Did you know there are 8,750 short-term rentals in Summit County? According to Summit County government, Breckenridge alone has 4,700 vacation rental homes with short term rental licenses. Googling the words “Breckenridge Vacation Rentals” will produce over 600,000 results. How do you make your home stand out among the rest?
Unless you have a deep-pocket marketing budget (in the millions) or are listed with a well-established existing website, ranking for the keywords “Breckenridge Vacation Rentals” is an extremely difficult task. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) such as Vrbo and AirBnB currently dominate in the game of keyword search on Google (although Google itself is aiming to get a piece of the pie with its own booking engine). Both homeowners and property managers alike are at the mercy of the OTAs in order to secure the bulk of yearly gross rental income, not only in Breckenridge, but around the world. Until the next enormous progression in the industry comes along, having your property managed by a reputable company and listed on multiple OTAs is the most effective way to maximize rental potential.
Within each OTA that your property is listed, another ranking system exists. For example, Vrbo will show the highest-ranking properties at the top of search results and the lowest ones last, which could potentially be page 23 of a search result. Vrbo makes money when visitors book properties on their site, so the most book-able homes will be shown first. Rates, reviews, speed of inquiry response, photo quality/quantity, listing quality, and availability are all factors taken into consideration in the ranking algorithms. In a future blog post, we will delve into each of those in more detail.
Having a database of past guests, potential guests, or a way to target Breckenridge visitors through means other than lodging searches are additional ways to market your Breckenridge vacation rental property. A good property manager who knows Breckenridge like the back of their hand can achieve this. Almost everyone who plans to visit Breckenridge will do some research on activities, possibly even before securing their lodging. Snagging these guests before they book on an OTA not only maximizes revenue, but is the best way to earn customer loyalty.
The Breckenridge Tourism Office (BTO) offers local property management companies additional ways to advertise their homes to the millions of visitors on the GoBreck site. This option is not available to individually managed properties.
In a future blog post, we will be covering OTA ranking in further detail and offering additional tips on making your Breckenridge vacation property stand out among the thousands on the market.