One of the growing trends in the vacation market today is the renting of real homes by families and groups, who are tending to prefer this option to hotels. Vacationers are quickly discovering the intimacy that can be enjoyed by all sharing the same home, plus the economy of being able to prepare meals at home, over eating out for three meals a day, to be preferable to the traditional hotel vacation.For all of the reasons that you enjoy your second home, others would be happy to pay you a surprisingly large sum for the privilege of doing so as well.If you are fortunate enough to own a second home or are considering buying one, why not allow others to stay when you are not there? Even Prince Charles rents out many of his extra homes.It is surprisingly easy to have your home on the vacation rental market, after you have mastered the ability to market your home, sell to clients and run your home from a distance. You can even delegate to another member of your family, one of your personal staff or a friend, to run the business for you.The advantages of turning your home into an income producing property are:You can continue to enjoy your home for your own vacations,
You can have your advertising up and running in about 24 hours, if you jump on it, and be making sales and bringing in money in well less than a week from the beginning of your advertising campaign,
The income you make can cover some, most or all of your yearly expenses in running the home,
You are not tied to only going to your property during your time off, as you can profitably rent it out to another and then enjoy a completely different vacation,
Because the home has to be kept up for your paying clients, when you go on vacation, you will have relatively little catching up to do on the maintenance of the property, so can just enjoy your time off,
As the years go on, you will find yourself becoming better and better at managing your property and it will become more and more profitable and
When you eventually do sell your property, it will be worth more, as it is indeed a business.I personally find it very satisfying to have turned my own second home into a business that allows others to also enjoy it. Many of my clients find that once they get over the idea of not wanting strangers in their home (and it is not hard to arrange things so that the invasion is minimal) that they can better afford to keep their homes, which have now become an investment, instead of a financial drain.There are many tricks of the trade, like how to quickly screen your guests, how to ensure that the home is always perfectly cleaned, maintained and relatively inexpensively at that, as well as details like how to get paid, what to do about deposits and taxes and what to charge, but once learned, your home can be smoothly run, just like any other business.