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Investment: Holidaymakers want your home! - Ross Elder, HolidayLettings.co.uk

Holidaymakers want your home!

Sometimes I imagine General Kitchener holding up a sign calling for holiday home owners, with homes in the most popular of holiday destinations, to join the self-catering core! Silly, but there are some destinations, in the UK and overseas, where demand for holiday home accommodation outstrips the supply by as much as ten times.

What is creating this imbalance, I hear you ask. It could be the perfectly logical answer that the destination is small and just does not have space for sufficient accommodation; the Isles of Scilly spring to mind. There could huge seasonal peaks in demand that mean it is not perhaps possible to have sustained demand year around; Lapland falls a little into this category.

In most other cases, the holiday homes already exist, but not enough owners are opting to let them out when not using the home themselves. My mission, of course, is to convince them otherwise!

Coastal resorts experiencing some of the highest demands for self catering accommodation in the UK include Whitsand Bay, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Brighton, Portrush, Polperro and Rye. In most cases, these destinations offer great beaches and a wide range of activities to keep all age groups occupied.

From speaking to some of our advertisers with holiday homes in Bournemouth, they are often booked up from May through to October – with a decent wetsuit and you rarely notice the cooler water! As a guide for potential holiday lettings landlords, two bedroom apartments in and around Bournemouth during peak summer season range in price from £350 to £850 per week. The Sandbanks area is particularly popular, where peak season pricing averages £750 per week for a similar property type and size.

Holiday homes overseas experience similar patterns, where there are areas that are more popular than the supply of accommodation can support. Particularly popular overseas destinations include (but are certainly not limited to) Benalmadena in Spain, St Paul’s in Malta and Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. Such demand drives prices up for holidaymakers, because of the lack of competition, yet in most of the places mentioned herein an influx of new entrants to the holiday lettings marketplace would be positive all around. There would be more choice for holidaymakers, greater competition on prices and still enough holidaymakers to book out homes throughout the peak season and beyond.

I must also stress the ease with which second home owners can enter this marketplace. The first year is always a little tricky as you get used to what marketing works and what doesn’t, learn who your typical guests are, their needs and the value their feedback provides in helping you improve your offering. The other intricacies revolve around sorting cleaning and changeovers where you don’t wish to or cannot handle these yourself. My favourite tip is the use of a lockable storage area; somewhere for you to place your most precious and personal items while you have guests in. This is not as fiddly as it sounds, because in reality you should have guests in week after week during peak periods, plus the majority of our advertisers inform us that they spend as little as four weeks of the year at their second home.

The appeal of renting a private holiday home is doubtless on the increase. The benefits it offers over a hotel stay are increasingly sought as holidays become ever more important as time away from the rat race: space to spread out, privacy, flexibility and value for money progressively outweigh the ‘waited on hand and foot’ element of hotels.

Demand for private holiday homes is on the increase, enquiries for summer bookings this year are up 43 per cent thus far. All we need now is to convince more second home owners to share their homes with paying guests and of the financial benefits they will reap along the way.

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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