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Investment: Can you be niche in a mass market? - Ross Edler, HolidayLettings.co.uk

Can you be niche in a mass market?

You own a holiday home in a popular area overseas and want to stand out from the crowd – what do you do? You advertise on some holiday home portals, prepare your home accordingly and expect the bookings to come flying in, don’t you? Or do you...?

I spent some time last autumn with some British owners of holiday homes in Florida. I learnt a fair amount more about the Florida marketplace and between us all we gained a better understanding of what is required to draw in the millions of people who head to Florida each year and how to stand out from the crowd of similar looking properties.

Before I arrived at the session I had checked out how well each of the homes in this particular part of Florida was performing on Holiday Lettings and was surprised to see a range of performance stats considering most of the homes were the same give or take a bedroom and all were on the same development.

Through the course of the session, however, I discovered that the marketing tactics of each of those home owners varied drastically. At the core of the outcome was the amount each home owner committed to spending on marketing each year and how quickly they responded to the enquiries they received.

When I asked for a show of hands with regards advertising spend there were a few who spent less than £300 a year, a majority that spent up to £500 a year and another small number spending upwards of £1,000 a year. This spend varied from a personal website and one listings site such as Holiday Lettings, to cards in local shop windows and the work intranet, to multiple listing sites and in some cases tens of free listing sites to the extent they could not remember them all!

When they then revealed the number of enquiries and confirmed bookings they each received through the year the penny dropped for everyone. The larger spenders in the room had also received the most enquiries and secured the most bookings. A similar show of hands revealed that the same people had the fastest response times to enquiries, some as short as half an hour. These home owners had also used more photographs in their marketing.

There’s no doubt success comes with experience as much with holiday lettings as with anything else, but there was evidence of tried and tested methods in the room. Holiday home letting is certainly not all about big budgets, but being smart with your marketing spend and realising when you need to do more marketing (to fill last minute gaps or incentivise off peak short breaks) has to be factored in too.

Florida has mass appeal, but presenting your home as also appealing to a niche could turn out to be a big win. Some ideas that came up in the session covered if you know that your neighbouring properties are vying for the same audience think outside the box. Use photos of Disney characters to woo a child-oriented holiday buyer; provide child-friendly bed linen, or decorate a bedroom in fun colours; don’t just say how far your home is from Disney, what about Epcot, Universal Studios and SeaWorld – every family will have different attraction priorities. And finally, yes the school holidays will always be in demand, but the most successful Florida holiday home owners are selling 37 weeks a year, many booking up months in advance. So ensuring your peak season pricing is optimised will enable you to offer discounts and special offers in the quieter periods.

Ross Elder

A buy-to-let investor and holiday home owner, Ross is passionate about doing holiday home letting effectively and efficiently with oodles of customer care. He is a keynote speaker on successfully marketing and managing holiday home lettings and instils much of his drive into the team at Holiday Lettings. Founded by Ross and his business partner Andy Firth in 1999, the company is now the busiest holiday home website in the UK

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