If u don’t live near your rental how do you manage it? Do u have a property manager/ company? Do u just use a cleaning company and u do the rest? Or something else?
And can I ask what you pay for whatever service u use and where u are located?
Personally I wouldn’t do “remote hosting”… I’ve heard/read too many horror stories.
As a Remote Host you really can’t do anything more than book guests and pay the bills. You absolutely need an on-site manager and a cleaning company. Cleaners are cleaners, not arrangers, decorators, monitors of things gone or broken.
BUT… If you could use family or an old friend as your representative (paid, of course) that would be best. Someone you can trust. An individual rather than a company to whom you’re just another account. Certainly NOT just a cleaning company.
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‘U’ need an excellent co-host.
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I mean people do it all the time. They own property in some vacation area and use it as a STR
Yes, but you need more than a cleaner. A remote host has no way of “doing the rest”. The rest covers someone checking to make sure the cleaner has done a good job, making sure everything is working properly and broken things get fixed, attending to any issues that might come up during a stay, including making sure the guests aren’t partying, trashing the place, sneaking in extra guests or pets, and being prepared to boot guests out if warranted. No way a cleaner can be expected to do all that.
I think you’ll find that most Hosts here feel you alone cannot adequately manage from afar. I’m one of them.
But I think @Annet3176 has another view and experience in managing from afar. Let’s see what she has to say. I know there is another post (probably several) on this subject.
For example:
Anecdotally, I’ve read here of Hosts paying 25%-30% of gross rentals to a management company. Some were surprised that after paying management fees, Airbnb/VRBO fees, cleaning fees that their net before all the other expenses was about 30% of the gross. But each situation is different. What’s important is to develop a spreadsheet to project costs and your net income.
This Host paid just 7%!
https://airhostsforum.com/t/praise-for-using-a-management-agency/47618?u=hostairbnbvrbo
Some people have a nearby co-Host – that’s what’s needed if you don’t have a management company. You can split up responsibilities so that you do the messaging/planning/House manual and guidebook/pricing/business management and they do on-site work (walk through after cleaners come, evaluating what repairs/improvements need to be done, stocking supplies, responding to guests’ needs when they need someone to be on site, etc.). If you don’t know someone you trust who is local to the your STR, consider contacting nearby and highly rated local Hosts to co-Host.
I don’t know if there’s a ‘typical’ co-Host rate because different Hosts might assign different responsibilities. If I were going to hire a co-Host I would think of a low percentage (3%?) + an hourly rate for work they’re called upon to do – or maybe just the hourly rate because suggesting a percentage might lead to bargaining for more.
If you do get a management company make sure the listing is in your name. Otherwise the reviews all attach to the management company, not you. The reviews are an important part of the value of your short-term rental: don’t give it away.
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I have managed hosting our vacation weekend home “remotely” for 12 years, with great success but it depends on what you mean by ‘manage’ and ‘remote.’ Remote as in a property you never occupy and is used only as an investment? And manage as in the turnover before a guest comes? Or the maintenance of the property?
I would write it all out for “U” but it is a broad topic.
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I guess it depends on what you mean by “afar.” My vacation apartment is about 40-60 minutes’ drive from my home in Sydney (depending on traffic). I used to have a property manager who took 20% of the income, plus she charged to stock amenities (TP, milk, etc.) and an additional $50 per stay for linens (loaning and washing them). She managed everything under her own listing and got the reviews, which @HostAirbnbVRBO Glenn doesn’t recommend.
I can see Glenn’s point, but I personally thought that was a good thing because it incentivised the property manager to get excellent reviews because they affected her Superhost status. I don’t know if she (or anyone) would have worked as hard to please guests if she was earning ratings for someone else.
On the other hand, her obsession with ratings meant that she had a formal policy of not charging people for any property damage because she didn’t want to get dinged in her ratings, and that was concerning to me.
I remember she told us to remove anything that had any value or personal meaning from the apartment. I found that distressing. I wanted to curate a beautiful space that people would enjoy being in, and she wanted me to furnish the apartment with low-quality junk that wouldn’t cost much to replace if someone stole or damaged it, because she absolutely refused to report anything stolen or damaged. She told me she’d rather pay the cost out of pocket than take a hit to her star rating. (I have no idea what she would have done if someone had broken or stolen the flat screen TV!)
She worked with a cleaner who did the cleaning and then she managed all the communications with guests. It’s not clear to me whether the property manager regularly or only infrequently visited the apartment in between guests to check on the cleaners’ work, or if the cleaner stocked all the supplies.
After a few months, we took over managing the place. I enjoy that!
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I’m remote, but I found an excellent cleaning woman and I visit the condo every two - three guests. I’m always replacing or restocking something.
