Welcome to Great Stays
The staycation experts
Great Stays was created specifically to give landlords the ability to maximize their short-term rental opportunities without any hassle.
Simply put, Great Stays landlords enjoy more profit, for no extra work.
2018 – Paul Horton has built a successful local estate agent managing up to 400 properties. Wanting to resolve the lack of short term accommodation locally, he founded Great Stays as a new niche property management company with the vision of Great Stays becoming the expert in the Lincoln short-lettings market
2021 – Great Stays provide a first-class stay-cation co-host service and experience for their guests listing landlords properties on 25 different marketing and booking platforms
Paul’s vision now entails expansion through England, Scotland and Wales without compromising these high standards. Please see our Franchise Opportunity
The company is growing at an astonishing rate year-on-year and currently on target to be the 2nd largest short-let management company in the UK.
Our Company Core Values
We’ve been able to deliver on our promises from the start, not just to our landlords, but also as importantly, to our guests. We care about keeping our landlord’s properties safe and their wallets filling. We need to be always evolving, pushing the lengths we go to, to be able to deliver the ultimate staycation experience.
From the professional photos, descriptions, room measurements and final preparation for listing and calendar management, we have you covered.
With our dynamic pricing strategy working alongside our state-of-the-art guest booking technology, we will always try to fill open dates and last-minute cancellations.
You can check on your property status via our clients portal and see real time occupancy levels, money earned, and look ahead to future bookings.
You can easily reserve your property for your own use or use by friends and family. You can simply see and track all current and future bookings
The exciting bit! Track the amount of money you are making in any period. Week by week, month by month accessing the same realtime data we use.
Mistakes should be examined, learned from, and not dwelled upon and stored. Read the amazing things people are saying about their stay in your property
Use our contact to fill out your details and one of our dedicated on-boarding learn with give you a call you to discuss your property and its suitability.
We will guide you though the process of getting your property ready for short term lettings, the minimum standard and things you will need.
The exciting part! See your property go live on all our marketing portals worldwide maximizing your property’s exposure to potential guests.
Ideally suited to existing lettings agents who already have an established landlord and property base to draw upon.
Your landlords benefit from the business model and can achieve 50-100% improvement in their property yields.
Perfect for people who are truthful, honest and passionate about property, and want a great add on to their existing business.
I have many years experience in the residential lettings industry. The Great Stays franchise is a second string to my bow. Compared to working in the residential lettings market running a Great Stays franchise has very little red tape and continually offers for greater profits for me thon residential lettings. Very pleased.
R topliss
1) Bath
2) Belfast
3) Birmingham
4) Blackpool
5) Bournemouth
6) Bridgewater
7) Brighton
8) Cambridge
9) Canterbury
10) Cardiff
11) Chester
12) Chichester
13) Dumfries
14) East Berkshire
15) East Fife
16) East London
17) Edinburgh
18) Exeter
19) Filey
20) Galloway
21) Glasgow
22) Guilford
23) Isle of Wight
24) Lake District
25) Leeds
26) Lincoln
27) Liverpool
28) London North
29) London South
30) Manchester
31) Monmouthshire
32) Morcecombe
33) Newcastle
34) Newport
35) Norfolk Coast
36) North Ceredigion
37) North Devon
38) North London
39) North Wales
40) North West
41) Nottingham
42) Oxford
43) Peak District
44) Perranpoth
45) Poole
46) Portsmouth
47) Reading
48) Saddleworth
49) Scarborough
50) Shropshire
51) South Ceredigion
52) South Hampshire
53) South London
54) South Pembrokeshire
55)Southampton
56) St Agnes
57) Suffolk
58) Swansea
59) Wells
60) West Dorset
61) West London
62) Weymouth
63) York
Green = Franchised = Available
If you are interested in talking to us about a franchise for your area please:
General Information
This is a summary of the “frequently asked questions by landlords” interview given by Great Stays UK managing director Paul Horton. You can listen to the full interview here:
Great Stays UK is a limited company created to work with property investors, landlords, and property developers to provide them with an alternative income opportunity to the traditional assured short hold tenancy letting model for their property investment. It was also created to offer guests a better quality of stay in the short and long-term vacation market.
