Hi,
July and August tends to be busy for rentals but it can be a bit quiet the rest of the year.
In my view occupancy is likely to depend on the pricing structure you use. If you are looking for very high occupancy you need to have very competitive prices. If you are less worried about occupancy and more concerned about how people treat your property you can set the price higher. From our experience and the experience of others we talk to here in Almerimar we believe that people who pay more for a rental tend to respect the property more. However, you get less people through the door.
We have found that a site called www.homelidays.com is a good site to use for advertising your rental property. It is French but uses automatic translation to make your property advert available to people across Europe in different languages. It takes a long time to input all your details but in my view this is worthwhile. I think the annual cost of placing an apartment on homelidays is around 170 euros. Which is worth it if it gets you at least one rental a year. Also, homelidays provides an easy to use calendar function that allows you to keep an online calendar of when your property is booked and available.
In addition, it might be worth considering doing your own small website for your property. This will probably not bring you many more rentals but can be used to provide more background material and further details that might be of use to people accessing homelidays (or any other advertising site you choose to use). Thus it can be used to help sway people to book your apartment rather than someone elses.
We started off advertising our rental property on three different advertising sites. However, homelidays got us more enquiries than the others so we have dropped the others. One other thing to bear in mind is that each site you advertise on tends to have its own calendar so it can take time to keep these all up to date.
We are already in the process of developing a website for some people who are taking ownership of property in Porto Fino later this year. We are also developing a site for another apartment in Almerimar. They are relatively simple sites that are for secondary marketing use supporting entries on homelidays (and/or elsewhere) and therefore we do not charge too much to develop or maintain them.
So feel free to get in touch if you are interested in the idea of us doing this for you.
John
This message was last edited by al24 on 7/9/2008.