Increase Revenue in Your Short-Term Rental Business

Teri Quance-Ahdan
10/10/2026

With the increase in short-term rental properties over the years, competition is continually looming over your cash flow potential. As a leader in your area, you’ll constantly have a target on your back, which makes running faster than the competition essential. Staying educated is paramount. Keeping up with current industry trends and opportunities can add an additional “ching” to your accounting. What follows are five tips to help keep your cash flow moving upward.

1. Increase Inventory

Increasing your property portfolio seems like common sense; however, making it happen is not as straightforward. The process of marketing, soliciting, and attaining a new property can be grueling for small business property managers. With the influx of new VRMs over the years, getting creative with management offerings and marketing can add the “bling” you need to set yourself apart from the competition. Using different platforms can help increase your brand exposure and support your sales force, especially if your sales force is small and stretched thin.

Use creative marketing with a bang. We love the idea of sending a property-specific gift to the most desirable properties we’d like to add to our portfolio. A nice digital watercolor of a potential vacation rental home shouts a special “Hello, we’d love to represent you” message. It’s impactful and keeps our company name and brand in front of the homeowner. It’s a subtle reminder of the services we offer as they begin their search for a property management company.

2. Add Amenities

Add area-appropriate and enticing amenities to help increase bookings and your nightly rate, ultimately increasing your bottom line. When we looked at booking analytics research and assessed the top 20 properties in our area, all of the top properties included either a swimming pool, hot tub, fire pit, game room, or a combination. We typically recommend that homeowners add one or several of these amenities to increase their occupancy rate, as well as to improve search engine filters. Above-ground hot tubs are a small investment and can make a huge impact.

3. Partnership Marketing

Partnering with other complementary businesses is an effective way to reach a broader audience within the same target market while stretching your advertising dollar. Businesses can develop collaborations with like-minded, non-competing brands because they share similar target audiences and want to tap into new markets. Through strategic marketing, we can show these audiences that you can’t have one offering without the other. Partnerships enhance each brand and bring new energy to owning a product or using a service.

An example may be a vacation rental property management company that partners with a touring company. While the touring company promotes the VR property management company as a source for accommodations, the VR property management company may offer tours while guests stay in the area. Touring companies offer an opportunity to increase VR exposure while bringing a valuable service to your vacation rental guests. It’s a win/win.

Another benefit of partnership marketing is to take advantage of one another’s databases and share the collective data, but it’s imperative that the audience and end goal are mapped out in advance and that each company is on the same page about the desired outcome.

Find co-marketing partners to work with long-term. It takes a lot of time and effort to find a great match. You want to leverage that effort and create multiple successful campaigns so that both of your brands benefit from the increased and repeated exposure to each other’s audiences.

Creating strong alliances plays an imperative role in business growth.

4. Concierge Sales

Focus on the same hospitality a guest would expect from a high-end hotel. Offer a personal, concierge-style experience for your guests. One of the most effective ways we’ve found is through a digital concierge touch screen. The guide provides property information to guests; it also gives the unique opportunity for additional sales. The goal is for your guests to want for nothing and have everything they may need at their fingertips while increasing sales.

Examples may include local or curated wines delivered to the door and ordered through the guide. Charcuterie boards or grocery delivery to spice up your guests’ vacation experience. Bike and golf cart rentals may also be an offering, as well as early check-ins and late check-outs. All are ordered at your guests’ convenience through a touch screen. Using the partnership marketing touring company example, negotiate a percentage of the booking when your guests book a tour.

Have an extra car or two? Offer your guests a car rental. It’s a great way to earn an extra few dollars per night.

5. Incentivize Longer Stays

Encouraging your guests to extend their stay at the front end or back end of their trip is a great way to increase not only the revenue from a guest, but also your occupancy rate. Offer a day or two before or after their stay at a discounted rate if the days are open.

There is an opportunity around every corner to increase revenue for forward-thinking property management companies and vacation rental homeowners.

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