Is having a very nice rental home enough to guarantee a high occupancy rate?

Summary: It is sometimes difficult to get your vacation rental home noticed when there are other vacation rental homes in your market.

Anthony asked if having a “very nice” rental home is enough to guarantee a high occupancy rate.

The vacation rental market is first driven by supply and demand. If 100 guests visit your area in a weekend , but there are 300 rental homes, and half of them are “very nice,” it doesn’t matter how nice they are because 200 homes will still be vacant, even the “very nice” ones.

The vacation rental market in Orlando was adequately satisfied when there were 16,000 “very nice rentals” in 1999. 20,000 new homes have been built in Orlando in the past 2 years, and the number of “nice rentals” has increased by the thousands, as have the number of nice hotel rooms, nice condos and nice time-shares.

Unfortunately, increasing number of brand new “very nice rentals” and new rooms is far outpacing the slim annual increases in visitors to Central Florida. High occupancy is rare in our market because of oversaturation of rooms.
Also, in our market, if your nice vacation rental home isn’t within 10 minutes of the main attractions, it doesn’t matter how nice it is, it will be discounted or ignored by the majority of prospective renters.

I do have a constructive tip: An owner can often achieve better than average occupancy by effectively using advertising and listing to differentiate his rental property from the others. The key is to have incremental differences that will cause a guest to choose your property instead of the other “very nice” ones.

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