Managing a Vacation Rental on Your Own

When my husband and I purchased our beach house in Pacific Beach, WA we were filled with excitement, hope, and the pursuit of an investment property to help us towards our golden retirement years (we're in our 30's).

All that we hoped to achieve was to make enough rental income to pay for the mortgage and enjoy the house with our family once or twice a month. The education we were about to receive was like someone giving you a Christmas present and taking it away the next day. We had made an appointment with a popular property management company in the area and sat down to go over the "numbers." To our dismay, Mr. Vacation Rental Man explained to us that he would be charging us a 50% commission on our rental revenue to manage the house for us. We would still furnish everything except the bed linens and he would keep the cleaning fee as well as the 50% commission.

When my husband and I did the math on our new found "opportunity" we were very glum. We would have to rent the home over 200 nights a year (very difficult in WA's winter season) in order to break even on our mortgage. We had a long talk about how we were going to be able to make that happen and decided we should at the very least give renting the home ourselves a shot. What has occurred over the past 9 months has been very encouraging and we are excited to say that after this summer we hope to have the mortgage paid through the winter.

Beach Rental Master Bedroom

Credit: Shawna Straub

Copyright: Shawna Straub