Renting

So if you have this villa in Orlando, the idea, probably, is that you won’t be living here all year round. You might just use it for the winter months to escape the cold, especially if you work at Aurora tow company or you might use it for your summer vacation. Or a little bit of both. To each his own. The point is, there are presumably going to be months of the year in which you will not be at this villa. So what’s going to happen to the place when you’re not around?

Will you visit frequently to make sure everything is still intact? Do you have a friend who lives down there year-round check in on it every once in a while? Do you give people access so they can get in every week or so and check on things (is that a thing people do? … I don’t know)? Or do you rent it out? There are obviously pros and cons to renting out your gorgeous villa to people who aren’t you.  We’ll start with the pros.

First of all, you’re going to make money off of this deal, which is always a huge plus. And you don’t even really have to do anything. Send in a cleaning crew maybe when your renters leave if you can’t get down there yourself to give the place a once over, and Bob’s your uncle, there you go, you’re making money. The dream situation, I’d imagine, would be to have some friends in there. If they’re really close friends, maybe you’d let them stay there for free, and their payment of sorts could just be looking after the place while you’re not there. Or maybe they’re just acquaintances, or friends of friends, and you could actually charge them a little something. But if you want to go traditional and rent to strangers, the nice thing about the property being in Orlando is that you’re very likely to get lots of families with kids who are looking for a reasonably-priced home base from which they can pop over to Disney. Generally, I’d like to believe, that’s a pretty non-destructive demographic.

Now the cons. I guess the obvious one is that you can never be absolutely sure (if you choose to rent to strangers, that is), what kind of people you’re going to get. Maybe they seem nice-enough, sure, but perhaps their four-year-old doesn’t have the same standards of cleanliness that you do, and it turns out it’s because its parents don’t particularly enforce such things. This could leave you with a mess on your hands, or maybe even some damage, which will probably mean either having a very awkward conversation with your renters, or spending money, or both. That said, even if you do have great renters and they leave everything squeaky clean, maybe you’re not the type of person who is okay with people sleeping in your bed and sitting on your couches and using your utensils, etc, etc. Sure, you’ll get the stuff cleaned, and on the utensil front, we all go to restaurants, right? But the thought of other people having slept in my bed, even though I would get it cleaned, wouldn’t be my favourite thing.

There are probably lots of other things to factor in here, but there are a few basic things to consider before renting out your home away from home.