Guides for renting vacation homes

This site started in 1996 as a directory of vacation homes for rent by owner. The directory is closed now. What we publish today is guides about the same two things: how to book a rental without getting burned, and what it takes to rent your own place out.

For travelers

Booking a rental means sending money to someone you have never met. These guides are about the checks you can do first.

• How to vet a vacation rental before you book Check the address, read the reviews the right way, and know which payment requests mean walk away.

For owners

We listed by-owner rentals for a decade. Renting your place out works very differently now than it did then.

• Renting your vacation home by owner: what changed since the classifieds era What you paid then, what you pay now, and which parts of the job got harder.

From our archive

The old directory is still online, unchanged, as it stood in 2005. It shows what renting by owner looked like before Airbnb and Vrbo existed.

About this site

10K Vacation Rentals is written by its editors. When a guide uses a number, we name who published it and in what year, so you can check it yourself.

The old pages stay up because they are a record of how a by-owner directory actually worked. We keep them as they were.