The Absent Owners' Guide
to Profitable Rental Home Ownership

Note: This guide has recently been updated and extended. The full version of the new guide is now available only as a downloadable eBook to clients of Hightower Realty. If you would like to receive a copy free of charge, please email me.

INTRODUCTION

This short guide is a digest of my own experiences and observations as a rental home owner and working as a real estate broker in the short term rentals (STR) business in Central Florida over the last seven years. I always welcome feedback, so if you feel that I have not adequately covered a particular area of concern, or that I have expressed my views badly - or just plain got it wrong - please be sure to let me know. This guide is frequently updated, extended and improved, so check back from time to time for the latest version.

I am Denis Le Marchant-Smith, London-born but a self-confessed Americanophile. My wife Katie and I had our first experience of Florida villa rentals fifteen years ago, when we rented a home in Kissimmee for a family vacation. We had stayed in hotels on several previous visits to Florida. We soon realized the extra value that a rental home can offer - so much more space, freedom to prepare meals instead of having to rely on expensive restaurants and coffee shops, and a lot more.

Within a few months we had negotiated the complications of US home ownership and were the very proud owners of our own vacation home. At that time we lived in the lovely island of Guernsey, which is one of the Channel Islands. Guernsey lies close to the Brittany coast of France, but finally the attraction of the Florida lifestyle proved too much.

Five years ago we sold our original vacation home, by that time an aging property in a deteriorating community that no longer provided an attractive ambience for rental guests. Now we keep in touch with the many hundreds of owners we have come into contact with over the years, both directly and through a couple of excellent online forums dedicated to Florida vacation home owners.

Back in the days when we bought our rental home there were few sources of help for new vacation home owners, no online owners forums, in fact no easily accessible support for overseas buyers. After the euphoria of our purchase we soon discovered that we were on our own! We came to realize that building up a profitable bookings schedule through the year was by no means an easy thing, and that we had a lot to learn. What follows is the result of that slow and sometimes painful learning process, condensed into a few basic guidelines to help you cut some corners on the road to profitability.

The main objective of this guide is to help prospective purchasers understand what they will be getting themselves into, and also to help current owners of vacation homes to assess the performance of their 'business' and to provide some insight into how to make improvements where improvements are needed. One important aspect of a successful rental home these days is to identify and provide those features that are most important to renters, and which will encourage more bookings at better rates. This question comes into play at an early stage, usually while a prospective buyer is still considering purchasing options - what type of home to buy, in what location, and with what features.