are coming from?

I have had very few hits through the website – wandering if there is any way to invcrease the response via “Rentability” website

Topic: Rentability / Same country holidays

Not such a good idea for people who let in a foreign country as I do, and cannot converse with potential guests in their mother tongue.

Topic: Renting your property / Guests Profile

Is it possible to have a facility where guests can leave comments here?

Topic: Rentability / Please can we have an idea of where our hits are coming from?

How extraordinary! I would love to know HOW your hits are coming! We have had precisely 1 hit in the last 7 days on a total of 5 properties.

Topic: Rentability / Please can we have an idea of where our hits are coming from?

We have had an amazing number of hits on our page this week, can you tell us which country/countries are checking out our ad, nobody is enquiring, but they are certainly looking!

Topic: Property Owner / Advertiser FAQs / Password

Hi Paul – To change your account password you need to ‘Login’ – which takes you to your ‘Dashboard’ page. On the ‘Dashboard’ page there is a button / link that reads ‘Edit profile’. This is where you can see and change all your personal account information.

Type your new password in the ‘Password’ field and the ‘Retype password’ field then click ’ Update password’.

If you have forgotten your password, when you ‘Login’ there is a button / link next to where you type your password in that says ‘I’ve forgotten my password’. Click this and it’s resent to your email account.

Topic: Property Owner / Advertiser FAQs / Password

How do I change my password?

Topic: Renting your property / Guests Profile

It sounds like a very good idea.

Topic: Rentability / Same country holidays

Not such a good idea for some of us renting in countries other than our own. For instance, we live and rent in Italy, but don’t especailly cater to the Italian market, nor do we especially want to, thus we wouldn’t benefit from this new idea.

Topic: Rentability / Same country holidays

Great idea to encourage us all to be environmentally freindly – everyones at it. Alistair sawday is about to publish a guide to green places to stay. We are going to re cast our profile accordingly and have all sorts of initiatives. Would welcome a sort based on a ‘green’ score . However, I agree with Margaret, your main client base relies on people travelling abroad – I wouldnt go for the ‘holiday at home’ route if you want to keep us!

Topic: Rentability / House swaps

That is a very crowded market, as is the rental one. We have been letting our gites successfully for 7 years, this spring we decided to visit our son in Sydney. With a big property and lots of animals we cant just shut up shop and have, in the past, managed to get previous guests to house sit when we want to go away off season. This Jan Feb we couldnt find anyone and eventually I tried housesitting and houseswapping sites. There are lots of sites most of which charge an entry fee, not seen any that charge per enquiry – I actually dont think that model would work. I had upwards of 200 offers to sit and probably 80 or so to swap from all over the world. I still do. OK our place is a very spectacular place to spend time but there are a lot of people out there wanting to do this and you have to do a lot of filtering and shortlisting. You would pay a fortune if you paid per enquiry. Your ‘cap’ would work but might reduce your income.

We successfully set up an 8 week  swap with  our  7 bed huge property for a 2 bed flat in central Sydney - absolutely perfect.  All went perfectly  and we would certainly do it again.

Now plus side you get a holiday where the only cost is travel, you get a house sitter, you get free car use ( sometimes a boat too). You are in a house not a hotel.

Minus side – there is a risk – will they trash your place and will their place be what you expect. If you are setting up a ‘site’ you need to deal with these. Some sites offer a suggested contract and recommend a ‘bond’ deposit – we didnt do either of those. Our years of assessing clients gives us a good feel ( and our son made contact) I would suggest something like tripadvisor or e bay where swappers are rated.

Bottom line I would and will swap again. I would certainly use your site. However there are lots of places to look just google it! – Perhaps your cap idea would be a good one – you certainly couldnt do it open ended. Im sure you will trawl ther opposition.

Good luck Tim

Topic: Rentability / Last minute availability campaigns

I like your specials/campaign idea. As you know cost is an issue to everyone. In one respect I feel our last minute discount will generate more inquiries which produces more income for the site, as you’re paid by inquiry. Any way the site can generate more interest the more income it produces. My conversion rate from inquiry to booking is currently running about 17% (this includes only inquiries I can accommodate, so if I’m already booked, those aren’t included). Sometimes it takes a lot of inquiries before I see a booking. I really like your site and I’m hoping it’s continues to grow and become more successful. Your new and ever changing ideas are to be commended.

Topic: Renting your property / Guests Profile

Yes, that sounds like a great idea!

Topic: Renting your property / Guests Profile

Hi Margret, We recently slightly updated the statistics display for our agency customers, but there hasn’t been a lot of movement on this front otherwise (though I did fix the Carribean maps!). Our current focus is very much on improving our “front end” features at the moment in order to increase conversion rates and traffic for our property owners. When we’re a bit more satisfied with that we’ll probably come back and start adding more statistics etc. for our property owners.

BTW – one little trick that we did think might be useful, and which might get included in the curret front-end revamp, was an automatic “main image optimiser” – often people have several images that could be used as their main image. The Main Image for your property is crucially important, because it has to capture a visitors attention and get them to look at your property in more detail. The idea was that our system would allow you to choose several possible main images, and we would rotate these images on the site and gather statistics about which was most effective in brining in visitors. Sound like a good idea ?

Topic: Renting your property / Guests Profile

Is there any up to date information on this subject?

Topic: Rentability / Addition to features list

Absolutely.

There’s actually a “suggest a feature” link on the features page, and we periodically go through the list and add any features people have requested.

Topic: Rentability / Addition to features list

Would it be possible to add the possibility of specifying either heated or unheated pools to your features list? You already offer shared/private, just wondered if you could extend on this.

