I am always checking out other vacation rental sites that are for sale. I expect over the next couple of years there will be many that come up for sale. On the surface it would seem somewhat easy to make money owning a vacation rental listing site. However, the reality is that to generate enough inquiries to satisfy a vacation rental owner, requires a lot of targeted traffic each month. So while a vacation rental site may con a few ignorant property owners into signing up in a given year, the reality is that if no inquiries or business is generated, that customer won’t renew the next year.
I’m glad that I am a vacation rental owner, it really helps when I am determining what features are important to develop on VacationRentalDirect.com. Hopefully someday this site will become profitable, but at the moment, it’s not a high priority for me. My priority is serving my customers and developing the traffic levels required to make their business successful.
This vacation rental listing site recently came for sale on SitePoint.com. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. Especially since it used Joomla with a plugin. But I’ll list it here, as the bidding is currently up to $20,000+.
I also found a vacation rental listing site for sale on bizbuysell.com the other day, but that must have sold, because the business broker I was talking with about it, just dropped off the face of the earth and I don’t see it listed any longer.
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Hi George, thanks for the note. Building out a vacation rental site or an online booking site requires a lot of resources and it’s a lot of work. I’ve just launched a new online booking and reservation product that integrates with vacationrentaldirect.com, you can signup for a free 30 day trial at http://www.innfirst.com. We currently support the Euro and will be working on supporting several European languages in early 2009.
I think you’ll find it’s a great system with some very innovating booking calendars, guest management and marketing features. All of the help files have not launched yet and several key features will launch this week and the next, but it’s a great system at a very low cost of US $19.99 / month.
http://www.innfirst.com