Our rental cabins are keeping us super busy! I started a new marketing campaign and have my first 20 hour/week employee devoted to supporting Weekend Oasis Marketing. We are getting lots of website traffic, phone calls, and booking reservations for our guests. All good stuff!

Being a small business owner of Weekend Oasis and having 4 rental properties, we always encounter challenges. Today's was the picture above. When we arrived at the rental cabin in Amissville the high winds caused a tree to come down! Good thing we cleared it before guests checked in :)

Billboard advertising

Looks cool and that is about it!

August 1, 2010, the Weekend Oasis Vacation Rental billboard went up in Northeast Pennsylvania. After some research and phone calls I was able to justify the spend (the price was affordable after being totally out of range) and thought I should try this form of advertising. To date, the only advertising that works for my business is on-line advertising.

To make this very aggressive I had my graphics guy design the billboard and I was offering one free night ($200 value) to anyone that took us up on the offer. The billboard was at a major 4 way intersection in Kingston, PA. We've had a lot of Northeast Pennsylvania guests so I know they fit my target market.

After an entire month I had absolutely no increase in website traffic and not one single phone call. As a result, the billboard resulted in $0 return on investment.

I do suspect it has helped branding and it was pretty exciting seeing the billboard, but I thought it would result in at least one booking or an increase of website traffic from that geographic area. Being a website analytics nerd I really dug into it and couldn't tie anything to the billboard.

So, if you are considering it, only do it if your marketing budget has extra spend and you simply want to say you had a billboard. For vacation rentals, it resulted in nothing.

About 2 years ago I rented my condo to a local. He needed a place for a few weeks. While sweating in the desert in Vegas I get a phone call. My house cleaners tells me someone busted down the door and broke into the condo. After a few more calls I found out the person renting my condo is the brother of my house cleaner. He was at the local bar, had an issue with another guy, and that guy drove over, kicked the door in, punched a hole in my wall, and had words with my guests. He calls his sister, my house cleaner, to help "clean the mess up". They call the sheriff to try to pass it off as something else so they wouldn't have to pay for damage. I ended up having the tenant leave, firing my house keeper for not being up front that her brother was renting it (she has a different last name), and ended up eating the bill to fix the door, wall, and changing the locks. What a mess. I remembered this because I was having a conversation with other VR Owners in a group I'm part of and she had a local tenant from hell that REFUSED to check-out. Lesson learned here, be VERY careful if you rent to locals ..

I love renting my properties and having guests stay, enjoy the vacation and come back. As I continue to grow the Weekend Oasis business I strive to have a diverse portfolio of properties. In doing so, I sometimes introduce sister properties that I manage for other owners. Recently, I introduced a beautiful cottage inside of a homeowners association. Long story short, all my thoughts about HOA's were once again validated. The HOA restricted putting canoes in the lake! Only the owner could do anything. I must promise myself never to buy a rental inside of a gated HOA community unless it is a condo!! Needless to say, this property is no longer able to be part of the Weekend Oasis family. Sad, but what can I do?