You love Maui so much that you’ve decided to buy a vacation home on our lovely island. Good choice! Now you can enjoy the ocean waves, dramatic hikes, and tasty roadside slushies whenever you want. Of course, you can’t spend all your days in Maui (though a person can dream, right?). Your condo isn’t doing you any good just sitting empty for most of the months out of the year, so you might have considered renting it out. Renting out your condo out when you aren’t using it is a great way to make some extra income, which can help you cover your second mortgage or finance more trips to Maui for you and your family! If want to move forward in offering your condo up as a vacation rental, the next major decision you’ll need to make is whether to rent out your condo on your own or hire a professional vacation property rental company to do it for you.
How Much Time Do You Have?
Rental sites like Airbnb make it easier than ever for you to offer your condo for rent to vacationers around the world. With a few pretty pictures and a snappy description, you can have your condo up on the site and ready to book in a jiffy. However, don’t be fooled by how easy it is to get up and running. These rental sites only give you a platform for connecting to renters. You are expected to do all of the work of actually managing the rental process itself. That includes answering questions, making sure the condo is clean and neat before the guests arrive, addressing any issues your guests have during their stay, cleaning the condo after the guests leave, and managing problems, like a broken lamp or noise complaints from neighbors.
In essence, you will need to be a landlord for your property, on call 24/7, and constantly on the lookout for new rentals to keep your unit occupied. If you don’t answer questions quickly, fail to address problems, or offer renters a condo that hasn’t been cleaned and tidied, you could get smacked with low reviews that will scare new renters away. If you don’t live in Maui, it may be hard to fix a clogged sink or clean the property. You’ll need to hire someone on the ground who can act as your “eyes and ears” to help your customers.
It really is a lot of work. If you happen to have a full time job and a family, the last thing you want to do is try to be a landlord for a property that is thousands of miles away! Remember that your time is money, and if you’re spending all of it on the phone with your renters, then the income your Maui unit earns may not be worth the cost!
Is a Professional Rental Property Management Company a Better Solution?
Some people absolutely love the challenge of renting out their properties and handling all of the management. If you’d rather focus on your career, family, and hobbies, then you might want to consider hiring a professional rental property management company instead. This type of company basically takes over complete management of your Maui condo rental. The company will advertise and market your condo, make bookings, clean the unit, provide complete customer service to renters, fix problems, assess the unit after the renters leave, and clean it before the next guests arrive.
They will take a percentage of the rental fees, but if you manage your condo on your own, you will likely have to pay handymen, cleaning crews, and others to help you take care of the property, anyway. A rental property management company will do that for you.
This is a complete hands-off solution. All you’ll do is collect your share of the rental income.
If you’d like to learn more about renting your Maui condo through a professional vacation property rental company, contact Ali’I Resorts now. We are always on the lookout for great Maui condos to add to our portfolio of rental properties.
