When Heather Bayer bought her first vacation rental property in Ontario’s Cottage Country in 1997, there were scarce educational resources for new hosts and managers. At the time, property managers were the main gatekeepers of this knowledge, but they weren’t often eager, or even willing, to share it with newcomers.
“I approached a property manager with my first property, and I said, I want to run it myself, but I want to know how to do it properly. And she said, ‘You know, I’m just not willing to talk to you about that,’” Heather recounted.
Learning vacation rental management the hard way
This void in information forced Heather to learn how to manage her rental property on her own through experience and making mistakes over a number of years. But it also planted a sense of purpose for Heather to give to others what she had been denied – educational resources, mentorship, and a place where amateurs could get their questions answered.
“I’ve owned over the years seven vacation rentals, and I managed up to 180 for nearly 20 years, and I made a lot of mistakes both in my own properties and in some of the properties we took on board to manage,” Heather reflected on her podcast, Vacation Rental Success, in November 2023. “Some of those mistakes were painful and costly to learn from so what I’m talking about today stems from a lot of experience.”
Writing vacation rental how-tos
Coming from a family with decades of hospitality experience and as a former owner of a business management training company, Heather gravitated towards writing about her experiences in vacation rental management.
In 2005, she compiled her many experiences and lessons learned into a book, later revised and published under the title, “Renting Your Recreational Property for Profit”.
In 2007, she launched a blog called CottageBlogger.com. The blog gave Heather a more timely platform to share lessons learned, discuss developments in the industry, and add downloads, checklists, and lengthier articles.
“The blog came out of all the mistakes I made, but also what I was seeing in that industry in that particular location, where the mantra was ‘Leave as found,” Heather said. “If you rented somewhere, then when you left it, you had to do all the housework on the last day or the last two days, or you lost your deposit. You brought your own linens. Mouse droppings were seen as standard. It really was the Wild West, and I wanted to bring it into the 21st century.”
Mouse droppings, in fact, played a role in Heather’s decision to buy a vacation rental in Ontario. In 1997, she and 12 family members who were attending a wedding in Ontario reserved a cottage on the shore of one of the more than 250,000 lakes in the Canadian province. When they arrived in the vicinity, a boat was waiting to escort them to the cottage, which was accessible only by water.
The cottage was not as comfortable and cozy as they had envisioned. The only occupants for the past six months had been mice, leaving behind an unwelcome housewarming gift of droppings for the family to clean up. The septic holding tank was filled to the brim, and Heather and the 12 others had to share one outhouse for a week.
Despite the unexpected hardships, they made the best of their time together. On their last day at the cabin, Heather and her sister sat on a rock, watching a captivating sunset over the lake and reflecting on their visit.
“And I said, ‘You know, I could do this [cottage rental business], and I could do it much better.”
She returned to her home in Oxford, England, and five months later she returned to Ontario and bought her first vacation rental cottage.
When her husband retired from the U.K. military, they made the decision to move to Ontario in 2003 and start a full-scale property management firm that would manage their cottages and properties owned by others.
One of the first vacation rental podcasts
Part of Heather’s mission to level up the vacation rental industry has meant adapting to change. Heather’s blog overlapped with the beginning of significant disruptions in the industry: the explosion of digital marketing, the emergence of Airbnb, HomeAway’s takeover of Vrbo, and TripAdvisor’s introduction of guest reviews, Heather noted.
In 2013, she started a podcast, embracing another growing popular medium. When she started the Vacation Rental Success podcast, only one other vacation rental podcast existed, Jasper Ribbers’ Get Paid for Your Pad.
“The blog was about me; it was about my experiences. But my experiences were fairly narrow,” Heather said. “Ontario, Canada, is not the big, wide world of vacation rentals.”
Around that time, Heather also started attending vacation rental conferences and seeing the broader picture of the industry. She interviewed some of the early influencers in the industry like Tyann Marcink and Matt Landau, who has been a guest on her podcast at least 10 times.
READ: Why volunteering is good for your vacation rental business
“I wanted to explore what other people were doing in the business and to bring their perspectives because mine was a little bit too narrow at the time,” she said. “I was still and am still in that period of lifelong learning. And I was learning every time I spoke to somebody and interviewed them. I learned something else that I then went back and applied to my business.”
While these nuggets of wisdom were helpful to her business, they also helped the businesses of her listeners. The podcast is now up to 535 episodes and 1.5 million downloads.
Going back to vacation rental school
The Vacation Rental Formula Business School is the most recent evolution in Heather’s mission to continue education for hosts, managers, and their staff with a focus on building businesses based on the pillars of trust, responsibility, and hospitality. She and her son, Mike, who also was a property maintenance specialist, have created a virtual and in-person business school for training property management staff and independent hosts in all aspects of the short-term rental business.
The vacation rental industry has come a long way not just in economic influence and technological advancements but also in its sense of culture and community. Heather said she is proud of the generosity of spirit and willingness to help others that she’s seen people in the industry exhibiting on a daily basis.
These changes are evident in vacation rental forums and Facebook groups like the Business of Short-Term Rental Property Management, which Heather started.
“I’m still blown away by how helpful and giving people are and particularly to new people coming into the business,” Heather said. “And that is something that really lights me up.”
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