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.
The revenue-share number most new co-hosts get wrong
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The most common pricing mistake isn't picking too low a percentage — it's picking a percentage before scoping what's actually included, which means the number is wrong regardless of what it is. Scope the work before you name a number. "Co-hosting" means different things to different owners: some want full-service (guest messaging, pricing, turnover coordination, owner reporting), others just want pricing and calendar management with the owner handling guest communication themselves. A 20% fee for full-service is a different deal than 20% for calendar management only — quoting a percentage before scoping the work is how co-hosts end up doing full-service work for a partial-service rate. Full-service co-hosting typically runs 15-25% of booking revenue (not profit — revenue, before the owner's own costs like mortgage, utilities, and cleaning supplies come out), with the lower end more common on higher-revenue properties (a flat 15% of a $150k/year property is real money, so owners negotiate harder) and the higher end more common on lower-revenue or high-touch properties (more guest issues, more owner hand-holding, less total dollars to justify a smaller percentage). Partial-service arrangements (pricing/calendar only, no guest communication or turnover coordination) typically land at 8-12%. Price in a review period from day one, not as an afterthought. A 90-day review clause, agreed to in writing before you start, gives you room to adjust if the property turns out to be far more (or less) work than scoped — without it looking like a bait-and-switch 6 months in. "We'll review the fee structure after 90 days based on actual time investment" is a normal, expected clause; owners who balk at it are telling you something about how the relationship will go. Don't discount to win the deal — rescope instead. If an owner pushes back on your rate, the answer isn't dropping the percentage on the same scope of work; it's offering a narrower scope at the lower rate ("I can do 12% if we're just handling pricing and calendar, and you handle guest messages yourself") or holding firm and letting them go to a co-host who'll underprice the work and burn out in 6 months. Underpriced deals are the single biggest predictor of co-hosts quitting the business entirely. |
The Co-Host Brief
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...