How To Be A Property Manager?

[Sleuth]

I'd say this is all about connections and experience. The short-term rental market in Buenos Aires is VERY competitive - AirBNB has over 4,000 listings alone.

That being said, a lot of people do list their apartments with agents who book them out and collect a 20% commission. This would involve:

• booking the apartment
• communicating with guests (before, during and after the booking)
• meeting guests for check in and check out
• handling maintenance issues that arise
• paying expenses
• dealing with problems that arise, complaints, missed flights, cancellations, etc.
• Refunding security deposits
• Getting guests to write reviews
• And probably a lot more i'm missing...

I do this myself for the properties we have here and in the US and it is a very time-consuming process. If I did not live here (and have a brother-in-law who helps), I would most likely need to hire a booking agency to handle this. (And sometimes when I get really tired of it, I think about doing that anyhow.)

So, how would you get the bookings? How much time do you have to dedicate to setting this up? AirBNB and FlipKey are free to list, but with the competition now, it's very hard to get bookings unless you are listed high on the sites, which mostly comes from reviews of previous renters (a catch-22). HomeAway and VRBO can cost over U$S 1000 for their best listing package. Do you have capital to invest in getting this going? How is your Spanish? You'll need to deal with building encargados, maintenance and service people, etc. How do you handle paying expenses for people? Do you have a bank account here? How do you pay the owners? Pesos or dollars? In Argentina or overseas? Do you know how to price nightly rentals? What peak season pricing should be vs off-season pricing? Do you have a cleaning crew? Linen and laundry service?

As I said in the beginning, if you have connections and experience it could work. I'm not sure how many owners would be willing to trust someone they have never met with no references. One suggestion might be to try and supplement someone's rentals with bookings of your own - collecting only on those to start. Or, find someone with an apartment who is doing long-term rentals and get them to do short-term rentals for the increased profit. Of course, that requires a lot of logistics (furniture, professional photos, etc.)

Hope that is at least a helpful start...

 

[Sleuth]

The thing is that in Argentina, most businesses haven't taken advantage of the full power of SEO and SEM, so if you find a business that is very good with SEO and SEM and can do a good job with your site, then everyone will beg to be on your site since only a few of those businesses here are taking advantage of SEO/SEM. That's the way I see it. Whenever I look for a temporary apartment, it seems like there are just a few sites that actually show up. If you would like free advice, about SEO/SEM, feel free to send me a message.

Have you Google'd "buenos aires apartment rental?" It's a highly competitive keyword with all the big name players in the top spots and tons of money being spent on Adsense. it would be near impossible to break into the first page of Google for this term. Maybe you could do more long-tail stuff, but that would take a lot of effort...