Vacation rental fraud is a huge obstacle to the growth of the vacation rental industry. As an individual who owns multiple vacation rentals, enjoys renting vacation rentals and owns a vacation rental listing site (VacationRentalDirect.com) -I have seen all aspects of vacation rental fraud. Let us review as many as possible.

Vacation Rental Owner Scams:

Overseas Cashiers Checks

I get spammed all the time by individuals who are interested in renting one of my units for a family member of business associate who will be arriving from overseas. Inevitably all of these individuals want to send me a cashiers check for an amount greater than the amount of their stay to cover incidental expenses, etc. I supposed to newbies and perhaps members of the older generation, this scam works. It only works because the overseas cashiers check that they will send you will not clear for 30 days or more. Thus after 45 days you will most likely have spent the money and that’s when the cashiers check will bounce and you will be forced to come up with the cash.

Propagating the problem further, many bank tellers, ignorant of their own bank’s internal operations, are disseminating bad information to their customers, telling them the bank drafts clear in 24-48 hours. What really happens is that per the 1992 Federal Reserve Board Regulation CC, the bank MUST make the funds available in you account in 48 hours, but the check has not cleared/bounced yet. Get the picture? Two different events, the bank makes funds available, then the check either clears or bounces about a week later, after bouncing around to incorrect Federal Reserve locations, or bank accounts. Virtually no one understands the big picture mechanics behind depositing checks, including tellers. The average bank draft or cashiers check can take 2 weeks to clear, not 2 days. Yet everyone thinks cashiers checks are as good as cash, and they think they clear the next day. Bottom line, the scammers know the banking system well, and capitalize on this arbitrage of time quite well. The banks make the funds available in your bank account within 48 hours of your deposit, days before the cashiers check clears- or bounces. Then they take the money back out of your account, and blacklist you.

Vacation Rental Renting Scams

I would guess that renting a vacation rental presents the biggest opportunity for fraud. Just today I got a call from a vacationer who had sent $300 to an alleged vacation rental property owner for a deposit. The owner / scammer emailed back and said that his manager has received the deposit, but he had been in a car accident and was in the hospital, would the prospective renter mind sending in another deposit check for $300?

I’ve also had it where the prospective renter has sent in a deposit, signed a contract and went to the property for their stay only to find that the vacation rental did not exist.

For every 5 horror stories there are a 1000 success stories, but the risk remains. Prospective renters need to take every possible precaution to protect themselves against fraud. Here are

7 Ways to Avoid Vacation Rental Fraud

1) Pay via credit card. Credit card companies hate chargebacks. Scammers will have a lot of chragebacks and won’t be accepting credit cards for long.

2) Does the vacation rental have a website? Most vacation rental owners now have websites, and most scammers won’t go through the trouble of creating a website. Look up who owns the domain of the website, using a WhoIs server. If the ownership if the domain is hidden that should be a big red flag that something is suspicious. Cross reference the name of the domain owner with the owner of the vacation rental.

3) Does the vacation rental owner answer the phone or do they prefer to communicate only via email? If you cannot ever communicate via the phone, that is another huge red flag.

4) is the email address of the property owner a @aol.com, or @gmail.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com address? Many vacation rental owners still have these types of email addresses, but so do many scammers, because they are easy to obtain. I always prefer to deal with owner who have the same email address as the domain of their website. In my own example, my website is www.rosewoodpointe.com and my email address is rentals@rosewoodpointe.com.

5) Is the property owner / property listed with the local Chamber of Commerce?

6) Does the Better Business Bureau have any recent reports against the owner?

7) Google the property owners name, phone and email address. If this individual has any record of previous misconduct many people will report it on public forums, etc. Google the actual property address as well to make sure the property exists.

Check out the various vacation rental fraud reporting blogs and databases, here are a list of the ones I am aware of:

- VacationRentalDirect.com Fraud Reporting
- Paradise Properties by Owner has some good scam alerts.
- HomeAway.com has a list of actual emails other property owners have received.

ULTIMATELY USE THE SNIFF TEST, IF SOMETHING DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT, IT PROBABLY ISNT’ RIGHT. ALL PROPERTY OWNERS SHOULD BE COURTEOUS AND WILLING TO ACCOMMODATE ANY REQUESTS YOU MAY HAVE REGARDING THEIR PROPERTY. IF THEY SEEM INDIGNANT OR RUDE OR UNWILLING TO BEND OVER BACKWARDS TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT SENDING IN A DEPOSIT CHECK, THEN MOVE ON TO ANOTHER PROPERTY!!!!!!!!!

Scams on Vacation Rentals By Owner Listing Sites

As much as we would like to guarantee that every property listing on our site is legitimate – it’s just not feasibly possible to do so. Fraudsters can sign up using stolen credit cards at any time. Until we get the chargeback notice, that listing will be live on our site. There are areas which are more prone to scams, those areas we review the transactions much more closely. We even went so far as to block all listings that originated from Nigeria.

Note: I am going to try my first “trackback” here to reference a post on another blog at FlipKey, which also posts material about the vacation rental industry. It’s a good, well informed blog, check it out.

Anyways, FlipKey had mentioned that two other vacation rental by owner listing sites have recently implemented a sort of vacation rental insurance to protect vacationers from renting a vacation rental that doesn’t exist. We are considering offering a similar type of insurance for renters at VacationRentalDirect.com. You can read more about it at FlipKey’s blog HERE..

Life is a bitch. Today I spent a lot of time learning all about things that I am sure all you have known since their inception. Things like RSS Feeds, Feedburner, Wordpress Widgets, etc. I had to redo my sidebar.php file to “widgetize” it. However, the CSS formatting is all messed up, so tomorrow my designer will take a look at it.

