Whatshot
Property Talk
Property Talk
Date: 2018-08-24
To Rent or not to rent
The short-term holiday rental business is changing. The emergence of online booking platforms such as Airbnb and Bookings.com, have created the opportunity for homeowners to efficiently connect with end-users and rent out rooms or complete homes or apartments to holiday guests or visitors.
The software is excellent and the cost is relatively low. The impact on traditional businesses such as hotels, guest-houses and real estate agencies servicing these markets is dramatic and profound.
There are however major problems that are emerging that have raised questions regarding the control of the behaviour of the guests and who and how to hold accountable.
In a traditional hotel environment badly behaved guests are removed from the premises either by hotel management, their security or the local police services.
In an environment serviced by traditional realtors managing the bookings, a level of accountability remains with the realtor and these agents would often intervene to resolve on site problems.
In a world without hotel management and agents involved, the homeowner is the only accountable party. With many homeowners typically being absent and not close at hand, or simply unwilling and unable to deal with problems on site this impacts on the immediate neighbours.
In a gated estate type of community that typifies the Dolphin Coast, the management of these estates are often laboured with dealing with these problems as they arise.
Much debate is currently underway by the management of the leading estates along the Dolphin Coast on how to effectively control the behavior of holiday guests and how to hold those involved in the booking process accountable.
Solutions range from the complete banning of all short-term holiday type booking activities, which is already implemented in one leading estate, to the banning of the use of online platforms such as Airbnb.
Having been involved in Zimbali's development since 1997, and having owned a holiday rentals business for the past 15 years, we have seen the change in the industry recently and have experienced first hand the incredible behaviour of some holiday guests.
It is true that over 90% of the guests we service are actually well behaved and enjoy their holidays without causing problems or breakages. However when problems do arise with poorly behaved tenants, the reactions are often severe and the temptation is to paint all rental guests with the same brush.
For an estate such as Zimbali, which is by far the most popular holiday rental opportunity along the KZN coast, a couple of key lessons have already been learnt. The first is that holiday guests cannot be permitted to have guests.
The second is that technology should be leveraged and embraced to control access. Remotes are old school and easily abused. Biometrics is the way to go with the level of sophistication improving continuously. The third important lesson is that the holiday booking activity has to have a ground handler involved on site - the home owner has to employ agents, or similar, to be on hand to take the after-hours call and attend to the issues that arise.