Work at Home Business Ideas- Managing Vacation Rentals

Dear Friends,

I am quite intrigued by the number of ladies here who want to work from home. As and when I strike an idea, I am sharing it here to see if it is helpful to anyone here.

My last two were..
http://www.indusladies.com/forums/working-from-home/42627-making-money-solving-simple-focused.html
http://www.indusladies.com/forums/working-from-home/44180-make-money-enabling-each-other.html

Today, I was reading an article about Vacation Rentals. Many individuals (upper middle class and rich folks) have vacation homes in hill stations or in tourist destinations. They go there once a year with their family on vacation. But for the rest of the time, the vacation home is vacant. Vacation rental is the concept where they can rent out the vacation home to individual tourists.

But the challenge is that these owners don't have much time to find tourists on an ongoing basis to rent out their houses. Nowadays, websites like Homeaway.com has come that connects owners with tourists. But it still requires work on the part of owners to list their property, respond to queries and manage the entire process. Because the tourist would be from a far away place and hence face-to-face contact is anyway not possible, this work is ideal for work from home.

Here are my ideas for you..

Idea #1 - Can you contact the owners of one or more such vacation homes and ask if they would be interested in you helping them to rent their property out. In India, many owners would be reluctant to rent out their homes because they worry about how the tourist will maintain the house etc. and hence might need some convincing. After all, keeping the house empty and unoccupied creates as much dust and deterioration as renting it out. Also, a person who can afford a vacation rental would maintain it reasonably well. Moreover, owners in many countries do rent out their vacation homes and it is an existing concept. Finally, the owner makes money by renting it out.

It might take time to find a owner, but once you lock in one or two clients, managing those two alone could yield substantial income for you. You would be all set.

Idea #2 - You can start a website like Homeaway.com, specifically focusing on India. The last few years boom had created some upper middle class folks who have bought vacation homes. With the economy in downswing, you might think it is a bad time to start this site because no tourist is looking to vacation now. But this is actually the right time to start because by the time you have your website up and running and the teething problems are over, the economy would be back to drive business.

Would this work? What are the major obstacles in executing to this.

Finding an opportunity like this - while difficult initially - would be far more lucrative and interesting for you that doing some data entry, survey and proof reading stuff.

 

Re: Making Money by Managing Vacation Rentals

Also see weneedavacation.com. This focuses only on vacation rentals in Cape Cod. You can start your site focused on vacation rentals in one area and then extend it out if it works out.