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Every co-hosting agreement you sign will end, and almost none of them say how. Owners leave for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance. They sell. A kid moves into the unit. They have one good year and decide they can self-manage. Most agreements spell out the beginning in detail and handle the ending in a single line: either party may terminate with 30 days' written notice. That line is the term you will actually use, and as written it decides nothing. The first thing to fix is that bookings outlive the contract. Give notice on March 1 and you are handing back a calendar with reservations sitting on it through July - stays you sourced, priced, and answered questions on, that you will never be paid for. There are two defensible answers and you only need to pick one. Either you are paid on stays that check out inside the notice window and nothing after, or you are paid your normal split on every reservation already on the books at the termination date, invoiced as each one checks out. What you cannot afford is silence, because silence means whoever controls the payout account decides, and that is not you. Write the handover as a deliverables list, not a promise to cooperate. "Reasonable assistance during transition" is unenforceable and infinitely expandable. Name the items instead: exported reservation list with guest contact details, current pricing rules and minimum-stay settings, lock codes and who holds them, cleaner and handyman contacts, listing and platform access transferred, and any open damage claims with their status. Then cap it - delivered within ten business days of the termination date, with one round of follow-up questions after that. Without the cap you are still answering texts for free six weeks later. Money you are holding needs its own sentence. If you keep an owner float for supplies, or platform payouts land in your account before you remit, say exactly when final reconciliation happens. Fifteen days after the last checkout is a reasonable default - long enough for damage claims and card chargebacks to settle, short enough that nobody thinks you are sitting on their money. Say what happens to the remaining float balance in the same sentence. Do this while the relationship is good, because the exit clause is the easiest term to negotiate at signing and the hardest to negotiate mid-argument. An owner who is happy with you will agree that four months of forward bookings you produced should be paid out. An owner who is leaving annoyed will not. Put it in the next agreement you send, and back-fill it into the existing ones at renewal as a one-page amendment rather than a full re-sign. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice - have someone licensed in your state read the language before you use it. The owner agreement in the Co-Host Starter Kit includes a termination and handover section built along these lines. |
Operating notes for people running short-term rentals as a business. Regulation changes, pricing tactics, owner-reporting playbooks, and turnover systems for STR co-hosts and small property managers — no "passive income" hype, just the stuff that keeps clients past year one.
Most co-hosts never choose a tool stack. They inherit one login at a time. The listing sits on the owner's platform account. The smart lock app is registered to the owner's email because that's who was standing there when the installer set it up. The pricing tool renews on a card you've never seen. Each of those arrived as a convenience, and individually none of them looks like a problem. Together they mean you are running your operation on credentials belonging to five different people, none...
Almost every late check-in you have ever had traces back to a linen count, not a bad cleaner. Look at the shape of a same-day turnover honestly. The guest leaves at 10 or 11. The next one arrives at 4. Inside that window your cleaner has to strip, clean, restage, and remake every bed. If the sheets that go back on the bed are the same sheets that came off it, the entire turnover is gated by a wash and dry cycle in a residential machine you do not control and cannot speed up. The cleaner is...
An orphan night is not something that happens to you. It is something your minimum-stay rule produced. A guest checks out Tuesday, the next one checks in Thursday, and the Wednesday between them is unsellable because your minimum stay for those dates is two nights. PriceLabs puts the mechanism on the record in its own documentation: orphan gaps occur when your default minimum stay exceeds one night. That is worth sitting with, because it reframes the problem. You are not unlucky. You...