Whether you own a beach home on 30A, a villa in Destin, or a condo in Panama City Beach, there are a lot of things to take into consideration before putting your vacation rental on a rental market. Does your unit need to be updated with newer furniture? Do the electronics need to be updated? Fresh paint? The list goes on. You will also need to determine if you will hire a professional management company or manage your vacation rental yourself. Self-management has its pros and cons and is not for everyone. Vacation rental listing websites like Flipkey provide a lot of self management tools for your vacation rental, but they don’t mention the daily tasks that come with the management of a property. To help you determine if you want to manage your property yourself or hire a professional management company, consider this list of Pro’s and Con’s of Self Management.Pros of Self-ManagementManaging the property yourself can save you commission fees. Some management companies charge as much as 40% commission to manage your vacation rental.You have complete control of who enters your property.Cons of Self-ManagementYou must find and manage your own housekeeping team. – A professional management company will inspect after a unit has been cleaned to make sure the housekeepers are cleaning the property to your guests expectations. Nothing turns a rental sour quicker that an uncleaned unit.You have to have a good list of contacts for maintenance and repairs. When the A/C goes out, or the garbage disposal gets jammed, who will you call? Most management companies have on staff maintenance and a list of preferred service providers to take care of issues quickly to minimize disruption to your guests vacation.You must make yourself available after hours for air conditioning issues or guests locked out of condo (etc). The phone rings at 2:00 AM to discover the guest left the key in the condo before they left for a night out on the town. How will you get them into the property? A management company will have after hours attendants that can issue new codes or retrieve existing codes to help guests get back into the property.You will spend a great deal of time doing marketing. Do you have a website for your property? Where will you market your property? Who is answering your rental inquiry emails while you are at work or spending time with your family? Do you want to answer calls concerning your property and the proximity of restaurants or shopping? A professional management company does all of that for you with professional marketing, websites, and knowledgeable, professional customer service.Execution of rental contracts via fax or email. Your rental contract must be written to ensure the safety of your guests as well as the safety of others and to protect your investment. Will you hire an attorney to write your rental agreement? Will you collect these via mail or email? How will you enforce the terms if a guest violates them? A management company will execute all rental agreements electronically at time of booking and have already done the leg work of crafting a rental agreement that allows you to rest knowing these things have already been taken care of.You will have to collect rent payments. Accepting rental deposits by check gets dicey sometimes especially when a guest books a stay 5 days prior to arrival. Will you mail a key before you receive a check and have given it time to clear? You could set up a merchant account to accept credit card payments over the phone but you will also have to pay monthly fees and a percentage of each transaction to do so. Also, if you collect damage deposits, you will have to refund those after you verify there was no damage to your property. A professional management company already has a merchant account and can receive timely payment prior to allowing access to your investment.You will have to do your own evictions if a guest becomes unruly. There are many factors involved in doing a legal eviction if a guest becomes unruly or violates occupancy or age restrictions. A professional management company knows the ins and outs of this process and will take care of these issues for you.You will have to pay your monthly taxes. It’s a time consuming process and one that must be done monthly to ensure you are legally renting your property. Depending on where your property is, there could also be local tourism taxes that must be accounted for. Failure to know all of the required taxes could cost you money in the long run.You will have to obtain your own license to rent out your property. This one is also very important. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulations requires all transient rentals to be licensed under Section 509. A professional management company will take care of licensing your property for legal transient vacation rentals.Managing your own property is very time consuming. Managing a vacation rental is not a hobby, it is a part time job at its least demanding time, and a full time job during peak seasons. Take a look at your existing schedule and ask yourself if you can take on additional responsibility right now.A vacation rental management company makes owning a vacation rental property fairly painless by taking care of all of the non-glamorous tasks of owning a beach property. If you do decide to self-manage, I wish you nothing but success and that all of your guests are great people.

The dynamism of the technological sector within today’s society is unstoppable. For this reason, many employees use their own mobile devices to access their company’s network. This tendency, called BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), is being adopted fundamentally by younger workers that use their own devices for professional purposes to avoid having to carry different smartphones or tablets with them.The risk of this radical initiative lies in the lack of security since these personal devices are completely out of the corporate administrator’s control. This is demonstrated in an international survey conducted among young workers by Fortinet. The company chose young employees for this analysis as they are considered to be the ones who will spread BYOD to the rest of the workforce.The report published by Fortinet indicates that three out of four workers use a personal mobile device to connect to their company’s network. The main reasons lie in the advantages of BYOD highlighted by the respondents, which are immediate and nonstop access to corporate data and more efficiency. On the other hand, half of the respondents are conscious that this way of working increases the risk of malware. Thus, companies are now exposed to two new dangers: the insecurity of their corporate data, and the risk of their network being infected with a virus.To solve the problem of data insecurity that a company may face because of BYOD, organizations should secure their networks, not the personal mobile devices used by their employees. The danger does not lie in these mobile devices, as more and more tasks are being performed remotely, but it lies in the workers’ corporate network access.Misappropriation of corporate dataThe lack of corporate security is also reflected in the conclusion of a study commissioned by the company Iron Mountain, which interviewed 2,000 employees of all ages and sectors in Germany, Spain, France and Britain. The report states that one in three employees (32%) has been taking or forwarding confidential information out of the office on more than one occasion. In addition, the survey reveals that half of European workers (51%) takes corporate information with them when they change jobs considering that it will be useful in their new position.Meanwhile, companies are extremely concerned about the control and confidentiality of their corporate documentation, and are rushing to adjust their data protection policies before the new European Union legislation comes into force. After all, their employees are taking highly confidential information that is essential to its reputation, competitiveness and customer satisfaction, outside the company.In fact, companies that are concerned about information security tend to focus on protecting their digital data, which highlights the need for document management software to adapt to each individual case.The study further suggests that a lack of specific information regarding data management policies or an inadequate application of these policies can be a decisive factor in cases where information has been lost. Only about half of the respondents (57%) stated that they clearly knew when documentation is confidential and a third (34.4%) confirmed that they were unaware of the existence of company guidelines as to whether or not the data could be used for non-corporate purposes.Document technology software manufacturers also play an important role in aspects such as safety, preservation and confidentiality of information, as they can and should make companies understand the IT risks that they might face. For example, they can help them discern the right time to transform their corporate architecture to safeguard an asset of great importance as is the privacy of corporate data.In fact, much of the success of implementing security policies lies in the awareness of employees and in its daily course of business. This means that ignoring a company’s security policies would jeopardize the safety of the organization.For further reading see: Fortinet and Iron Mountain