Rentals that you generate yourself by promoting your own vacation home are the key to profitable ownership. Using the calculations in the previous section, consider a typical management company-driven rentals schedule.

Thirty-five weeks a year would be considered good by most (and unachievable by many). Let us assume a weekly return to the owner from the MC of $800 on 35 weeks of bookings. The annual income from this will amount to around $28,000.

Now look at what the same property can return from owner-generated bookings. Say a range of rental rates from $900 to $1300 depending on the season, and 35 weeks of bookings a year. The figures do not look so vastly better than in the previous example, but the annual income now works out at $38,500. The extra $10,500 is enough in many cases to change a loss into a healthy profit.

There are some additional costs involved in owner-generated bookings, but in cash terms this will probably amount to only a few hundred dollars a year. Most of the cost is in your time and effort.

This extra time and effort has another important reward of its own, which shouldn't be under-estimated. By communicating directly with your future guests you will come to know something about them before they use your home, and to come to an understanding with them about what your home will offer them, and how they should respect it. They in turn will know something about the owners of the home they will be living in. There is a big difference in the way your home will be treated by someone who thinks of it as someone else's home rather than as a hotel room.

How can contact be made with potential renters? They are out there, hundreds of thousands of people renting tens of thousands of homes in Florida every year, but at the moment you do not know who they are, and they have never heard of you. Before you can start to generate your own bookings you have to change that.