Cape Cod Vacation Rentals: The Flat Fee Advantage

What is Cape Cod Vacation Rentals?

Cape Cod Vacation Rentals is a niche home rental site that charges a $99 annual flat fee to list your residence for rent.

How it works

This site simply charges an advertising fee to list your Cape Cod home for rent.

Cape Cod Vacation Rentals review:

There are two ways to pay for advertising your property for rent — a flat fee that’s charged up-front to advertise; or a commission that’s charged against each booking. Cape Cod Vacation Rentals is in the flat-fee camp.

Flat fees are sometimes criticized because they’re levied before the homeowner earns any money. However, for those who end up renting their homes for more than a few nights, they tend to be the less-costly option for the homeowner and the renter. And this is particularly true when you’re dealing with expensive rentals.

Flat fees vs. commissions

Consider someone who secures a $5,000 one-month rental of their property. If you pay a 20% commission on that rental, you give up a $1,000 commission, netting just $4,000. If, however, you paid just $99 to advertise, your net is $4,901 — $901 less.

The challenge, of course, is that the fee is a sure thing. Rentals are not. Thus, before paying a flat fee, you need to feel confident that the site where you are listing your rental draws enough traffic to secure you a few bookings.

One concern

This is our one concern about Cape Cod Vacation Rentals. This site is relatively young and only gets about 4,000 – 10,000 site visits per month. That said, Cape Cod rentals are a category unto themselves and that may be enough traffic to generate rentals, particularly during peak summer months. Given that many of the rentals charge five times the annual advertising cost for a single night’s lodging, it’s probably not a bad gamble.

Recommendations

Cape Cod Vacation Rentals is worth a try. However, if you’re looking to rent your home as much as possible, we’d also recommend that you list with Airbnb. The site simply gets better web traffic than all of its competitors and charges homeowners the most reasonable fees. (Homeowners pay a 3% site commission; renters pay about 15%.)

Also consider WeNeedaVacation, another fee-only advertising site that specializes in Cape Cod rentals.

2/26/2023