I own all of the vacation rental by owner properties you will find here (along with my "silent" partner, my husband). We rent by owner so that you will get the best available home for you and your needs. We rent only vacation rental properties that we would want to live or vacation in ourselves! You will find exceptional locations and attention to detail to be the uniting factors in these vacation condos, homes, cottages. We got into this business because these homes are where we want to retire, but we aren't quite ready for that yet...so enjoy them while we can't!!! In November 2006 I started marketing other people's vacation homes for them and more recently formed BETTER Vacation Rentals, Inc. - a boutique property management company. Why? Because I have a passion for placing people in a great place for their vacations and my friends and colleagues understand this. I've been referring guests to others for years now. So I've decided to make it a little easier on the guest by just booking them when I can.
My husband and I grew up just outside of Boston, MA and over the border in Salem, NH and now live in San Diego County, CA. We love to travel, but have school age children and still need to work for a living (we still lose money every year on these vacation rentals because they are in such expensive areas). When our children were babies, we found we had to give up staying in B&B's because no one wanted us. After too many nights in hotels either sitting in the tub waiting for the baby to sleep or falling asleep before the kids while we laid quietly on the bed, we started to stay in vacation rentals. Being from New England, we never even thought to call an agency, we just consulted our favorite "magazine of Maine": Down East.� We found the vacation rental by owner option to be more affordable than hotel suites and far more comfortable for our family. We had often stayed along the coast of Maine so our first vacation rental by owner experience was in Maine. Eventually we bought our own cottage in Maine (now called "Mussel Cove") and turned it into a vacation rental when we couldn't be there - to help us pay the mortgage. We started renting the place in 1999, just 5 weeks after purchasing the former fishing camp. Our specialty seems to be taking places with great locations and turning them into great places to vacation.
Now we don't have as much time to use the first place we bought as the kids have grown and so has their attachment to "home". We have grown to like sharing our favorite vacation spots with others so much that we have added two more vacation rental properties here in CA: Oceanside and Palm Desert, where we can manage them more closely and later use all three places for retirement. In the fall of 2006 other owners started contacting me and asking me to manage their vacation rentals. I became a licensed CA RE Broker since it is required to manage any property that is rented for more than 30 days (we get many seasonal guests). I launched "BETTER Vacation Rentals" in fall of 2007. What started as a one person show has grown successfully and we now specialize in vacation rentals at North Coast Village in Oceanside, CA and are slowly expanding into other parts of North San Diego County including Carsbad. We offer a better vacation rental experience to both owner and guest by working closely with both for a perfect match.
I am a stay at home mom first and foremost, with a Fortune 500 marketing background.
Melinda