Making money from your holiday villa: tip 2: use a lettings agent

Your villa is costing you big money and you need to recoup it quick. Get some tenants in. A good lettings agent can help you with:

• how much to charge: the market in most places is oversupplied, which means that if you ask too much you will get nothing, but of course if you charge too little you will end up with too little money

• where to get tenants from. Do not underestimate how awful tenants can be. Strangers can really leave a mess. They sit on your furniture with their swimming trunks, they do disgusting things, stop thinking about it. When your agent rings you up and says ‘Great news! I’ve got some tenants for you!’ you can lean back and say ‘Who are they? What do they do for a living? Where do they live?’ and if you don’t like the answers, tell them to find somebody else. And if they don’t find somebody else then it’s their fault. They charge you a lot of money, so you can behave like that. It’s your house and it is costing you a lot of money.

Agencies take 10-20% commission: they act as principals in any deal, so the customer pays the agency, and the agency pays you (less, of course). The agency expects you to present the house in a certain state and gets very upset if there is building work next door. Examples are:

Villa Retreats (who offer villas in most places),

Palmer and Parker (Smart villas in France, Spain, Portugal and Caribbean)

Meon Villas – very large mainstream tour operator

Some will take your villa for the whole season but then of course they will offer less and you will get it back in a worse state.

Using an agent should be the ‘guaranteed cash’ option but often isn’t. Remember that lettings agents are really estate agents, and so many of them do what all estate agents do, which is to exaggerate how much they can get. Remember also that everything you have ever heard about how much other people get for their houses is bollocks and they are showing off. If you believe either then you are in danger of ending up with nothing! Believe those who give cautious estimates: however little the tenants are paying, at least they are paying something. Golden Rule Number 1 is THE LESS YOU CHARGE THE MORE YOU WILL MAKE – see the next post.