Investment: 10 years on: the evolution of holiday lettings - Ross Elder, HolidayLettings.co.uk

10 years on: the evolution of holiday lettings

Remember when you scoured the lineage ads of national and regional newspapers for self-catering holiday accommodation; or perhaps that was your parents. 10 years ago, even after the arrival of the information superhighway we cannot live without today, people were still arranging holidays offline and through long-winded methods.

How frustrating it was to watch parents post photographs with a stamped addressed envelope to potential guests; having to have multiple copies of the photos only for the recipients to return them once they had decided whether or not they liked the look of the cottage, villa, gîte or apartment.

This behaviour was much to the bemusement of me and my friend, now business partner, Andy Firth. I was then a graduate trainee with Barclays, he a technical wizz keen to optimise this new-fangled gadget called ‘Google’. We both knew people trying to find guests for the weeks they were not using their holiday homes. We could see the potential of being able to view these homes on a worldwide platform accessible by all that enabled the owners to stay in control of their homes.

Our eureka moment was purchasing the holidaylettings.co.uk domain name late in 1999. While everyone else worried about the Y2K issue we set about creating a database oriented platform where holidaymakers could browse by location, property type and size while home owners could manage the content of their own adverts.

Getting to grips with search engine optimisation in the early days proved invaluable, but the boom in overseas property purchases and low cost airlines has supported our growth as well as the growth of the ‘book direct with owner’ concept. Second home ownership is no longer restricted to the wealthy and neither is renting a private villa. It is sometimes worthy of a pinch to see how much this concept has become a marketplace for owners and holidaymakers to connect, engage and share homes. What hope is there for the package holiday when renting a private holiday home can come in as much as 50 per cent cheaper than putting a family up in a hotel.

Tough times

In tough economic times such as these now, the self-catering/private rental holiday has experienced enormous growth – enquiries through Holiday Lettings alone this year are up 40 per cent year on year. Not only are holidaymakers coming around to the benefits of value, space, flexibility and freedom of renting a private pad from an individual, but so are long term second home owners.

The ONS estimates some two million Britons own land or property overseas, in addition to 850,000 second homes in the UK. Even taking buy-to-lets out of that equation you begin to realise the potential in this marketplace. Second home owners around the world are beginning to realise the added value sitting in their second home; the home, according to our research, that they spend no more than four weeks a year in on average.

It is hard to imagine holiday home owners 10 years ago earning enough rental income to surpass taking on a part time job, yet this year we estimate that through the million plus holidaymaker enquiries we will generate for our advertisers, those that convert to bookings will create in excess of £300m pounds for those individual home owners. That’s no mean feat and a figure that forces the once niche concept of holiday home letting up into the stratosphere of the online travel industry.

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