A well-designed and organised property website is the key to higher revenues. Find the 8 most important elements of a successful property website.
We will not talk here about the basics for all websites, like easy navigation, mobile friendly, SEO, a recognisable brand style and so on.
In this article, we will highlight only the special parts, which do a property website work for you.
High-quality Photos
High-quality photos, adapted to the needs of the villa are just a must. You will be surprised, but photos for holiday rentals are different from photos of a villa for sale.
It’s important to work with a professional photographer. As he/she will have a high-quality camera for high-resolution pictures and experience to show all the highlights of the property.
Find our article: Why not all photographers deserve to be named photographer
High-quality descriptions
The description should talk to your customer. It should make them feel at the villa. They even should feel how they’ll be back home and talk to all their friends and colleagues about how awesome it was.
It’s also important to correctly show the rates, especially if you use seasonal ones.
Booking calendar
The must-have of any holiday rentals and the hotel is an easy booking calendar with a “book now” possibility. Your customer should have easy access to the most important information to make the decision to book.
The calendar should be easy to use and always updated.
The calendar should be an iCal, in other words, an Internet calendar. Then you can easily share it with agencies and booking websites. And be sure that they are always updated about the availability. An Ical can also be added to a Google/Apple calendar to have all your bookings on your phone.
You can also use CloudBeds (get a Cloudbeds -50$ discount: Here)
A special part for agencies
If you want agencies to work well with your property, you need to be sure that they have easy access to information about your property. Information like downloadable photos, Icals, and all the necessary details about the rules, rates etc.
By creating a page for agents on your website, you’ll create more traffic to your website with each visit.
A special part for the villa team
Same as for the agencies, your team especially the villa manager should be always well informed. About the next bookings, and about all necessary comments from the guests. It’s not always easy to find information in multiple emails. But with a special part for the villa team, all the information will be online, structured, always available, and protected by a password.
FAQ
It’s important to divide the highlighted content of your website and other detailed information into different places. The website will look more professional if you limit the information to the major pages, and have a separate FAQ part for more specific cases.
We have a large holiday rental FAQ base, which we use on the websites of our special solution clients. Some cases are special, but most questions about the property and its rules will be the same.
PRO tip: You can print your FAQ and villa rules and keep them in the villa.
See our post about: Villa Rules
Call to action from the homepage
This is an important point for most of websites, but we will highlight it here. On your home page, you should have a booking calendar or a Book now button.
PRO tip: We also recommend having a booking calendar and/or book now on all the pages from where the customer will wish to book (like photos, villa description, rates etc)
Newsletter for Agencies
All the agencies working with your villa should be well informed about your special offers or any updates about the villa. It’s easy to send updates to everyone with a newsletter. With most of the newsletter plugins, you will see who didn’t open the newsletter, so you can follow up with a mail. Remember that all property agents are humans and can forget about your property. Sending a newsletter monthly will make them keep your villa in mind for the next suitable request.
PRO tip: you can include your clients in a newsletter too. But it’ll be less effective, than personalized emails with information. We always send a special greeting card to international celebrations to all of our clients’ clients of Property sales and Marketing Solutions.
BONUS: if the villa is for Sale
It’s important to inform website visitors that the villa is for sale. For that, you can include a downloadable PDF with all the details. After that, you can share this link with potential buyers or agencies.
By visiting the PDF on your website, you’ll create more traffic to your website.
See the brochure we created for Baan View Talay villa- > Downloadable Sales brochure
FAMEsolutely is happy to help you to bring your business to a new level!
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