Let us know if you have any feedback / issues with signing in to your VillaSeek customer area….

Tom
VillaSeek website team

We’ve added a few more feature icons to the Villaseek Villa search pages. We’ve added icons for villas with barbecues, for whether the villa has air conditioning, and for whether there are bikes available at the holiday property.

Owners can turn these icons on for their holiday properties, by logging into the villa management area of VillaSeek, clicking the holiday property they’d like to edit, then pressing the edit villa link.

If you have any other ideas for icons you’d like us to add to VillaSeek, or for any other features you’d like us to add to the villa info pages, just let us know in the comments!

Tom K

I’ve been working on some more individual / tailored pages for the villa directory on VillaSeek.com. The eventual aim is to get an easy-to-navigate page for every region that we list, which links to articles here on the blog, and pulls in some more useful info about the region. If anybody has regions they’d particularly like me to focus on, drop a comment on this blog and I’ll add those… within a couple of weeks there will be a tailored page for every region.

As an example of some of the pages I’ve got up and running take a look at the listings pages for luxury villas in the Caribbean, and holiday villas near Disney…. Do drop me a comment and let me know any improvements… I’ll be working on getting all these up and running in the coming weeks.

Tom

“Having read your magazine in our doctor’s surgery I was shocked to see that it was full of bargain basement Florida villas whose owners are literally giving their beautiful homes away. As we don’t discount or charge cheap prices we do not feel that this sort of magazine which has such cheap villas would be a suitable place to advertise our home.”

And:

“The rates were, to put it bluntly, scandalously low. This is the mindset of villa owners who think that ‘anything is better than nothing’ but that sort of marketing encourages haggling and bargaining, and pushes prices even further down.

It also attracts the sort of people who DON’T respect your home as they have paid so little that they think that the villa owner is made of money in order to be able to subsidise their holiday – and the guest is laughing all the way to the bank as they spend all the money they have squeezed out of the villa owner on extra park tickets or designer gear.”

For a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom villa in Esprit, Davenport, this owner charges from £599 to £750 per week. Is he correct in believing it’s better to leave the villa empty than offer a last minute price of, say, £300 per week? And is his belief that people looking for a bargain are less likely to respect the house well founded?

Rental prices in Florida have been tending to fall because so much property is on offer and visitor numbers have been dropping. Is this a trend that can be successfully resisted?

Another factor is that lower property prices mean owners who have bought cheaply can offer low rental prices. For instance, our current issue has an ad from Dolby Properties which includes this property:

Highlands Reserve – immaculate 5/3.5 villa with sunny pool. Outstanding rental history. $291,000.

That’s around £180,000 – say £200,000 with taxes, charges and set-up costs. So if you were to rent that out at £395 a week (the sort of ‘scandalously low’ figure our emailer has in mind) you would need to sell 31 weeks a year to bring in £12,000. In reality, you would charge more for the summer holidays and Christmas.

Would £12k be enough to pay mortgage, management costs, cleaning, local taxes, maintenance, insurance and all the rest of it? And would you be better off selling, say, 20 weeks at £595 to bring in the same sort of money?

And why is it that the spread between minimum and peak weekly prices is much less in Florida (where the peak price is usually no more than 50 per cent higher than the minimum) than, say, Spain where the top rate is often three times or more?

Let us know your views in the comments section below – whether you are a holidaymaker thinking of renting a Florida property, an owner trying to make a success of renting, or maybe a professional involved in the business.

The Thailand and India section

Hi everyone

Just to let you know, I have rebranded our Asia Pacific section on Villaseek, to better reflect the villa listings within the section. It’s now simply the Thailand and India section. You can also access the two countries directly, by clicking through to Thailand and India.

So, the change doesn’t actually affect any of the villas in the section, but hopefully will make it clearer to people who are looking for self-catered accommodation in Thailand and India.

Holiday Villas and Cottages Magazine on MyeBook.com

There are several ways to read our paper-based sister publication, Holiday Villas and Cottages magazine. The most common is in popular news agents, such as WH Smiths. Or you might stumble upon it in the waiting room of a doctor’s, dentist’s, hairdresser’s, or health club.

But we’ve also been putting copies online. The usual way to read the magazine online is via Zmags — and you can always read the latest issue at the magazine’s website. More recently, we’ve been playing about with putting online issues on another virtual magazine publisher, myebook.com. The site allows you to flick through a virtual copy of the magazine and comment on the articles. You can read the latest issue via myebook.

We’re also really happy to announce that a previous issue of Holiday Cottages magazine has now reached over 12,000 views. So we’re looking forward to adding future issues onto the platform and reaching new audiences for the magazine.

On your customer control panel (http://www.villaseek.com/customers), there’s a “Keywords / Photos” page for each villa. As well as uploading up to eight photos, you can also enter keywords and a description for your villa.

These are embedded into your listing page as meta data, where Google can read them — potentially enabling your individual listing page to appear higher on Google when people search using those keywords.

The main advantage is on VIllaseek itself, though. If potential holidaymakers enter a keyword (eg. “sleeps 4″, or “near sea”, etc.) into the search box on the front page of Villaseek, then your villa will come up if you’ve also entered those keywords.

So it’s a way of adding more information to your villa page, and increasing its visibility when people do keyword searches.

The best way to use the keyword search area is to enter a comma-separated list of potential keywords into the box on your control panel, and then press the update button. This adds the keywords to your page, and also to our search system – ready for people to find your villa when they search using the appropriate keywords,

As always, drop us a comment below if you need any more info about the system – or feel free to contact us via email or phone if you’ve got any specific questions!

Tom

We’ll be making an official announcement about this in a couple of weeks, but we’ve just finished an upgrade to the Villaseek site that will allow all villa listings to show eight photos of their villa. I’ll be testing out this functionality over the next week with a few villas. If you currently list your villa on Villaseek, and would like to have more photos, drop us a comment below with your reference number, and I’ll get in touch to add your extra photos… Once we’ve tested it, we’ll add the functionality to the photo-upload page on everyone’s control panel.

If there are other areas of the site that you think could be improved, or features you’d like us to think about adding, drop me a comment and we’ll get to work on i!

Tom K

The Villaseek photo upload panel

Dear villa owners,

Just to let you know, we’ve had an issue with the photo upload system on your customer management page over the last few days. I’ve now fixed this – so you should be able to upload new and replacement photos on your listings pages at any time you like.

We’ve also got a new keywords and description section on the same page. Here you can enter a few words that describe your villa (separated by commas). That will cause your villa to come up when people search for those keywords.

The keywords and description will also appear on your villa page as metadata that is used by some Internet search engines for the descriptions on search listings, and may help to increase the visibility of your listing on those search engines.

As always, drop us a comment, or get in touch via the contact page on Villaseek.com and we’ll do our best to help with any queries,

Tom