21 Questions to Ask Before You Hand Someone the Keys

Our management fee is set per home and per market rather than as one advertised flat rate — a two-bedroom uptown loft and a Montana cabin don’t cost the same to run, and pretending they do means someone is overpaying. We’ll walk you line by line through a sample owner statement before you sign anything, and onboarding fees are currently waived with a one-year agreement.

We calculate our fee on your net payout — after OTA commissions, occupancy taxes, card processing and cleaning have come out — not on the gross booking. That’s the same arrangement for every owner we work with; only the percentage is tailored to the home and market.

It matters more than it sounds. Across our portfolio that works out to about 12% of everything the guest pays — nightly rate, cleaning, fees and taxes included. On an individual booking it typically lands between 10% and 15%.

So whatever percentage you’re quoted elsewhere, the question that decides what you actually pay is what it’s calculated on. Press hardest on occupancy tax. Across our homes it runs about 11.5% of what guests pay — and if a manager’s fee is calculated on the guest’s total, they are taking a cut of that tax too. On our portfolio that alone would be around $1,500 per property per year, charged on money you never earned and passed straight through to the state.

Some managers exclude tax from the base and some don’t. We haven’t found a reliable way to tell from the outside, which is exactly why it’s worth asking and reading the agreement rather than comparing headline rates. Measured against a manager charging 20% of everything the guest pays, our structure has run about a third lower — roughly $4,350 per property per year across our homes, with the tax slice above included in that.

Ask us to run your numbers both ways. Then ask everyone else to do the same. It’s the only version of this comparison that means anything.

We price dynamically and adjust continuously rather than setting seasonal rates and walking away — that’s a large part of how our homes tend to run at two to three times the market average for their area. You’ll have a floor you’re comfortable with, and we’ll tell you honestly when we think it’s costing you money.

Once a month, by the 15th, covering the previous month’s completed stays — paid by ACH straight into your account, with a full statement behind it showing every booking, fee and expense that produced the number. No paper check sitting in a mailbox you may be nowhere near. It’s a deadline rather than a moving target, so you can plan a mortgage payment around it.

We use trust accounting. Owner money sits in a formally designated trust account, entirely separate from the account that runs our business — your rent is never our working capital, and a slow quarter on our side has no bearing on what’s yours. That’s every owner we work with, whatever state the home is in. Ask us to walk you through it and we will. Ask every manager you talk to, and treat a vague answer as an answer.

It’s your house. There’s a direct owner line — a real number you text, not a form or a general inbox — and someone on our team blocks the dates or builds the reservation for you. No cap on nights, no fee, no notice period. The only limit is a guest who already booked.

We won’t chase you about it either. We assume you’ll tell us when you want your own house, and we don’t treat those stays as something to be worked around.

One piece of advice that applies to any manager, not just us: holiday weeks fill further out than owners expect. If you want Thanksgiving in your own house, say so early.

Text the owner line with the dates and what you’d like them to pay, and we’ll build the quote. It runs through the same booking system as any other stay, so the rental agreement, the professional clean and the coverage all apply — your friend just pays less.

Send them straight to us — and no, the fee doesn’t change, because the work doesn’t either.

If they book through Airbnb or Vrbo, it runs exactly like any other stay. If they book direct on a card, the work shifts rather than shrinks: there’s no platform identity check sitting behind a credit card, so we screen the guest ourselves — ID verification and the same checks a platform would run before anyone gets a code. What we skip is chasing a review afterwards, because a direct stay doesn’t build your listing. What’s left is identical either way. Messaging, the turnover, check-in, supplies, someone reachable at midnight, the accounting, the tax filing.

The larger part of what you’re paying for was never per-booking anyway. It’s the standing machinery — the vendor network, the overnight cover, the systems that make a turnover run the same way on a Tuesday in February as on the Saturday of a holiday weekend. That cost doesn’t move with how your calendar fills.

One trade worth knowing about: a direct guest doesn’t leave a review on your Airbnb or Vrbo listing, so those stays don’t build the review history that drives your ranking there. It’s a real trade, and worth making knowingly.

Airbnb’s cut on a booking is substantial. On a direct booking almost all of it stays in the pot — only card processing comes out, and our rates are the same either way, so the guest pays what they’d have paid anyway. On our own numbers the owner ends up with roughly 14% more from the same guest, on the same dates, at the same price.

We do earn a little more on a direct booking too, since our fee is calculated on net and there’s no platform commission coming out of the base first. But the split is about four to one in your favour — you keep around 81% of the difference. We’d rather say that plainly than have you work it out from a statement later.

Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Google Vacation Rentals, and a direct-booking site for the home itself — plus up to a dozen smaller and niche channels beyond those. We hold Superhost status on Airbnb, continuously since 2014, along with Premier Host on Vrbo and Premier Partner on Booking.com. Those matter because each one is a ranking input on its own platform, not just a badge on a profile.

Now the honest version of that long tail, because most managers won’t give it to you. Airbnb produces the large majority of our bookings. Vrbo, Booking.com, Google and direct account for most of what’s left. The dozen niche channels below those produce very little — some have never generated a single booking, others one or two a year across the entire portfolio. We list on them because our software syndicates at no extra cost, not because they’re a strategy.

So the useful follow-up for any manager who recites a long channel list: ask what share of bookings each one actually produced last year. Breadth is cheap and worth having. It just isn’t the same thing as demand.

We arrange the professional photography and bill it to you at cost — it isn’t folded into the management fee, and we don’t mark it up. Worth being precise about that, because when a manager says photography is “included,” it is being paid for somewhere; you just can’t see where.

Listing copy is written rather than templated, including titles and descriptions built with search in mind, because both Airbnb and Google read them.

If you’d rather commission your own photographer, we’ll work with whatever you bring us. And design and staging is a separate service, for a home that needs more than a good camera.

It varies by market, which is the point — Charlotte’s off-season behaves nothing like Naples’s. We adjust minimum stays, target the guest segments that travel when leisure demand drops, and manage gap nights deliberately rather than discounting across the board. Ask us what we’d specifically do with your home and its calendar; you’ll get a real answer, not a formula.

Every home we take on now issues a unique code for each booking, generated automatically and expiring at checkout. No shared codes, no permanent codes, no code that outlives the stay it was issued for.

We’ll be straight about the history, because it bears on the question. For several years we rotated codes on a schedule instead. Early attempts at per-booking codes produced enough push failures — lock firmware, software, Wi-Fi outages — that guests were getting locked out, and we judged a reliable code worse than no guest stranded on a doorstep at 11pm. The tooling has since caught up, and the failure modes are now designed around rather than hoped away: codes are issued days ahead rather than at check-in, every write is verified, and our team holds a fallback. We’re completing the rollout across the homes we already manage.

Ask any manager this question and then ask the follow-up: how long does a code stay live, and what happens when it fails?

Yes — and with a standard rather than a promise: fifteen minutes or less, day or night. In practice it’s usually five or six. Most guest questions — check-in, wifi, the dishwasher, somewhere to eat — get an accurate answer immediately at any hour, because we’ve built the systems to handle them rather than relying on someone being awake to read a message. Anything that needs judgment goes to our team.

We’ll also tell you the thing most managers won’t: at 2am there is no plumber and no HVAC tech. Not for us, not for anyone. What matters overnight isn’t repair, it’s containment. A locked-out guest is back inside within minutes without anyone being woken. A leak means we walk the guest to the shut-off valve and have a trade booked for first thing. A furnace that quits in January means heaters, extra blankets, or a different bed for the night. The repair happens in the morning, because mornings are when repairs happen — but nobody spends the night stranded.

4.92 on Airbnb, across more than 1,500 reviews — and we’d rather show you than tell you, so our host profile is public and you can read every one of them yourself.

Three things worth knowing about that number. It’s a portfolio average, not our best house — any manager can show you their flagship listing. A high average on twenty stays means very little; this one is built on more than fifteen hundred. And it sits comfortably above the 4.8 Airbnb requires to hold Superhost status, which is one of the few benchmarks in this business that’s independently verified rather than self-reported. We’ve held it continuously since 2014.

All of it, and it’s stocked rather than promised. Every home gets a housekeeping closet that we set up and keep filled — sheets, towels, toiletries, paper goods, coffee and creamer, light bulbs, air filters, cotton buds, all the small things nobody thinks about until a guest can’t find one. We coordinate the whole list with our housekeeping team, bought specifically for your house.

Supplies are billed to you at cost. What we pay is what you pay. And they belong to the house — that’s your inventory sitting in your closet, not ours.

The part owners tend to underestimate isn’t the cost, it’s the coordination. Knowing a house is two turnovers from running out of towels, or that its air filters are a size the local hardware store doesn’t carry, is the difference between a guest noticing something and a guest never thinking about it at all.

A year — and here’s the reasoning rather than just the policy. We don’t charge an onboarding fee, and onboarding a home properly takes us somewhere around two hundred hours.

