How to Make Money Renting Your Personal Car on Turo
Most people have a vehicle sitting at home and not being used. Have you ever wondered if you could rent out that car to someone to use? Well, Turo will allow you to do that. During the low rideshare demand in December, I decided to rent out my car on Turo. The experiment went well, so I listed a few more cars on the Turo marketplace and business has been pretty good in Boston. Turo can work in any market, depending on what car you have and what your vehicle related expenses are.
What is Turo?
Turo is a marketplace for car owners to put up their personal cars up for rent by other people. New drivers can get $70 for signing up and renting out their car on the service with this link. Drivers have a lot of control over how and when to rent out their cars in addition to setting up pricing.
This post serves as a quick guide to listing your car on Turo and providing a few tips on adjusting some of the settings with Turo. In future posts, I will go a bit more detail about specific issues with Turo, such as damage claim, fuel/mile overage fees, late fees, and how to get your car back if the renter doesn’t bring it back.
How Do I get Started with Turo?
Then fill out your personal information and credit card to set up your profile. You will need to set up your customer profile before setting up your renter profile. Once you set up your profile, it will ask you for your vehicle information. They ask for vehicle information, license plate, mileage, features of your car and a few photos.
Next step is to set your car availability based on advance notice, shortest and longest trip you will allow. I typically set it for longer trips but for others, they set it as very short trips so they can still use their car and adjust their schedule based on rentals. The shortest rental on Turo is one day.
You are required to have one photo to create the listing. You can take your own photos but Turo pays for a set of professional pictures so look into that once you have your listing up.
Once you are done, you publish your listing and it goes live right away. Typically, someone won’t rent it that second so you will have a few minutes to browse through the settings and change them accordingly.
What are my Turo listing settings?
Below is the list of settings for your individual cars:
- Calendar
- Pricing
- Delivery & airports
- Location
- Photos
- Details
- Distance included
- Vehicle protection
- Trip history
- Trip preferences
- Snooze/unlist/delete listing
Turo Calendar
This is where you can set up your cars availability and also view what the pricing on each day is. The default pricing is Turo’s automatic pricing that decides pricing based on their own algorithm. You can adjust pricing under the next section.
This would be the place to block off dates your car is unavailable. Click on any date and you can click “+ mark as unavailable” and another drop down menu will appear, asking you what date and times it is unavailable. It defaults for one day but you can add as many days as you want.
Turo Pricing
This is the section where you can change pricing.
Right now, the setting is on “Automatic Pricing” so only the minimum price option is active. This is a nice way to set a minimum price for your car. If you find that you are getting too many reservations, you can slowly increase the minimum price until you get the number of reservations you want. Automatic pricing is an algorithm that accounts for demand in your area, seasonality, your car’s make and model, your approval rate, and your star rating. Once you click “Automatic Pricing” off, you will see a few more options.
Under Manual pricing, you will be able to change daily price, set the weekly and monthly discounts and also set pricing by the day. Setting the price by day will be useful if you want to set a high price over a holiday weekend but I won’t recommend you do that regularly. I switch Automatic pricing on and off to see what Turo recommends the price to be and I can adjust the price accordingly. I typically list the cars for under the recommended price to get more reservations during the slow months. During the summer, I expect the cars to rent very quickly at above Automatic Pricing levels.
If you want to rent it out below automatic pricing levels, you will need to turn it off and set your own daily price. You can set a low daily price and give no weekly/monthly discounts, or set a high daily price with high weekly/monthly discounts. There are many other variations you can do, so you can try out different schemes to see what works best for you.
If you want to rent it out above automatic pricing levels, set automatic pricing to on and then set a higher minimum price. I did this to my BMW as the automatic pricing seemed a bit too low and I was able to get reservations with a higher minimum price.
Turo Delivery and Airports
Below you can set how much you want to charge for delivery or curbside pickup for the airports in your area.
Turo Car Location
This page will help set your vehicle location. Potential Turo renters will see the same screen so they have an idea of where your car is approximately located.
Turo Car Photos
This is the page to upload more photos of your car. When you initially list your car, you can post just one photo to get the listing started. Once you get better pictures, you can go to this page and upload more pictures and delete the old ones. You can also re-arrange the photos so that it shows in a specific order.