I was able to get Gravatars set up for commenting, but there are some remaining formatting issues. I also found a plugin that displays the author avatar next to each post. I am hoping to get a few other plugins installed including MyBlogLog. Tag Clouds and some sort of search functionality are needed as well.

Why put myself through all this hell? Well most of the functionality is required to aid in the distribution and sharing of our content to other users and other social news and media sites. Additionally, many of the tools allow us to measure and track the number of visitors to our site as well as the number of subscribers to our RSS feeds. It is nice to know if all of this work is yielding any tangible results.

In summary, a clean, modern, ad free, web 2.0 style design is important to attract and keep visitors. The web is full of junk blogs. I am hoping to keep my blog simple and easy-to-use, like our vacation rental listing service. To be successful in the social media world, a blog needs to have tools to help readers share the material with their friends and with their networks.

On a final note, I am down to three avatars from the over 40 submission to my avatar design contest at SitePoint.com. In an odd twist of events it turns out that the submission that I liked the best was copied from iStockPhoto.com. Five minutes and $3.00 later I owned a licensed copy of the image:

Here are the other two I really like:

In the end I chose the image that you see next to each of my posts. It’s a caricature of me as a superhero with my screen name underneath it. I really like it and will be deploying it across all the social news and media sites that I participate in!

Social Media Marketing is sort of a buzz phrase these days. Social Media as a whole encompasses a variety of sites like or similar to MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon and there are literally 100s of others. I have a lame myspace profile and an even lamer facebook profile, but in the end, those sites just bored the hell out of me. Why not just call each other or God forbid go meet up somewhere? Hell, I am only 35, but to me MySpace and Facebook seem like a complete fad and waste of time. God gave a real world to explore, why immerse myself in a virtual one?

But my wife got into myspace, so at times, I could sort of see the appeal. But not really. The marketing aspect of myspace and facebook is interesting, but after helping to pioneer embeddable videos and widgets using another site I own, PcPlanets.com, the whole scene just bored me. Which is pretty apparent if you look at the design of PcPlanets.com. The content is updated, but the design is quite dated.

So I’ve been slow to catch on to this whole notion of social media marketing. I’ve never used Digg.com and never bothered with StumbleUpon or Squidoo either, although I’ve seen plenty of mentions of them in the media and on various webmaster forums; but, it just seemed like a waste of time.

When I did finally visit Digg, I totally just took the low road and spammed them with content and articles. Of course that didn’t work. So fast forward another nine months and now I am giving social media marketing another shot, but this time I am going to engage the community only after doing a great deal of research and planning.

Learnings:

1) I need a brand. If I am going to become an active social participant, I need a simple, bold, memorable identity. Which means I need an avatar. After scrolling many of the SU (StumbleUpon) profiles, I found that I investigated the users with best avatars first. In returning, or in visiting other sites, or when just stumbling around, I was able to recall avatars that were clean, bold and identifiable. So it makes sense that if I am to participate online, I need an avatar.

2) I can’t do it alone. My objective is to develop an influencer profile on SU. It’s not going to be easy, it will take months of work. Perhaps I’ll never quite get there, because I am a busy guy. In the end, it is my hope that by really working at contributing to the community and working to network with some of the influencers on SU, that my profile strength will increase and I’ll turn the heads of a few veterans who will DIGG or Stumble some of my stuff.

3) Great content. I’ve got some innovative ideas for blog postings and content relevant to the real estate and vacation rental verticals,as well as some stuff relevant to coding, marketing and rich media. I’ll take my time, work on some solid content, correct grammar and spelling, and overall put out content that has value to others.

In the end, I hope to really focus on writing or obtaining some informative content about regional areas of the world that have high concentrations of vacation rentals. By writing informed material, perhaps sometimes even controversial material, about regional matters, I hope to draw attention, traffic and additional writings from other bloggers, journalists and renters to those areas which in the end will increase my deep internal links, which will increase my search engine rankings.

Thus when it’s all said and done, I will have built up a strong profile filled with like minded individuals with an interest in travel, lodgings and vacation rentals. Hopefully I’ll be stumbling and reviewing other sites daily and submitting some great content for the members of my network to stumble and review. Along the way we’ll all learn a great deal about social media networking, learn a bunch from each other and hopefully drive a ton of long term social media and search engine traffic to our respective sites.

I think it’s going to be a long and hard process. I will publish the results as they come in. Let’s begin.

Traffic to VacationRentalDirect.com reached an all-time high of 1920 unique visitors yesterday. For simplicity’s sake we’ll say 2000 unique visits per day, that puts us at 60,000 unique visits per month. That’s up 8x from last year at this time. Vacation Rental sites are a bear to get going. There are so many new entrants in recent years and it’s tough to get high search engine rankings for all the regional keywords. That’s what I do however, and I do it well.

That’ s best evidenced by our national search engine rankings on Google for the large, generic terms:

Vacation Rentals – #3 (sometimes #2)
Vacation Rental – #3
Vacation Homes – #2
Beach Homes – #4

etc. The list is long and notable.

That’s great, but we really need to start scoring with the regional terms. We are getting some traction on the first three pages, but there’s a lot of work remaining. I’ve got a plan, and the plan will work, and next year at this time I predict our traffic will be much closer to 20,000 unique visitors per day.

My stats come from Google Analytics.

I didn’t have the EPS files for the old logo and it was time to inject a little more color into the site. The blog and the helpspot support area have not been updated yet, but we are getting there. We’ll be relaunching the rest of the index page soon. It’s just time to mix things up a little!!!