Almost ready for guests!

The duck house is almost ready for guests! We’ve been working hard on furnishing, decorating and finishing up the last of the interior repairs. This past weekend, I installed a handrail to the basement (much safer now), put all the knobs in the upstairs bathroom, fastened the shower curtain rod to the wall so it won’t come down any more, installed a lock on the crawl space so our guests don’t accidentally end up in the not-so-pleasant crawl space, removed the 6 inches of dirt from the steps on the side of the house, and various other improvements.

I also had the pleasure of meeting one of our reserved guests who is in town for a quick visit, but will be coming for about a week in June to watch her daughter graduate from UW. She had many good things to say about the house and I think she’s very much looking forward to her visit. This should be a fun place for her family, since everybody can come and go as they please, and it will feel very comfortable.

Only 3 weeks until our first guests!

Waterfront vacation rentals near Seattle (my competition)

If someone wants to rent a waterfront vacation home near Seattle, what are their choices? Well, they could stay with me, of course. But, since I want my potential guests to have all the information they need to make their decision, maybe I should show them all of their choices.

Well, here we go:

name	location	water?	BD/BA	sleeps	pets	flexibility in summer	weekly summer rate (inc. cleaning)
The Seaside Chalet	near Alki	Puget Sound, across the street	3/2	5-6	no	5 night min	2150
Wisteria Hollow (multiple homes)	near Gig Harbor	Puget Sound, private beach	7/5	4-24	no	5 night min	1200-3000
The Salish House	near Gig Harbor	Puget Sound, private beach	2/1	3-5	yes	7 nights, Sat-Sat	1750
Vashon Island Cabin	Vashon Island	Puget Sound, high bank, private beach	1/1	2-4	yes	3 night min	1000-1400
The Lucian	West Seattle	Puget Sound, 1 block to beach	3/2	2-6	no	5 night min	1485
Waterfront Cottage on Lk Sammamish	Lk. Sammamish	Freshwater lakefront	1/2	2-5	no	generally require 1 week	1550
Waterfront Escape	between SeaTac and Tacoma	Puget Sound, high bank	4/3	8	no	5 night min	2900
Waterfront and Beach Cottage (2 choices)	Magnolia (in Seattle)	Puget Sound, beachfront	1/1	2	no	6 night min	980/1575
Lk Wash Waterfront rental (shared home with owners)	near Renton	Lk. Washington, lakefront	2/2	4-6	no	3 or 7 night min	1400
Lowman Beach House	West Seattle	Puget Sound, public beach across the street from house	2/2	4-6	no	5 night min	2045
Lowman Beach House	West Seattle	Puget Sound, public beach across the street from house	1/1	2-3	no	5 night min	1495
House Boat	Seattle	In Lk. Union	1/2	4	no	1 month
near Alki Beach	Alki Beach	1/2 to beach	2/1	2-4	yes	1 week	1200
condo at Alki	Alki Beach	?	2/2	4	yes	?	1200?
Alki Beach condo	Alki	1/2 to beach	2/1	4-6	no	?	1200
The Captain’s House	W. Seattle	Puget Sound, 1/2 block to beach	3/1	6	no	1 week	1300
Home Above the Bay	??	Puget Sound, high bank, private access	7/3	14	no	1 week	3425
Edgeriver Estate	Near North Bend	riverfront	3/2	5-6	no	1 week	1700
Alki Beach House	W. Seattle	1/2 block from Alki Beach	1/1	2-4	no	1 week	1200
Duck House	Seattle (15 min north of downtown)	private freshwater lake access (Bitter Lake)	2/3	6-7	yes	3 night min	1700
Waterfront Luxury home	Lk. Sammamish	private lake access	5/3	10	no	1 week	3700

It looks like there are only 4 Seattle rental houses in VRBO on a freshwater lake: 2 on Lk Sammamish, 1 on Lk Washington and ours. None of the other ones allow dogs. The two on Lk Sammamish have a 1 week minimum, and the one on Lk Washington is a shared rental (i.e. the owners live upstairs). All the rentals in W. Seattle & Alki have a street between the house and the water. There seems to be some private water access for some of the Puget Sound waterfront homes – but those are pretty far from the city (which might be a good thing if that’s what you’re looking for)… but only really hardy swimmers go in the Sound since it is so cold.

There you have it. It seems like The Duck House is a unique place to stay: private lake access, close to downtown, dog friendly, 3 night minimum.

Ads running: VRBO, craigslist, google

Alright, now that the website for the rental is live, its time to get some guests! I spent some time comparing the big vacation rental websites, and found that VRBO seems to still be the biggest destination out there. Some of the other sites have nicer search interfaces, and look more modern, but vrbo still gets most of the traffic. For the Seattle area, they had about 80 rentals, while the other sites had less than half of that number. Maybe if people start renting and liking our place, then we can expand to the other places as well.

To get the ad running on VRBO, I had to decide how high up on the list to go. The way you get higher on the default list is to post more photos, and they charge you a base rate of $179/year plus $24/year for each additional photo. beyond the 3 included photos. They also have a nice little table which shows you how many photos you need in order to get higher in the list. Here are the values from that text table in a chart. You can see that the more you pay per year, the higher your ad placement. I chose 4 pictures, in order to get me about halfway up the list. From there, it didn’t seem worth the extra money to get higher. Maybe if this turns out to be a success I can pay more money to increase the prestige of the place.

As for google adwords, I made a text ad and decided to pay a decent amount per click for the first couple weeks, with a moderate daily budget (about $5) for some popluar keywords like “seattle vacation rental,” until I start getting bookings. I’ll turn that down in a couple weeks.

Finally, I posted an ad on one of my favorite sites: craigslist. I just grabbed an excerpt from my main web page and put it in the ad with a link back to my web page.

Maybe in a week, I’ll see where (or if) I get more traffic and bookings!

Main website now up

The main Seattle Duck House website is now up. I spent about 8 hours getting the text written and images all set up. We picked a nice “logo” image from a search of creative commons licensed photos at flickr for mallard duck and found a great close-up photo taken by Mike Baird.

I “bought” the domain name on April 12: it is actually free when you keep the site hosted at Microsoft Office Live. They will also pay for the annual renewals. As far as I can tell, the only catch is that they put a Live Search bar in the upper left and a tiny Office Live logo in lower right. There are no ads anywhere – so it still looks very clean and professional.

Why did I pick MS Office Live? Well, I’ve always tended to cheer for the underdogs, especially when they are the home team… So, I decided to see what they had to offer – especially since it was free. I have plenty of experience writing HTML from scratch, and I’ve even tried a few other domain name and hosting services (notably godaddy.com). This is far better and easier, and I don’t feel like they’re trying to suck more and more purchases out of me.

It turns out that it really nicely integrates mail, domain name picking, website design, and web statistics. Most of the features only work with IE (but the Office Live Mail works fine on Firefox). The web design interface at Office Live was actually very pleasant and intuitive. There were a few quirky things here and there, but overall, I’ve been very pleased about the service. I can’t complain when its free. But, in reality, there’s not much to complain about for hosting a static website.