Your guide to short-term rentals at the Jersey Shore

Jersey Shore rental prices are so high that some families find that booking airfare and a rental in Florida is cheaper than spending a week in Wildwood. Could short-term rental apps be the solution down the Shore?

It depends on your vacation needs and if you’re willing to make compromises.

In New Jersey shore towns, vacationers have a choice between hotel rooms and short-term rentals. Prices vary heavily between both and offer drastically different experiences. For example, a couple’s weekend getaway is better suited for hotels to save money, whereas large groups of friends or multiple families looking to stay for a week should consider short-term rentals.

This guide will explore how to find the best prices for your needs, despite them still being much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finding the ideal vacation rental at the right price requires research. You’ll need to look at nearby hotels, traditional vacation homes, and digital platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. For help with the latter, here are some expert tips from a seasoned Jersey Shore Airbnb host and a short-term rental data researcher.

In a short-term rental, there’s no room service, kitchen staff, or clean towels on demand. Yet, they can be less expensive for longer stays, provide a variety of accommodations, and importantly, have kitchens to save money on buying food, said Paul Stewart, a Jersey Shore Airbnb host who operates more than 80 properties across Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ventnor City, and Ocean City through his company Cozy Cohost.

“You are booking a private house, so if you’re extremely picky and want everything to be perfect, vacation rental homes are probably not the best move,” he said. “There are minor things that can go wrong during your stay. It’s totally different from a hotel.”

Hotels provide cozy rooms to luxurious suites with concierge in the lobby, room service at your beck and call, and cleaning services for your room, towels, and linens. They’re also cheaper for short stays and you often don’t have to book very far in advance.

» READ MORE: Visiting the Shore? These hotels have everything.

By the time Memorial Day weekend comes around, many of the best rentals are already booked for the summer. Stewart starts seeing a wave of bookings in April and by the start of summer in June, the majority of his properties are 50% to 60% booked through the summer months.

It gets even more competitive in smaller family vacation towns like Ocean City, where Stewart says families book much earlier.

Melanie Brown works as the executive director of data insights for Key Data Dashboard, a short-term rental analytics company that tracks rental prices and bookings along the Jersey Shore. According to Brown’s research, renters are booking short-term rentals for the busy months — June through August — more than two to four months in advance, especially in Cape May where the average short-term renter books their stay 115 days in advance.

“If you have a larger group, especially when bringing together multiple families or friend groups, you have to get it on the calendar earlier,” Brown said. “Whereas hotels if you’re traveling with one or two people or a four-person family then you can kind of book last-minute.”

While short-term rentals can be a cheaper alternative than staying at a hotel, they can be much more expensive in some cases. Plus, cleaning and service fees can add hundreds to the total cost.

While some shore towns are more expensive than others, rental prices depend more about the time of summer you’re booking for, proximity to the beach, and amenities, said Stewart. Online platforms like Airbnb often offer discounts for booking a full week’s stay in many cases, too.

Last year, a short-term rental in South Jersey, from Brigantine to Cape May, during the summer months ran, on average, $488 per day to rent, according to Key Data Dashboard, while a hotel room was, on average, $136 per day.

“Short-term rentals are generally more expensive on a nightly basis than hotels. The key there though is that a hotel is generally a one bedroom, whereas short-term rentals are often two or more bedroom properties. If we look at short-term rentals on a per-person or bedroom basis, short-term rentals don’t look as much more expensive,” Brown said. Larger groups tend to split costs of a rental, making the per-person cost come down as well, she added.

For a range of prices on short-term rentals, Stewart says to expect to pay $350 per night for a cheaper rental, midgrade rentals are $500 to $600 per night, and high-end rentals can be $1,000 to $1,500 per night. If you’re truly made of money, you can rent out mansions for $5,000 per night. (One of Stewart’s prized short-term rentals is an A.C. waterfront home where Al Capone smuggled booze during Prohibition.)

If you’re looking for something small or a single room with a bed, it’s possible to find short-term rentals via online apps for $100 or less.

Book early, be ready to make compromises for the cheapest rentals, and look at both online platforms, local real estate agencies, and hotels in the shore town you desire.

While online rental platforms make it easier for renters to find a home, it can be more costly for property owners to list a rental on those platforms than on their own website, Brown said.

“Generally property managers make their direct-booking website the cheapest option because they’re not having to pay fees to Airbnb or Vrbo” she said. “My top tip to friends and people who don’t work in the industry is use Airbnb or Vrbo like a search engine and then go find that property on the manager’s website and you’ll often get a discount.”

This rental hack won’t work every time as not every property manager has a direct-booking website. But, if a property manager does — you might save up to 15% through direct booking, Brown said.

When renting short-term, you’ll receive a list of rules and instructions, like keeping the house clean and how to use the appliances. These rules are set by the rental operator and vary.

“Since we have so many properties and guests, we found that the best way we can control things is to be very straight-up and fairly strict with our rules,” Stewart said.

Many places are looking for renters that will treat the property like they would their own, so it’s not a free pass for loud parties or bedlam in the rental. Follow the rules set forth by the rental and you shouldn’t run into issues.

This isn’t a hotel, so there won’t be staff in the lobby to provide fresh towels or change a lightbulb on a moment’s notice. Instead, you may need to bring your own towels and wash them in the in-unit laundry machine or there may be instructions on where to find lightbulbs in the short-term rental if one needs replacing.

You’ll almost certainly be asked to wash the dishes and load the dishwasher before leaving, too. If you’re not looking to lift a finger for vacation, hotels will be a better bet.

Short-term rentals won’t have staff to clean up the place when you leave the house for the day, whereas hotels will often clean rooms multiple times throughout your stay. Instead, short-term rentals pay a cleaning company or hire their own staff to clean the place after your stay. To recoup the cost of these services, rental operators often pass this cost onto the customer.

“You actually don’t make any money on the cleaning side because the margins after you pay for staff and cleaning supplies are so small,” Stewart said.

But there’s a one in 10 chance you get a rental without cleaning fees, according to AirDNA.

Cleaning fees for a vacation home rental usually exceed $100 and often are upward of $200 or more, depending on the size of the house.