The acceleration of the internet and advancements in eCommerce have put rental businesses in multiple industries on a rising trend. As per Statista, revenue for vacation rentals is projected to reach $105.70 billion in 2026 from $82.78 billion in 2022. The annual growth of the car rental industry is expected at 9.38% with a market volume of $116.40 billion by 2026. Similarly, various other industries such as dress rentals, equipment rentals, and furniture rentals are estimated to experience tremendous growth in the coming years.
Pertaining to the industry demands and innovations in technology, it’s important for rental businesses to have an online presence. Though creating it is not a difficult task these days, but the crowded space of website builders and B2B advertisements has made it more complex. In this article, we will describe a few ways to create a rental website that will help entrepreneurs to launch a clean and affordable website for their rental businesses with ease.
Which One To Choose: Rental Software, A Website Builder Or A Team Of Developers?
A normal website for your rental business won’t suffice the requirements of the market. A fully functional rental business requires a platform with several modules and integrations. To create a website for your rental business operations you can either choose a website builder, a dedicated rental software, or a team of developers to write the codes manually.
Some of the basic features for any rental business include agreement management, advance rental security management, payment gateway integrations, order and inventory management, dedicated dashboards for customers and vendors, and so on.
So, if your website builder is not providing you with all these functionalities, you can go with rental software with all these modules or hire a dedicated team of developers to get the job done. Hiring developers would be a costly affair as it requires hours of hard work to build a platform with multiple functionalities. You can consider building a website using rental software that comes at an affordable price.
Step-By-Step Approach To Create A Rental Website
Buy a Domain Name and Find a Web Hosting Provider
After you are done with your rental platform, you can buy a domain name and find a reliable hosting provider for your business.
A platform created using a website builder can be easily hosted on the web as hosting service providers have determined options for most of them. Similarly, if you hire developers to launch your website, they can help in configuring the files and uploading them to the platform of the service provider.
And rental software is usually managed and hosted by the platform only (except one like YoRent). If you build a website using rental software, make sure you are hosting it on the service provider of your own choice as it has multiple benefits including no extra charges on scalability, and such software generally comes at a one-time cost for a lifetime license.
Create a Business Plan/Strategy
Creating an efficient business plan is a pivotal step you need to perform after all technical installations. Your business plan for a new rental business should be purely focused on your target location, audiences, and utilities you deal with. Since there are significant costs associated with the implementation of business strategies, you can narrow down the operations and be as precise as possible. Below is a small checklist you can include in a business plan for your rental business.
- Goals of business
- Target audiences and location
- How will the business operate
- Revenue streams
- Initiate and implement the market research
Identifying The Target Audience For Your Rental Website
Your business model revolves around the target audience and location in which your business operates. Start by analyzing the offerings of your rental business. This will help you in creating customer profiles and classifying them into segments that you can target individually to assess the competition. Subsequent to confined customer segments of your target market you can create a list of general requirements by the customers and offer the services in an efficient manner.
Identify Revenue Streams
Having diversity in your revenue streams helps in financial stability and encourages business growth. Also, relying on a single income source puts your business at risk with changes in trends. For a rental business that operates online, you can add revenue streams like:
- Rental commissions
- Paid advertisements
- Sponsored listings for products
- Subscriptions for the platform where you offer discounts to the subscribed customers
- Selling product insurance
Manage Your Inventory
Updating inventory for your rental website is more of a management skill rather than product updation. Since products are more frequently rented and then returned, it becomes a hectic task to keep a check on daily operations after coordinating with multiple stakeholders. This even creates mental unrest if your rental website doesn’t have a module for inventory management.
A general website with few pages might have plugins integrated to manage the products but this is not a viable solution for long-term survival. See if you can afford a dedicated inventory management software for your rental business or you can move forward with a rental software that has in-built functionality to manage your rental business inventories.
Initiate The Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns can help you in raising awareness about your newly started rental business among customers. Be it the latest products in your inventory, a traditional festival approaching, or a market expecting a seasonal push, you can run determined marketing campaigns to attract customers and create brand recognition.
Here are some proven marketing mediums you can invest your time in to see better results at the initial stages of your rental business:
- Social media marketing
- Business blogs and outreach
- Work on customer feedback
- Use attractive images
- Running advertisements online
Analyze The Reports
During the time your business starts getting initial traction from the customers, you can create marketing reports that help you in analyzing the performance and creating future plans for the business. Additionally, you can also outsource reports from market research platforms that provide growth and scope reports for specific industries. However, most of the work post analysis of the reports is prejudiced towards the target audience, location, and the resources available to you.
Wrapping Up
Though the trends in online business are continuously evolving with technological advancements, this also opens doors to new opportunities for existing platforms. A rental website is a major asset for your business that needs to be updated with time and shifts in the industry. So, when building a website for your rental business, make sure you have the authority to customize it. Furthermore, generating revenue at the initial stages can be a struggle but can be eased by initiating marketing and awareness campaigns as mentioned above.
