Prospective Owners

Do you own a property in Marco Island or Naples?

Are you thinking about listing your property as a vacation or annual rental in Marco Island or Naples? Maybe you’re weighing the advantages of renting it out yourself versus using a rental company. Here are some considerations:

Renting it out yourself.

You can’t rent your property if people don’t know it exists. You need to go where the prospective guests are – online. When people search for Marco Island rentals or Naples rentals, it’s imperative that you appear on the first page of Google search results since only 6% of all people look beyond the first page.

You need to maintain a toll free telephone number and answer all inquiries immediately. You have to familiarize yourself with licensing and record keeping requirements as well as laws affecting the relationships between property owners and guests.

How do you determine what rate to charge? Ask for too much and your place will go unrented. Ask for too little and you’ll be shortchanging yourself.

When you do get a guest, you have to handle logistical issues, like getting them keys and coordinating the cleaning and quality checks prior to check in. In many cases, there’s only a small window of a few hours in between guests to perform these essential functions.

You also have to be prepared to respond to maintenance issues that inevitably arise. Guests demand immediate resolution to their concerns, so you’ll need ready access to service professionals who can handle problems with appliances, electricity, air conditioning and plumbing. Coordinating this is especially challenging for people who aren’t local residents.

Add up the marketing, logistics and customer service and you will realize that renting the property yourself requires a substantial investment of your time. Are you prepared to make that investment? That’s the key question you need to ask yourself.

Your second option is to work with a rental company like Marco Island Vacation Properties®.

What can Marco Island Vacation Properties® do for you?

We’ve been serving Marco Island and Naples since 1989, and we’re the number one non franchised real estate agency on Marco Island. We don’t say this to boast but simply because this kind of experience is an invaluable benefit to our property owners.

When prospective guests contact us, we can guide them through the entire process. Our office is fully staffed with receptionists and rental specialists with the experience to anticipate and answer questions immediately and who know what it takes to close a sale.

Our accountants are experts in local regulations who keep up to date in the ever-changing laws and ordinances affecting the owner/guest relationship.

We have over 35 years of experience on Marco Island and are leaders in this area. We are the most trusted and represent over $300,000,000 across 300+ listings.

We have partnered with NoiseAware allowing properties owners to sign up for this cutting edge technology. Short-term rentals aren’t noisy on their own. And most guests are great. But even the best guests can get too loud sometimes. And their volume can bother neighbors and lead to complaints and fines. Excessive noise is also the leading indicator that a party might be starting at your property. Privacy-safe noise monitoring gives our agency and property owner the insight into what’s happening at their property between check-in and check-out, and tools to resolve noise quickly. So we can fix vacation-rental noise problems before they lead to neighbor complaints, expensive fines, parties or property damage.

Our housekeeping department will get your place in top shape for each new renter. We perform thorough pre-arrival and post-departure inspections to make sure no detail was overlooked, from double-checking to see if the right linen’s are in the right bedroom all the way down to testing every last light bulb.

When we hand over the keys, our job is just beginning. No matter how up to date the property is, virtually all guests will contact us with questions. We have a 24/7 answering service to provide guests with immediate assistance. Oftentimes, the problem is nothing more complex than showing a guest the proper way to operate the hot tub, but our timely response makes the difference between a happy guest and a dissatisfied guest who complains about the experience in online comments that will be read by many prospective visitors in the future.

A happy guest is the most effective form of marketing.

It’s in part because of our responsiveness that we have so many guests who return to the same property year after year. If you scroll through our properties and read the guest comments, you’ll see they’re filled with praise for our team and how quickly we addressed their concerns. In over 50,000 reviews, we have an overall guest rating of 4.8 stars out of 5. This type of guest satisfaction not only creates customers for life, it’s also the most effective way of attracting new visitors.

We also aggressively market your property in high-traffic vacation sites, like VRBO, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, FlipKey, Booking.com, Expedia and many other places where visitors come in search of tropical vacation rentals. Our own site also appears as the first search result in Google for common key phrase searches, so prospective guests will be directed to your property through multiple channels. We hire professional stagers, photographers, and writers to showcase your property, but we never charge fees for any of our marketing efforts.

Recent studies show over 95% of all travelers prefer to book their trip directly through a website, so we offer convenient, easy-to-navigate 24/7 online booking services.

We’re part of the Marco Island community.

There is no way to overstate the importance of this. We live and work here every day. We’re members of the Marco Island Chamber of commerce. We’ve formed trusted bonds with people throughout the island. Our maintenance and cleaning vendors aren’t just names on a uniform. We know them all, probably know their families, too. So when your property needs a last minute cleaning or repair, we can count on our loyal vendors to take care of it promptly.

We have a conveniently located twelve-thousand square-foot office on Marco Island located at 847 Collier Boulevard (next to McDonald’s).

We’re also part of the online community.

This is where many prospective guests make their initial contacts and check our reputation. We’re active in the all the appropriate social media venues. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+, as well as local television ads and media like the Marco Eagle Newspaper and the Marco Review.

What sets Marco Island Vacation Properties® apart?

There are other rental companies on the island. Why entrust your property to us?

It’s not just our experience, though that’s very important. It’s the way we treat our guests that really makes us unique. We tell them they’re going have the vacation of a lifetime and by delivering on that promise we create loyal repeat guests and inspire new visitors. We don’t take our stellar customer satisfaction ratings for granted. We’re constantly looking for innovative ways to enhance the guest experience.

For instance, we developed an App that’s a true breakthrough in customer service. It gives guests all the information they need before, during, and after their stay. It features information like arrival instructions, directions to the property and tips on how to best enjoy all the amenities the property has to offer. It also gives recommendations on restaurants, events, activities and special attractions. If guests get lost, the App helps them locate the rental property using their phone’s GPS.

 We also developed a state-of-the-art texting service where our guests/property owners can communicate easily and conveniently with our friendly staff. They can also view all of the information they need before, during, and after their stay. Our texting service will also send friendly reminder messages to our guest for trash collection, noise ordinance, turtle season, and more!

These are just a few examples of what the App and texting service can do and just two examples of the many ways we deliver a superior guest experience.

We also have a dedicated marketing team and analysts who use dynamic pricing techniques to ensure your property has the best chance of performing in this extremely competitive market.

Our rate structure is also unique. We work off a 20% commission, and we offer an owner referral commission of 10%. And you can rest assured we never charge credit card fees or upcharge vendor bills.

Let’s talk.

Marco Island is one of the world’s most desirable vacation destinations, and it offers an unmatched business opportunity for property owners. But maintaining a successful vacation property requires so much more than simply taking a few pictures and posting an ad on a rental site. You need a thorough understanding of the market. You have to familiarize yourself with the intricacies of the accounting laws and record keeping requirements. You need loyal and committed vendors for maintenance and cleaning.

Most of all, you need to treat the customer like a king. Sounds like a cliché but it’s a true one. All our five star ratings didn’t happen by accident. We’ve made customer service priority one. It underlies everything we do because a happy guest is a lifelong renter.

We attach the same value to our relationships with our property owners. It’s not a relationship we take for granted, but rather something we consider a partnership. We’ll treat your property with the utmost care and do everything in our power to find you the ideal guests and maximize your rental income.

If you’re looking to purchase a property to rent out, we can help there, too. Please visit our real estate sales site.

We’d love the opportunity to get to know you and hear what you’re looking for and what your plans are. We hope to speak to you soon.