There are many downsides to being in the residential lettings market because of the amount of red tape and legalities that you have to involve yourself in just to be a residential landlord. Compare this to a staycation property where there is no similar regulation.
With staycation properties there are no AST’s, no section 8 and section 21, no deposit protection scheme, and no need to evict a tenant. There are no tenants, people are staying as guests who have been accepted to stay for a set period and set fee, rather like a hotel.
There is also far less wear and tear on the property. The property is cleaned after each guest stays and is therefore being inspected frequently. The landlord has more access to their property.
The property will have less wear and tear and is being cleaned after each guest stay whereas a normal residential let the property will be professionally cleaned only at the end of the tenancy. So the property may be cleaned every two or three days. Even if we have a long-term tenant in your property from an insurance company (homeowner temporary housing for insurance remedial work)or the NHS (locum doctors) for example for a month long stay, we will still do a mid-stay clean, change the bed linen and the towels.
That depends on a variety of factors. As a provider of the staycation business model, there would be no incentive for me to stay in that market vs just running our traditional letting agency unless I can make money at it, which means you also making money.
For example, if we work on achieving typically £99 per night and on achieving 80 to 85% occupancy, you will be receiving more than double what you would normally get from a typical residential let. You could be receiving £2000-£2500 per month in a property that would typically let for £700 per month as a residential let.
It is a hands-off service for you. We take all the stress and hassle away from you. It is a fully managed staycation business, it does exactly what it says on the tin. We do all the laundry, all the cleaning, all the bookings, handle all the guest relations for you, and do all the maintenance.
Typically in residential lets, maintenance is one of the biggest issues, and inspections. Staycation properties are inspected at every clean and this could be every two or three days when we are doing the cleaning. The cleaners complete the checklist at the end of the clean and will report back any issues, breakages or anything missing and then we can take action accordingly. In many ways, your property is being maintained to a higher standard than is possible with a typical residential let, where inspections are once every quarter and the property could be getting treated well.
Give Great Stays your property to manage and sit back and relax. You can use the portal to check on your income, bookings, and reserve the property for your own use.
Absolutely. We expect it. We operate a bookings calendar that works 12 months in advance, so when we are putting the property live on the booking platform you can tell us when you want to use the property yourself. Of course, you might not know in advance when you want to use a property, so you can use the app and see when there are vacant days and book these for yourself, any time you like. The system lets us know and you can go and stay and use the property as any other guest. The cleaning is triggered as it would be for any other staying guests.
Online portal allows you to:
Guest communications is critical to the success of your property as a staycation. We know all of our properties and can successfully handle guest relations which result in good reviews. Good reviews means more guests and more bookings.
The initial term is 12 months and then becomes a rolling contract with 2 months notice of termination by either party. It takes time to get traction. We need to get occupants to get good reviews and good reviews help to get more and more bookings.
If you decide to cancel you can do that once the last booking in the diary has completed.
However, we hope that you are having such a good experience and making good money that you never want to take the property away and enjoy the benefits of it being a staycation property!
This is an important question that we never get asked.
When we convert your property into a staycation property we can transfer it from council tax into business rates since it is operating as a business. So when you come to want to sell the property instead you are selling an ongoing and active business if you want to, and usually, this is far more valuable than just the value of the property itself.
Definitely. I believe properties need to be a bit quirky. Some properties will need the wow factor internally, others less so if the location is the wow factor. We can advise you on a case-by-case basis.
Regardless there are minimum safety standards that we require to be met for us to take your property into our staycation portfolio. We have documentation for you on items such as fire blankets, fire extinguishers etc.
