Barefoot Technologies Blog- Vacation Rental Industry News

Zillow announced the acquisition of Trulia yesterday in a stock exchange deal valued at 3.5 billion dollars. Both websites will continue to operate separately. Together they account for about 48% (not including local websites) of listings web traffic. These two portals are the biggest names in the online real estate market. Combining forces might have some unique implications for those agencies and brokerages that are currently serving both the real estate and vacation rental markets and for those companies that are only serving the real estate market in vacation rental hotspots.

By Claiborne Yarbrough, Business Development, BarefootTechnologies, with comments from Brent Bellm, COO of HomeAway

TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel review website, has just made the acquisition of LaFourchette for $140 million in an all cash deal. LaFourchette is one of the leading Internet and mobile restaurant reservation systems in France and Spain with over 12,000 participating restaurants.  With this purchase, TripAdvisor is diversifying their offerings to more than just rental reviews.  This move is one that vacation rental management companies should start to follow for several reasons.  You can read the full article here.

Congratulations, your web traffic is higher than ever, you are seeing more leads now and you are closing and bringing in more guests than years past.  I guess this means your inbound marketing program is over, right? Not quite, social referrals and social medias are worth their weight in gold and now is the time to turn your guests into advocates!

In the constant struggle that is marketing, getting more people to your website is not always the answer, sometimes it’s getting the right people.  This week I will address the Paveya infographic’s first stage which is “attract website visitors”.  This is the starting point for all your inbound marketing tactics for your vacation rentals and can impact your business immensely.  The point of this stage is to move “strangers” to become “website visitors” and improve visibility for your website.

In years past, this one have been done with one word, “SEO” or search engine optimization.  Many people use the term SEO to this day but the old definition of SEO bears a minimalistic resemblance to the current methods of optimizing your website.  The first page on Google or other search engines has led to some interesting tactics in web design.  It also led to the creation of an entire industry that would focus on helping you beat the google algorithm.  However, Google has evolved and its latest stage of algorithm has left the SEO hotshots of old in the dust.  The new way to think about SEO should focus on content creation.

On March 12th we wrote a blog that described state lawmakers in Florida looking to have changes made to the rental properties industry by July 1st of this year. The bill is about the rights of the people who live near the rental properties according to those who support it.To read the full bill click here. If this bill passes, changes would need to be made to your business to abide by these new rules. The community would be able to impose rules on trash, noise, and traffic. This would mean property managers will need to be careful about who is renting the property. A group for a bachelor party would not be suitable for a quiet residential area for three nights but a young couple with small children should be fine. Here are some ways to prepare your business for the potential law changes ahead.

Over the past few months, several pieces of legislation have popped up that want to increase, or at least allow for the increase of legislative influences over vacation rentals.  We have already written about cases in Hawaii, Colorado, Las Vegas and more but the latest legislation is coming in Florida, a vacation rental hotspot.  The bill is aimed to remove a prior bill that restricts legislative measures.  We saw legislative involvement go over poorly in Hawaii and other places but what is going on in Florida?