Turo Car Details
This is the page where you can adjust the vehicle details, including features, details, name, color, and other details. Don’t spend too much time on this since you will adjust the description over time once you get a few requests and see other cars in the marketplace. It is good to look at other cars in your market and see what they are saying about their cars and you can use a similar description.
Turo Distance Included
This is one of the most overlooked pages on Turo. It is crucial that you set your distance properly. I set it for the lowest possible amount since I like to have the cheapest car in the area.
The “standard” most people list with is 150 miles, 750 a week and 1850 a month. I typically list at 100/500/1500 because my cars tend to be cheaper and better located than the competition. Make sure to experiment with the settings and in some cases, its better to be on the lower side and not get reservations then to put it too high and then have a month long reservation that allows them to drive too many miles.
If you are on a lease, set it to 100/500/1125 and set your prices high to make sure you don’t exceed your mileage limits on your lease. If someone were to rent your car for 30 1-day reservations, thats 3000 miles in a month. Most leases are 1000 miles a month so 3000 would blow your allocation in just a month. My utilization is somewhere around 20 days a month and around 2000 miles a month.
For additional distance, I charge $2-$3 per mile over the limit. Anything much higher than their recommended fee will have a small prompt asking you if this is what you want to do. Just say yes. Keep in mind that there is a limit of $1000 of mile overage fees.
Turo Vehicle Protection
This is where you set the type of vehicle protection you want to put onto your rental. Most people select Turo Standard and you will earn 75% of your gross rental income. This type of protection works well for new listings and most listings.
Owners of more expensive vehicles may want to consider Turo Basic. It has a threshold of $3000, but if you have a more expensive car, any type of damage is going to be more than $3000, so any claim will exceed it. The extra 10% in rental revenue typically covers the unlikely event of a claim and owners claim to make out a bit better with Turo Basic. Also, you can work directly with the renter and use their insurance instead of using Turo. In this case, they will pay to fix the car, so you get the additional revenue from Turo Basic and have your car fixed for free.
Owners of less expensive cars (<$7000) may want to consider Turo Premium. This type of protection covers wear and tear, so any type of nick or dent that you can document (make sure that your before and after pictures can clearly show damage, which may be difficult in some instances) will be covered and fixed directly by Turo. Since less expensive cars have less revenue, the cost of Turo Premium will cost less than if you put that on a more expensive car.
I personally have it on Turo Standard for the time being. I have two cars that I consider less expensive so I may put Turo Premium on it to ensure these vehicles are good enough to rent.
Turo Trip Preferences
This is where you can choose if your car can be booked instantly (without your approval), how much advance notice you need, and trip duration. I typically set the advance notice as a few hours and trip duration above 3 days. I will consider long term trips since these vehicles were meant to be rented out full time.
Think about how you want to rent out your car and change these settings accordingly. Many drivers will take any type of rental (minimum 1 day) and they claim that they have some renters that change a day rental to a month rental. If you want to maximize your income, choose minimum 1 day and no maximum duration.
You need to be careful when setting up “Instant book
Turo Account Settings
Below is the settings for your account, which includes your own pickup/return hours, dates you are available for pickup/dropoff and a place to identify your own commercial rental insurance if you have it. Some owners have opted to get their own commercial insurance but either way, Turo takes out 10% for their own overhead costs. For Turo Standard coverage, they take 15% of your revenue for insurance (taking into account the 10% overhead).
- Pickup & return hours
- Owner provided insurance
Pickup and Return Hours
This is the screen to set up your pickup and return hours. If you work 9-5 Monday through Friday, you can black out those times. If your cars are at work and you are only available 9-5 M-F, you can set those hours too. I’m typically out of town a day a week, so I set myself unavailable for that day. You can also set up times when you will be away from vacation so no pickups and dropoffs can occur during those times. So far, that feature has worked very well for me. Note that it won’t prevent renters who have a booking to request a change that takes place during these unavailable hours. It will be at your discretion to approve or deny these reservation changes.
Owner Provided Insurance
This is the screen to add your own commercial insurance. The one benefit is that you may get a better rate on getting your own commercial rental insurance than from Turo, especially those who have multiple cars on the Turo Platform full time. If you have one or two cars, it is not worth it to get your own insurance.
The one major benefit is that you can rent out your cars outside of the platform, especially to repeat renters. You can save 10% from Turo fees. There are some limitations when you use your own insurance, including late fees and mile overage fees. These fees will need to be collected directly from the renter if you rent your car on the Turo platform and have your own insurance.
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