Outer Banks Property Manager

The internet is drastically changing the Outer Banks vacation rental market. The days of guests waiting to receive a beautifully printed glossy guide to each realtor's homes is no longer relevant. The internet has speed up the vacation rental business as much as it has other fields. Today's top marketed vacation homes are booking over a year in advance. This is creating quite a disparity between homes. Each year the percent of people who are finding their homes online is growing. This momentum is not about to stop.

Once this is realized we can move forward to bridging the gap between the top tier of homes and everyone else. If you take time and search for a vacation home online you realize that some appear brilliant and some appear beyond drab. This is the only thing someone is going to see about your home. When you look through the pictures you notice common themes that make the bad pictures bad. Look at your exterior. That is one of the money shots. If it's cloudy or overcast or dark your house is going to look bad no matter how great it is. Whatever the best features of your home are they need to be best represented in the pictures. If your bedrooms are great but the deck not so much you need the pictures to make it appear as if everything is great. This is your vacation rental income. One simple fix we feel that is beyond worth the initial cost is hiring a professional photographer to come shoot your home. This one simple step will yield you several years of increased value. A good photographer hired by you or through your rental company should not cost more than $100. Take a minute and think, how easy is it to recoup $100. The interest you earn on your extra weeks rental will more than pay for this. Take the first step and find a photographer.

Looking outside at this beautiful October weather got me thinking today about change. Not just the change from summer to fall, but the change from ordinary bulbs to compact fluorescent.

Since we're on the topic of improving the return on our vacation home rentals, I feel it necessary to address this cost cutting issue today. Not only does this issue deal with greatly cutting cost in our rental homes but it's near to this writer because of the fragility of the Outer Banks. It is my hope that everyone gets to experience this wonderful place. In order to keep it beautiful and pollution- free we are going to address the light bulb issue.
I know it may not be a particularly popular position but when I look at the number of light bulbs in an average vacation rental home and how often renters leave every light on all day long, this position just makes fiscal sense. To think our renters are going to change and turn off the lights every night let alone during the day may be too much to ask. Since we don't see any change in the habits of our renters, except more abuse to our homes, we need to take the steps to reduce our energy bills.

Ok so you're saying to yourself, "Another person up on the soapbox preaching." Well I'll try and save my environmental feelings for later in this column. Right now we concentrate on the energy and related dollar savings.

The first step is counting all the light bulbs in our house. We will use a fictional home located in Nags Head here on the Outer Banks. This home is a 4 bedroom 2 bath home. After taking our pad and pencil and walking through the home we found 71 light bulbs. You may think this number is extraordinarily high, but we counted all the light bulbs. We had our exterior lights, ceiling fan in each room, each individual bulb in the bathrooms, all of our recessed lighting and the chandelier in the kitchen, and all of our lights in our great room. While your home may have more or less, you need to take the time to count how many bulbs are in your home. Not just the ones you can think of. Some of the bathrooms in the vacation homes have 8 and 9 bulbs alone.

We need to determine how much energy our homes use during the rental season. This can be easily done by you, just look at past electric bills. Let's assume the average light bulb in a rental home is on for 16 hours a day throughout the summer. If you think this is an absurdly high number, you have never driven down 'Beach Road' in July and paid attention to how many lights are on. Sometimes if you drive around at night, you would think you're in the city with how illuminated everything is from just the lights being on in homes. I am just using these as examples to show you why your electric bill is so high.
We entered our fictitious numbers into a light bulb calculator. For this simple example all of our bulbs were existing 75 watt bulbs replaced with a 23 watt cf bulb. We used an average on-time of 6 hours a day. (We were trying to recreate power use over the rental season.) The average cost of the existing bulbs was 75 cents a bulb. We used a cost of $5 per carbon fluorescent. (This is about $ .50/.75 higher than you can find them in local Wal-Mart's or Home Depot's.) We used a constant cost of 8.5 cents per kilowatt.

You want to know how much money you could save? Try the experiment on your own home. To really show you the differences, do it on your personal home and then vacation home. Here are 2 light bulb usage calculators: EnergyStar Calculator and Touchstone energy.

Now just a quick thought. If saving money doesn't sway you to change your bulbs, how about the impact that just your steps will have on the environment. Just 1 homeowner taking this quick and easy step helps us leave a better world for those that come after us.