Topic: Rentability / Same country holidays

I think this is a great idea. We are in the process of having our carbon footprint calculated (if that is the right word). We are also pushing to get people to use the train for the journey from the UK to Bavaria. I would rather see that encouraged than trying to encourage people to holiday in their own country, which would, after all be counterproductive for most of us!

Topic: Rentability / internet search

Many thanks for that Josh.

Caz

Topic: Rentability / internet search

Hi Caz, I’m not sure whether you mean in the “ads” section of the Google results page or the real “organic results” section, so I’ll try to answer both questions as well as I can.

We probably aren’t showing up at the moment in the paid ads section for those terms (the column of links down the right hand side of Google’s search results page) because we are in the middle of a transition in our marketing strategy with Google ads. If you’d checked a week or two ago you would have generally found us one of the top three advertisements for those terms, but we are currently developing and testing a new system which will make our pay-per-click marketing much, much more effective. Very few travellers actually search for such a broad term as “holiday rental” – they are usually much more specific about what they want and our new system is designed to leverage this. Developing the new system involves working with Google to connect directly to their server systems and it’s is rather complex – I admit it’s taking us a bit longer than we expected to get this online. We are improving the system though and hope to have something working soon. It’s unlikely that you will ever find us marketing very heavily using such very broad terms, though even now when I did a test search for the terms “vacation rental listings” we were second in the ads.

Organic search results are the main “real” results that appear when you do a search. Again, you are very unlikely to find us listed using very broad searches, but if you try more targeted and realistic terms we do a bit better. I just tried affordable disney villa , for instance, and we are second in the returned results, for holiday home advertising we’re fourth. It’s worth bearing in mind that we have only been open to the public for a few months, and achieving high organic search rankings is something that unavoidably takes time. Nonetheless one of our main focusses at the moment is improving our organic search positioning and we expect it to greatly improve over the next six months.

Our strategy, like everything else we do, is to try to re-think how search optimisation should be done. It’s no secret that in terms of capitalisation, we are a small mouse in comparison to the giant lumbering cow of our major competitor. There is no way we can compete in spending power with the $160 million of investment that HomeAway have. Our advantage is that HomeAway are using their money to attempt to maintain the status quo in the industry, whereas we are trying to change things. They have to maintain their enormously high prices in order to justify their investment – we looked at their standard business model and realised there was a better, fairer way. They have paid large sums of money for businesses with very outdated technological foundations – we are able to move very quickly to build technical innovations that they simply can’t match. Take a look at our new page layout system (see here or here for examples) – we think our system allows our customers to make the best looking advertisements in the industry – light years ahead of anything from the mainstream competitors. We are now planning to bring the same technical agility to bear on the problem of optimising our search results. I wish I could tell you what kinds of things we are planning, but I’m sure you’ll understand why we have to keep these things secret from our competitors for the time being.

Topic: Rentability / internet search

Why can I not find rentability.com when I do a search on either Google or Yahoo. I have tried a number of different terms – holiday rental, holiday rental world wide, holiday homes etc.

Topic: Rentability / Problem with embedding the enquiry form

Hi Simon, This was an error that occurred briefly for some users with a recent update to the site. The bug has been fixed now. Thanks for pointing this out – By the way, if you have bug reports such as this it’s much quicker to send them to “support@rentability.com” – we get thm directly thaen and will generally act on them much faster than postings to the forum. We usually try to fix serious bugs like this within a few hours of the report.

Topic: Rentability / Last minute availability campaigns

Thanks for your comments Simon and I understand your concern about the pricing involved – considering that as you say, you’re already taking a hit on your expected revenue for that period…. just had a thought for a 3rd tariff method – instead of charging a flat rate for a year, or a flat rate for a ‘campaign’, we could say that you pay a slightly higher rate per enquiry for that period – although on reflection this idea sounds allot more complicated to implement, for example you may receive enquiries for different periods within a campaign period etc.

It would be allot cleaner if it worked on a per campaign basis I think – let’s say for arguments sake 2 credits (about $6) per campaign. Presumably it wouldn’t be every week or month that you ran a campaign as you would be getting your normal bookings for most of the year, but at least you have the option.

I think it’s allot cheaper than some existing sites, for example holiday-rentals.co.uk, part of the homeaway group, who charge an impressive £25+vat (that’s $50+) for a 2 week campaign… our main problem could be that, if it’s this price, we may create a culture of ‘Late deals’ where advertisers use it as a matter of course, manipulating their tariffs to absorb the difference (but I’m sure not our discerning advertisers : )...

Topic: Rentability / Last minute availability campaigns

This sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Whether others opt in or out of the campaign is up to them, so you really can’t lose with this idea. I don’t know how much I would be prepared to pay for the service though—if I’m already offering a discount against my normal rates, then I feel that I’m already paying to some extent!

Topic: Rentability / Problem with embedding the enquiry form

Hi,

I’ve been trying to embed the Rentability enquiry form into my website, but whatever I try I can’t make it give any feedback to the user when the “Submit enquiry” button is pressed. Without any feedback, the user goes to the trouble of completing the form, presses the “Submit” button and … nothing happens. Actually, the enquiry does get posted and an email does get sent, but nothing SEEMS to have happened. This makes the user feel like he/she has wasted his/her time. Looking at the Rentability javascript it seems like there should be a “your enquiry has been posted” message, but for some reason it doesn’t appear.

I’m using IE7.0 on Windows XP, which reports “Errors on page” when the submit button is pressed.