The ‘Invite to book’ feature is a fundamental step in your renting process on HousingAnywhere!

When you invite to book, you are welcoming a potential tenant to book your accommodation and paying the first month’s rent in advance.

There are two ways to get to a booking; either accepting a booking request or sending an invitation to book, which then has to be accepted by the tenant.

In our experience, tenants are more likely to accept an invitation than to send a booking request. Advertisers who ‘invite to book’ find a tenant on average 3 times faster!

We strongly advise you to send an invitation to book!

How to properly use the “Invite to book” feature

When you receive a message from an interested tenant, you should already have most of information needed to evaluate a candidate. If the candidate is a good fit for you, you can answer their message and then click on the “Invite to book” feature.

Once you send an invitation to book, your selected tenant has 48 hours to confirm their booking and complete their payment.

The “invite to book” feature is the most powerful tool to show tenant that you're happy to host them in your accommodation. More than that, inviting to book increase your ranking position in the search results and, remember: the more you invite to book, the more you increase your chance to get bookings!

There are several different scenarios you could face before inviting a tenant to book

1. Did you receive more than one interesting request?

Congratulations on your success in attracting tenants! You can now invite ALL tenants simultaneously! The first tenant who completes the booking will get your accommodation. Once that is done, all the other “invite to book” requests will be automatically cancelled.

2. Would you like to find out more about your potential tenant before you invite them to book?

No problem, you can ask all the information you need via the conversation feature, to ensure you make an informed decision, and then you can send an ‘invite to book’ request.

3. Are you not receiving appealing requests from prospective tenants?

If you're not getting requests that match your criteria, don’t worry. Simply answer to the tenant kindly refusing their request and click on “Decline”. Read more about how to receive more relevant requests.

4. Are you not receiving any requests?

Don’t worry, we can help you improve this! One of the ways we can make sure your property is getting noticed is by making your listing the best it can be! Follow our guides on how to make your listing more appealing and how to improve your visibility on the search results.

Sending a 'Special Offer'

When you find your preferred tenant but their request doesn’t quite match your requirements, then you can make them a ‘Special offer’ and make adjustments in your offering just for that tenant.

The ‘Special Offer’ feature enables you to make a tailored offer to the preferred tenant of your choice. This offer can be either about the price or date range that meets your requirements.

Once you've decided what the offer is you want to make, simply click the ‘Special offer’ button, then adjust either the date range or rental price you want to offer.

The ‘Special offer’ function works in the same way as the ‘invite to book’ function, in that it is still an invitation to book your property, just with the special offer terms you have decided to offer that particular tenant.

To recap by being proactive and inviting tenants to book or making them a special offer will ensure that you'll find the right tenant and rent out your properties in no time!

Want to know more? Read about how to integrate your property database with HousingAnywhere.