The Essential Playbook to Grow & Scale a Short-Term Rental Business

Take the Stress out of Scaling your Business with Boom

The Essential Playbook to Grow & Scale a Short-Term Rental Business | Boom

Growing a short-term rental business is challenging: how do you maintain high standards at scale, while juggling all the plates? When done right, it doesn’t need to be stressful. With the right tools and structure in place, your business will operate just as smoothly at five hundred properties (or more!) as it did at two — and make far more profit.

This playbook will guide you through the essential strategies to grow and scale your short-term rental business without the headaches, from understanding sustainable growth to maximizing revenue while maintaining great guest satisfaction.

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Understanding Growth: Adding Doors vs. Increasing Profitability

The first step to growing your vacation rental management business is asking yourself what growth really means to you. Is it adding more doors to your portfolio and scaling your business? Or is it making your existing portfolio more profitable? Both paths are valid choices, but they require quite different strategies.

Growing your portfolio

Adding more doors is a quick way to expand your business footprint, potentially increasing your revenues — but with significant up-front costs, especially if you expand to new locations. To avoid operational headaches, streamlined processes and data-driven tools are a must-have.

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Data-forward

To really increase your profitability, you need to re-evaluate your pricing strategies and nail your operations. Consider investing in dynamic pricing tools, building effective dashboards, and streamlining your cleaning and maintenance processes to cut costs and grow income. Maximizing revenue and occupancy is an art, but it’s also a science — and that means that data is a huge part of it. 

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Increasing profitability

Whatever you decide to do, keeping your profits and losses (P&L) sheet in perfect condition is the only way to know for sure that your profitability will grow.

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Growing While Maintaining Service Quality

Adding properties at speed feels great, doesn’t it? That is, until your five-star reviews start slipping. Maintaining great service while scaling your portfolio requires reliable systems and the right team in place.

Automation

Automating repetitive tasks like guest communication or scheduling — which only get more intense as you add more properties — can free up your team’s time to focus on delivering top-tier service. Build out your team wisely: consider whether an existing team member has capacity to take on this task, or if you can use technology to automate it, before hiring new team members. However, bear in mind that expanding into new locations might complicate the workload, making it harder to ensure properties are clean and up to scratch without in-person checks. 

Clear reporting

By centralizing all the information you have on a property, from guest reviews and messages to cleaning staff notes, it will be like you’re really there. AI can help by collating and categorizing all the information you have, putting it into an easy-to-read format like a dashboard and even flagging issues before they get out of hand.

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Turning Owners into your Best Ambassadors through Transparency

Trend reporting

More properties also means more owners to deal with, and like your existing owners, each of them will have different expectations and want different things from you. Clear reporting is vital for owner relations, helping them to see the value you deliver and stopping the constant questions.

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Owner advocates

Happy owners can become your best ambassadors, referring even more properties to you. That’s why before you scale, you need to get your current owners onside and happy. Apart from reporting on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that really matter to them, on a regular schedule, you also need to really communicate your value. That means highlighting how you handle challenges, taking the stress off their shoulders, and showcasing your expertise, so they know that they’re in really safe hands.

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Scaling a short-term rental business is challenging, but it can be very rewarding. By balancing growth strategies, prioritizing service quality, optimizing revenue with laser-focused reporting, and fostering homeowner loyalty, you can grow a business that’s profitable, scalable and built to last. Use this playbook as your guide, and remember: growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of quality or profitability.