Sunday 29 March 2015

Quick update

Just noticed it has been 3 months since my last post and I haven't posted anything this year yet. The reason is a combination of still being busy with the apartment and not having much worthy of reporting. The apartment is going well and I have visited several times this year, staying between 3 and 5 days each time. Most visits have been combined with arranged meetings with potential holiday letting agents. Finding a suitable agent has proved difficult as 90% of them only deal with the marketing and bookings aspects, but they don't manage the guest handovers, laundry and cleaning. This requires a locally based company who can be hands on. But these tend to be in smaller and hence don't appear on search engines. So I decided on a combination of both approaches. I found a small, local company who will manage everything from bookings onwards and I signed up on my last visit. But although they have an existing client base, I doubt that considering it's already the end of March, we will get many bookings without some extra help. So I found a specialist disabled holiday agency which featured prominently on google and negotiated  a reduced rate. Obviously it's not ideal having two companies taking cuts, but the combined commission is only a percent or two above many other agency's commission for doing a lot less. I also put a booking system on the website and created a pay per click campaign on google using Adwords. So I will see which route generates the most (or any) business. I was back there last week to meet the electrician to get the property electrically certified for renting.  http://www.brackleshambreaks.com/