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Self Catering – 10 Steps to manage Guest

Lenore & Janet — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:38:01 +0000

While many landlords are very familiar with advertising for long term tenants; Self Catering and holiday apartments attract a different set of requirements. The Self Catering Landlord need not worry about Deposit Tenancy Schemes or landlord licensing; however they do need to become familiar with advertising and marketing your accommodation; and how to allow entry and exit. Guest can require accommodation from anything from a few days to a few months – all situations need to be catered for.

Self Catering – 10 steps to guest management

Here is a set of steps that a self catering landlord should follow to help ease the workload involved.

Advertise (this will be a blog in its own right; and important for the success of your investment
Pricing the self catering accommodation
Guests Book Accommodation
Organise to meet Guest for their arrival
Guest Arrives – Meet & Greet
Take Damages Deposit
Guest sign Ts & Cs
Guest Departs
Prepare apartment for next set of guests
Refund Damages Deposit

As I noted I will discuss forms advertising in a blog on its own, however, suffice to say that you may have the most wonderful self catering apartment, but if no one can find it you won’t get any bookings. As a self catering landlord it is important to ensure that your property is advertised and its photos help make the final sale.

Pricing your accommodation is a very important task. Firstly you should compare the market, find other similar holiday/self catering apartments in your area. See how they are priced, and see how well they are booked. If you have an apartment in London you should be aiming for 70% capacity. For self catering letting, the overheads for running the apartment and changing over between guests is high – so you will need to consider this cost when setting prices. Most landlords have a minimum stay period – as a changeover is expensive, so there is no point in letting a property for 1 night – as you would probably not take home any profit from a 1 night stay. Most self catering properties have a min. of a 3-4 nights stay, while it is not uncommon to ask for a 1 week stay. Again, I will discuss pricing in another blog, as there are several more points to consider.

Once a guest decides to book your property, you will need to have a process in hand to document this booking. You will need to take a deposit (non-refundable); and schedule in the arrival and departure. As it gets busy, you need to ensure that you don’t miss meeting a guest on their arrival, and also to ensure that you don’t do any ‘double bookings’ If you only have one property, you should easily be able to manage this with a simple spreadsheet. But if you own more than a few, it may get a bit more complicated, and you may want something a little more sophisticated.

Meeting and greeting guests is a nice personal touch – which is not always necessary. You do need to consider how the guests are going to receive the key for the property. If you are going to meet and greet the guest at the property – don’t forget to advertise this as one of your features. Damages Deposit (again a subject for another blog); but don’t forget to take one. In essence, the guests tend to take more care in your property when they know you are holding a damages deposit for them.

Terms and Conditions are a necessary component of Guest Registration in self catering. You may refer to a version or our terms and conditions which will give you some guidance as to what the guest is agreeing to. I would suggest that you modify them as per your requirements. The final 3 steps all involve letting the guest leave the self catering apartment, getting the apartment ready for the next set of guests, and the refund of the damages deposit.

To summarise, this is a brief set of guidelines on how to manage your guests. Please feel free to contact either Lenore or Janet at self-catering-online.com where we would be more than happy to help with any further advice you may need on these matters.

Self catering: less risk than long-term letting

Lenore & Janet — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:14:43 +0000

Janet recently ran a presentation in the Landlord Zone conference discussing the practicalities of using a flat for Self Catering vs Long-term letting, which was titled: Less Risk with Self Catering.
The conference was targeted to existing long-term let landlords or potential long-term let landlords, with the audience mostly disenchanted long-term let landlords looking for alternative ideas on generating income for their investment. Most of the participants had never considered the option of using a property as a ‘holiday let‘.

Benefits of short-term self-catering

Janet identified many of the pros regarding short-term letting. But perhaps the most popular points were down to two items:

No Assurred tenancy – tenant does not have rights to the property
Potential for earning more income

As many of the landlords at this presentation appeared to have been letting for quite some time, it was inevitable that many of the landlords had been through very difficult experiences with tenants. While looking at their pride and joy of an investment they would get frustrated watching it deteriorate, possibly with a tenant who refuses to pay their rent. Unfortunately, though this situation can be rare, it is difficult to rectify in a short period of time, leaving the landlord with no income on their investment and running the property at a loss.

Janet noted that with ‘holiday letting’ the guest is not granted the same rights as a tenant. As long as y9ou have provided the guest with a correct set of terms and conditions (and they have accepted them) the guest does no have any rights to the property. Also, with self catering letting the guest has paid in advance before arriving at the property. This eliminates the possiblity of not getting paid.

Coming next

In the next blog I will discuss the cycle guest management.

London landlords – short-term lets a great opportunity

Lenore & Janet — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:44:59 +0000

It is clear that there is a great opportunity for landlords in London to generate good income by providing short term lets in London. At the exhibition for Buy to Let Landlords in London we met property owners who had been doing this successfully for years, and others who were very interested in the opportunity.

We had an excellent day at the event; the presentation was well attended and generated lots of very interesting questions. Individuals were especially interested in having the flexibility of no six month commitment on their property and having full access themselves.

London holiday lets seminar

On Tuesday evening Janet will be giving an abridged version of the short-term lets presentation at a property seminar run by David Lawrenson, the well-known property expert and author. Have a look and we hope to see you there!

Finding Self catering Property in London

Lenore & Janet — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:44:10 +0000

We are going to London today to attend and present at a Landlord’s exhibition at Olympia.

Having successfully established our web-site in Edinburgh, we now have facilities to advertise London self-catering property. We’ve done lots of research and discovered that it is very difficult to find self-catering accommodation in London. Several guests in Edinburgh had mentioned how difficult it was in London, compared to Edinburgh, Paris Rome and other major cities – which we were quite surprised about.

I took my daughter and some friends to London last year and wanted a holiday let apartment. I discovered exactly what people meant. There were no dedicated web-sites. The only advertising sites were global sites – which are really geared up to provide information about Villas for beach type holidays on the Mediterranean or Caribbean. I had to send out lots of messages – most of which resulted in no reply. I just couldn’t search on availability, see details and prices and book with any confidence.

This was actually an even worse service than visitors to Edinburgh had before we set up. Hence us making London our latest destination.