By Roshan L. D’Silva · Holiday home Rental Basics
This is not a small decision, and it is usually made too casually — somebody mentions that the place could pay for itself, and six weeks later there are strangers in it.
Letting can be excellent. It funds the running costs, keeps the house aired and maintained, and gives you a reason to keep it properly. But be clear about what changes, because a let holiday home is a different object from a private one.
What you actually give up
Some of the best weeks. The weeks you most want — school holidays, the perfect fortnight in September — are the weeks that earn most. You cannot have both, and pretending otherwise is where most owner disappointment starts.
The house as you left it. Furniture moves. Things break, mostly in small ways. Wear happens three or four times faster than in a house used by one family.
Your own things. Anything you would mind losing has to go behind a locked door, which is why the owner's closet below matters so much.
Your time, or a share of the revenue. Someone must handle enquiries, pricing, changeovers, laundry and problems. That is either you, at awkward hours, or a manager taking a percentage. There is no third option.
Some flexibility. Once a booking is taken you cannot have the house that week, whatever comes up.
What you gain
Income, and often a lot of it in a strong season. A maintained house — properties that are used and cleaned weekly develop fewer problems than ones shut for eight months. Someone looking at it regularly. And a reason to keep standards up, which sounds soft and is not: let houses get repainted and re-equipped, private ones drift.
The decision that comes first: block your own weeks
Do this before the property goes live anywhere. Not afterwards, and certainly not as bookings arrive.
Open a calendar for the next two years and block the weeks you and your family will actually use. Be specific and be generous to yourself — a fortnight in the summer, a week at whatever holiday matters in your family, and the shoulder week you love because the place is quiet.
Those weeks are not available. They are not available at a high price either. They are simply gone from the letting calendar.
Owners who skip this step reason that they will fit their own visits around bookings. What happens is that a booking arrives for the last week of July, the money is good, they take it, and the following year the same. Three years later they have a profitable rental property and they have not spent a summer in the house they bought to spend summers in.
You bought this for a reason. Protect the reason first, then let the rest.
Half measures are legitimate
Letting is not binary, and some of the most contented owners I know sit between the two.
- Peak weeks only. Let the eight or ten highest-earning weeks, keep the rest. Most of the income, a fraction of the wear and the admin.
- Long lets in the off-season. One tenant for three winter months. Far less work than twelve changeovers, and it keeps the house occupied in the months it would otherwise sit damp.
- Friends and family only, at cost or a little above. No platform, no licence question in many places, and people who treat the house properly. Modest income, minimal aggravation.
Then check you are allowed to
Before any of this, establish that letting is permitted — nationally, locally, and in your own building. That is the subject of the next article in this series, and it is not a formality. Owners are fined for this every year, and a good number of them genuinely did not know.
Nothing here is tax or legal advice, and the position varies by market.