We have relationships with good furniture and décor companies we can put you in touch with for you to deal directly with. They specifically cater for the staycation property market, with packs for kitchens, bathrooms, everything, and even have complete packages including recreational items such as decks of cards, board games, reading books, children’s books, and so on.
We inspect the property initially and we can make recommendations and give advice as to how to improve or modify your property for the staycation market.
We also work with interior designers and if you want to push the boat out we can help with that. It depends on the size and style of the property, how many guests you can accommodate and how much of a wow factor you want to achieve!
As an example, I have a new landlord with a half-million-pound art deco-style property that she has ‘gone to town’ on. The property has ‘wow factor’ and can sleep 10 at a nightly rate of £450.
You don’t have to go to those lengths, we have landlords with cottages that prepare them to match the countryside and others prefer a minimalist look. You don’t have to use our interior designers, and you can do the decor and furnishings yourself. Just be mindful that the materials and designs are of good quality and tasteful to get good reviews from guests, which leads to higher occupancy rates.
It’s useful to remember that this is a home from home and if this was your home from home have you got everything there that you would want, remembering things like a corkscrew, mirrors, etc.
In our lettings business when we take a property on we can take nice photos ourselves, get the property on Right Move and the other portals, and then tenants can come and view and see it for themselves.
However, with a staycation, the photos are your shop front display, so we always use professionally taken photographs. The photos are displayed on portals all over the world. I always find when I am thinking about staying somewhere the images grab my attention and then I am drawn in to read the words. So having the best possible images is everything. It is the arty and lifestyle photos as well that draw us in, and I can’t do them. So I always use a professional to take around 75 images of the property, a mixture of the property and the arty and lifestyle images, for example, the pizza oven in the garden, the shampoos in the bathroom. It makes the property feel opulent, like a hotel. We want to show your property in its best possible light to get as much exposure as we can for your property. To help it stand out from the others.
With 75 or so photos you then have options to rotate them in the adverts, paying attention to whether you are getting the occupancy rates and swap them out accordingly. Once you have a large number of shots once, you don’t need to get them done again.
Anyone can grab photos with a smartphone. Not everyone can take professional photographs.
There is a setup fee at the start of our agreement to cover the professional photos, setting everything on our systems, and the portals, and possibly soaps, shampoos et cetera. But that is a one-off for each property. There are no re-let fees like you can get with a typical residential let property.
We don’t have in-house cleaners, we employ third-party contractors, cleaning companies to do the cleans and laundry for us. We hand select them, we run checks on them and we liaise with them. Normally we work with small local businesses with 4-6 cleaners and not large national cleaning companies. We negotiate a price for a typical two-man two hour clean per two-bedroom property. The cleaners work from our app that notifies them when property cleans are required and us when the cleans are completed.
When you are getting the laundry-free property you will need to have three sets per bed. In answer to the question of why, one set is on the bed, one set is being cleaned and one set will be put on the bed next.
For example with the property that sleeps 10 that I mentioned previously there are 30 sets of laundry for the property. There is a lot of laundry to keep track of. We iron in labels like you used to have on your school uniforms so that we can track everything and we liaise with the laundry companies and the cleaners to make sure everything runs like clockwork. Occasionally we get lucky and have cleaners that also do laundry, which is the best of all worlds as far as I’m concerned, because they have complete control over everything and know where everything is at all times.
Pricing the laundry preparation can be a tricky one. Prices vary, typically we pay £2 per pillowcase and up to £6 per duvet cover.
Cleaning varies anywhere from £11-£18 per hour depending on the area, London is the most expensive. We do not make a charge on this.
The cleaning teams complete the checklist for us and return this after completing the clean. Also, the reviews that we get are overwhelmingly positive. The cleanliness of the property is more important than for example the colour and style of the kettle.
Having the properties clean is very important to the business and if you had a bad review because of cleanliness it can impact the occupancy rates moving forwards a prompt reaction is key. Also, we do random spot checks across the portfolio to check cleanliness.