I manage remotely (an hour and 40 minutes away.) I have a cleaner (not a service). She sends me photos of each room after every turnover and keeps me abreast of what needs to be stocked. I gave her pictures of how I want each room to look. She texts me upon her arrival, after she has done an initial walkthrough, to tell me if anything is out of whack. We have a handyman and other tradespeople on speed dial in case of an issue. We also have a ring camera on each external entry point so we can monitor activity.
We visit at least once a month to do quality control. It has been working out. I’d be open to an “on the ground” person but we don’t have any close friends yet in the area. I am not interested in paying a property management company.
Anyway, if we ever get connected to someone local who can do the quality control more frequently I’d consider it but again we are managing it quite nicely and we are not that far if there is a dire emergency.
Hope this helps!
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Ever since you wrote this I thought on the one hand I, like you, believe in incentives (and being generous) but yet that I most likely wouldn’t for myself adopt this approach. But why? I realize also that the question is moot for you since you’ve taken over managing but might be a useful discussion for a Host who is hiring a property manager.
You can provide incentives in a range of ways so that when you earn more money so does the worker who contributes to that.
With every turnover this property manager has an opportunity to work more (stock the amenities, do the linens), and therefore to earn additional income. That’s one kind of incentive.
This property manager also makes a percentage of the rental income. That’s another kind of incentive.
That’s not, mostly, an opportunity to work more but mostly to receive income for the ongoing work that comes just with being in the STR business. To be sure with each new rental the property manager has some messaging work but mostly the manager receiving a percentage of income is being compensated for:
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both the quantity and the quality of the many and diverse tasks the manager performs that are otherwise both tedious to log (and therefore to charge for) and difficult to objectively evaluate (How valuable was that change of phrase in the listing? How charming was your note? How much added value in that snack?) and
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The overall success of the listing that the property manager has developed – success measured as a percentage multiplied by its occupancy rate multiplied by its ‘fully loaded’ nightly rate.
Such a property manager is highly incentivized to earn additional income by boosting that occupancy rate and all-in nightly rate. But this manager’s incentives are not tied to profitability and one result of that might be your manager’s reluctance to charge guests for property damage that the manager likely felt would not only ding its ratings but also for which the manager does not ‘pay’ since its income is unaffected by profitability. Still, my sense is that your manager’s behavior on the property damage and the way the listing should be furnished is possibly not a result of mismatched incentives with the owner but is just an honest difference of views in the risks/rewards of going after guests for damages.
But the incentive for the property manager to have the listing in its own name is yet another incentive AND another bite at the apple to profit from the success of the STR, which after all is based not only on the property manager’s work (including intellectual property type contributions as well as the work force that the manager has developed) but also the capital and IT kinds of contributions of the owner. What’s more whereas the previous incentives gave rise to additional income to the manager, the incentive that puts the listing in the manager’s name gives the property manager a kind of asset.
Now the property manager, not the STR ‘owner’ who paid for the property and takes ALL the risks of ongoing losses and opportunity cost risks, ‘owns’ 100% of the reviews! If the property manager is ever fired the asset that the STR owner has also worked and paid for goes entirely away. The STR owner who has paid for the asset of all those reviews loses ALL of it. The STR owner can even be held hostage by such a property manager, explicitly or implicitly, for current subpar performance since firing the property manager loses the asset of the reviews that the owner paid for.
To me, giving the asset itself of the STR reviews to the property manager – confuses who the owner of the STR property is.
My sense is most Hosts here agree with the bottom line of not putting the listing in the manager’s name. My hope is that there’s language or reasoning here that helps the Host negotiating with a property manager on why that Host might not agree that the listings be in the name of the property manager even though in the very important beginning of a new STR that can be helpful as the Host piggybacks on the manager’s reputation.
In the long run the Host is seeking to build an asset, which are proven by the reviews of the property. Giving away those reviews to the property manager directly conflicts with the Host’s objective to build the asset the owner bought and in which the owner continues to invest.
I don’t know what a ‘fair’ arrangement is with a property manager. After all, if I were the property manager I would be concerned that after I had built that STR listing from scratch, provided all my knowledge and skills on establishing the rules, the messaging, the decor and amenities, the House Manual and Guide to the Area – everything that goes into establishing the STR – as well as the workforce that I had curated/tapped into, that the STR owner could fire me, self-manage and copy all that I had done.
So I think I generally understand both sides. I suppose that the ‘fair’ arrangement is one that the marketplace makes available. I could understand how an owner could let the manager get the listings because the owner could fire the manager at the ‘out’ of the contract or its termination and, with all the knowledge gleaned from observing the manager, start again but really not from scratch.
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