Another wild ride
Nothing about the past two years has been “normal” for the vacation rental business. Hurricane Sally beat us up pretty badly – recovery efforts took months and for some areas, they were hoping to reopen by Labor Day last year. Owning a vacation rental is not for the faint of heart and yet we saw record sales as new owners poured in. 2021 was a record year for real estate and we said goodbye to many veteran owners and made friends with the “newbies” coming into this business.
Website traffic and inquiries are all UP UP UP! Travelers are getting wise to those ridiculous booking fees and commissions charged by the “big sites” – and owners are getting fed up with all the rules being imposed on them.
- Website Traffic up – nearly 2,000,000 Page Views in 2021
- Inquiries up – over 16,000 Inquiries in 2021
- Listings up 12% – We now have over 430 Active Listings – we are the LARGEST “no booking fee” website serving Alabama. We have TWICE as many Alabama Listings as our nearest competitor.
- We sent out over 600,000 emails in 2021 and our email database has grown 25% to over 20,000 traveler emails.
- We have over 21,000 followers on Social Media, including an extremely active Owner Support Group that is open to anyone who owns or manages a vacation rental in Alabama.
While we are growing, our competition is shrinking. What sets us apart? We pride ourselves in giving exceptional customer service, routinely going above and beyond. We have helped many new owners learn the ropes to set them up for success in this business. We continue to focus primarily on supporting individual owners and small scale property managers. We guarantee that your listing will be seen, not buried under major property management companies or hotels.
We truly believe that this will be an amazing year for our AlaVHR family – and when you join AlaVHR, it really is like being part of the family. Most importantly, we want to thank every owner who treats US like family and continues to put their faith in us. We will continue to work very hard for you in 2022!
