Setting Up a Rental Program at Your Dealership

Setting Up a Rental Program at Your Dealership

If you already run a trailer dealership and you want to add rentals as a new revenue stream, TrailerBase is built to slot in next to your existing sales floor without disrupting it. The whole platform adapts when it knows you are a dealer: the trailer form gets new fields, the renter profile grows a sales lead section, and the public site can show both rental and sale inventory side by side.

This guide walks through the first week of standing up a dealership rental program.

Step 1: Set Your Business Type

The first thing to confirm is the businessType setting. During onboarding you are asked what kind of operation you run — pick Dealership or Hybrid (Dealer plus Rentals). If you already onboarded as a pure rental shop, no problem: open Settings then Company Branding and switch the business type there. The change is non-destructive. Existing trailers and reservations stay put, and the dealer-specific fields appear immediately.

The moment you flip that switch, three things change:

• The trailer form gains an Inventory Type field (RENTAL, SALES, DUAL_PURPOSE).
• The renter detail page gains a Sales Lead section.
• A new Sales Leads page appears in the sidebar at /leads.

Step 2: Decide Which Units Become Rentals

Walk your floor and pick the first units you want to rent out. We strongly recommend starting with two or three trailers, not your whole inventory. You learn the workflow on a small footprint, and you avoid pulling popular sale models off the lot before you know what rental demand looks like.

Good first candidates:

• Slow-moving units that are tying up floor space
• Demo trailers your sales team already loans informally
• Aged inventory you have already depreciated
• One unit per major category (a dump, a utility, an enclosed) so you can gauge demand across types

Step 3: Tag Each Unit's Inventory Type

For every trailer in TrailerBase, set the Inventory Type field:

• RENTAL for units that are rental-only and not for sale.
• SALES for units that are sale-only and not bookable.
• DUAL_PURPOSE for units you are willing to rent until they sell.

Most dealers start with a small RENTAL fleet and a few DUAL_PURPOSE units that double-duty. See the companion article on tagging inventory for details on how each value flows through the booking widget and the public site.

Step 4: Set Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Rates

On each rental or dual-purpose unit, fill in your rate ladder. A common starting point at a dealership:

1. Daily rate at roughly 0.5 to 0.8 percent of the sale price.
2. Weekly rate at about 5 times the daily.
3. Monthly rate at about 15 times the daily.

Add a security deposit equal to one to two days of rental, and a cleaning fee that matches what your detail bay actually costs you. The pricing strategy article in this section goes deeper.

Step 5: Run a Test Booking

Before you tell your sales team or list anything publicly, create a test reservation against yourself. Walk through pickup, return, deposit hold, and invoice close. This is your dress rehearsal. When it feels smooth, open the public booking widget on your website and let your first paying renter through.

What Stays Out of the Way

Your sales workflow does not change. Sales listings still appear on your dealer site, your DMS still owns purchase contracts, and your sales team's day looks the same. The rental side runs as a quiet new channel that occasionally hands them a warm lead.