Rental Reserve Blog

To Meet or not to Greet?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:41:46 +0100

Meet and greets are costly and time consuming.

We have all been there. It's 4pm on a Sunday afternoon. You have popped out to do a meet and greet for your self catering property. Your family are waiting on you and your guests phone saying they are half an hour away. They say sorry they are late. The sat nav has been playing up. Anyhow they are just finishing afternoon tea at Loch Lomond and will be in Edinburgh in half an hour!

Even at a push that's a good hour and a half drive.

No bookings to 90% occupancy

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:05:37 +0100

That's exactly what I did for April 2009 on my West End Apartment in the heart of Edinburgh.

When I looked at my availability calendar in late February and realised April was a desert with NO bookings – I realised the credit crunch had hit. It was obvious what I must do to win over the potential customers that were out there looking for a bargain. That meant I had to discount and be competitive.

The colour of money - orange?!

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:15:12 +0100

A post over at the Zoomf blog highlighted my attention to some unusual research by the guys at Rightmove.

It seems that simply by using the colour orange, you can increase the conversion rate (lookers to buyers - or bookers in our case) by over 30%.

I, much like the guys at Zoomf, am finding this a little hard to believe and there are many factors that go into increasing conversions, colour is likely to be one of them but I'm not in a rush to give any of our websites a new lick of orange paint.

Interesting also to see that we are not the only industry dealing with bulging inboxes and always on the look out for software that can reduce the workload, as discussed the Zoomf post.

Setting the balance due date

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:48:33 +0100

New featured added to the online booking system: you can now choose when you would like your balance paid.

Edinburgh holiday let owners save 80% on rates

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:53:10 +0100

Some great news for owners and agents of short term lets in Edinburgh. You may not be aware of the Small Business Bonus Scheme, a new rates relief scheme introduced by the Scottish Government, which this year will save you 80% on your rates bill. Next year it will save you 100% on your rates!