Most of that is inventory work nobody ever sees. Walk-through videos, counting what’s actually in every kitchen drawer, checking it against our lists, and building a knowledge base specific to your house — so that when a guest asks at 11pm which cupboard the wine glasses are in, they get an answer instead of an apology. That groundwork is what lets a home be run properly from a distance. The rest is photography, building the listing across every channel, pricing setup, sourcing vendors, stocking the house, and working the first several stays until it runs cleanly.

We absorb all of it, and the one-year term is what makes absorbing it possible.

If you need to leave inside the first year, there’s a $2,500 cancellation fee. Set that against two hundred unbilled hours and you’ll see it isn’t designed to trap anyone — it recovers a fraction of the setup. After the first year, the agreement renews in six-month terms rather than annual ones.

We’d genuinely rather you left than stayed unhappy. We’d also rather tell you plainly that the first year carries a cost, because a manager who charges no onboarding fee and asks for no term is recovering it somewhere you can’t see.

And on the reviews, since we told you to ask: they stay with us. Every home we manage sits under a single account — that’s what lets our software, our pricing and our team run as one operation rather than dozens of separate ones. We don’t co-host, meaning we don’t log into an account of yours and post on your behalf, so the listing and its review history live with ours.

That trade runs both ways, and you should weigh both halves. From your first day, your home inherits an account rated 4.92 across more than fifteen hundred reviews, with Superhost status held since 2014 — while a new listing on a new account starts at zero and has to buy its way into visibility over a first season that costs real money. You get that head start immediately. The cost is that the reviews your home earns stay on the account that carried it.

If keeping your own listing history matters more to you than the head start, then co-hosting is the model you want — and it isn’t one we offer. Better to know that before you sign than after.

We manage homes across Charlotte and Chapel Hill, Tampa, Naples and Marco Island, and Whitehall, Montana — with twelve years of hosting behind the company and people on the ground in each of them. Ask us about your specific neighbourhood, not just your city: what a home two streets over actually earns, who the reliable trades are, what the permitting looks like. If we don’t think we’re the right fit for it, we’ll say so.

Often yes — though it depends on the market and the project, and it’s charged separately rather than folded into management.

In practice that means accepting deliveries so you’re not driving over to sit in an empty house waiting on a sofa, meeting installers and letting trades in, and on some projects doing the installation ourselves rather than coordinating someone else to do it. If you want more than logistics, design and staging is a service we offer outright.

Ask early rather than late. Furnishing is where owners most underestimate the time, and a delivery window someone has to cover in person is what turns one weekend into four. Tell us what you’re planning and we’ll tell you straight whether we can take it on for your home.

Under $500, we handle it and you don’t hear about it. A furnace filter, a router that needs replacing, a broken blind, a dishwasher that’s stopped draining — we fix it, it appears on your statement, and you get on with your day. That’s what hands-off actually means: not that you’re kept in the dark, but that we don’t bring you problems we’ve already solved.

Above $500, it comes to you before we act, with our recommendation and what we expect it to cost. That number is written into your agreement — and it’s a starting point, not a rule. Plenty of owners tell us to stop calling and just handle things, so we set the figure wherever you want it. The one exception is a genuine emergency: if water is coming through a ceiling we stop the damage first and call you second, because the alternative is a far larger bill.

Some things you’d assume are problems turn out not to be. A guest who smokes in the house gets charged for it, we ozone-treat the property before the next arrival, and that guest never knows anything happened. It usually lands on your statement as revenue rather than a cost.

And anything that touches the asset itself — water damage, structural issues, an insurance claim — you hear about straight away, whatever it costs. Those aren’t ours to absorb.

Short-term rental activity generally isn’t covered by a standard homeowner’s policy, so we help owners get properly covered — we work with Steadily, who write short-term-rental-specific policies. You can run a quote through our partner page before you talk to us about anything else; it’s worth knowing what proper coverage costs whoever ends up managing the home. Platform protection sits on top of that as a backstop, not a replacement.

And since this whole page is about knowing where a manager’s money comes from: if you buy a policy through that link, Steadily pays us a referral fee. It doesn’t change what you pay, and we’d send you to them either way — but you shouldn’t have to find that out on your own.

We do — registration where it’s required, filing, and remittance. You won’t be filing occupancy or lodging tax returns for a home we manage.

Worth being precise about what that covers, because “we handle the taxes” can be heard far too broadly. Occupancy and lodging tax is a transaction tax on the stay itself, and that one is ours. Income tax on what your property earns is yours — we’ll give your accountant the documentation they need, but we’re not filing your return.

The reason to ask anyone this question: platforms collect and remit some of these taxes in some jurisdictions and not others, and the gaps vary city by city. A manager who says “the platforms take care of it” may be entirely right, partly right, or wrong — and the liability lands on you in all three cases.