We don’t normally do accompanied check-ins these days. Checkout time is 11 AM, self-check-in time is anytime from 2 PM. People choose what time they arrive and even if they give us a time, sometimes things can happen, delays in traffic and it’s not cost-effective to have the staff waiting around.
The key safe is a small metal box somewhere on the outside of the property and has double wheels much like the old locks we had on our bikes when we were growing up. Unlike many bike locks, these are extremely secure. Another benefit is that the cleaning teams use the key safes so we no longer have all the traveling around to and from the office to retrieve and return keys.
In 2016 the portals began recommending we all use keys safes and run a remote check-in process. For your property to qualify as ‘business ready’ on Airbnb – which helps to boost occupancy rates – remote check-ins are now required.
How far do you go to look after your guests? I know how far I go which is probably to the ends of the earth to make sure they were happy. This has to be within reason and there have to be limitations. We have dedicated phone lines to handle these requests and they range from how to use the heating, is a decent Chinese takeaway nearby as well as other questions. We recently declined a request to provide a different television because the guest did not like the look of it!
Property rules are there for a reason and many are in place to head off potential problems in advance. For example, we don’t do hen nights, stag dos, large groups of male-only, all to ensure the smooth running of the business and to protect the property.
Allowing pets is a really good thing to do, perhaps not in the city center properties but certainly in the other properties and there is a severe lack of properties where pets are allowed. With such strong demand, allowing pets into your property really can help occupancy rates.
With a brand-new property and no reviews we normally start by reducing the price right down, sometimes by half. We wouldn’t do this for example at Christmas or Boxing Day, but certainly would in the summer.
Without reviews, your property is an unknown entity. By approaching it this way, the initial guests are effectively testing pilots and once they start leaving good reviews it is very easy to start moving the price up.
Your side of the equation is straightforward. Present the property in the way that we recommend. If you go to a jumble sale to pick up small sofas and put in tables that you had in the garage for years that won’t work. But if you do present properly following our guidelines then we can do what we are great at.
We are co-hosts with large portals like Airbnb and Booking.com, which means we get more exposure than a landlord putting a single property. We consistently appear higher in the searches because of this co-host relationship.
Our target is always to get to 80 to 85% occupancy meaning 24 to 25 guests occupied days in a typical 30 day month.
With the cleaning teams working in the property at the end of each guest stay, often several times a week, problems, breakages, items missing are reported back immediately.
Also we work exclusively with Guardhog who provide insurance specifically for protecting landlords of staycation properties.
The booking portals are excellent at handling issues of breakage and loss, they hold the card details of the individual making the booking and will make a charge against the individual once we provide them with evidence.
As a landlord, you are given a unique login to our booking platform portal which gives you full access to how each of your properties is performing, income, expenditure, occupancy, and as mentioned earlier you can also book out specific days for using the property yourself.
The portals payout in the middle of each month and we then transfer to you minus deductions usually within 48 hours of receipt.
It’s very straightforward. You can call the office and we can talk you through it. You can sign up online and sign all the paperwork electronically online. There is simply a case of getting the property ready, getting the photographs done and getting everything added to the portals and starting with the marketing for you.
We will arrange to meet at the property so that we can do an initial inspection and tell you anything that may need to be done to bring the property up to standard. We are not there to be critical of your property, simply there to advise you on how to best present the property to achieve the best occupancy and return. We will also have one of the cleaning teams turn up to do an initial inspection and possibly arrange an initial clean as required.
Head Office:
25 Bailgate, Lincoin. Lincolnshire, LN1 3AP
Liverpool Head Office: 0151 542 5055 I Lincoln Office: 01522 904 904
Email: info@greatstaysuk.co.uk
Web: www.greatstaysuk.co.uk
71 Moss Lane,
Orrell Park, Liverpool,
L9 8AE
Tel: 0151 542 5055
25 Bailgate, Portico House,
Lincoln, Lincolnshire,
LN1 3AP
Tel: 01522 904 904
Email: info@greatstaysuk.co.uk