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.
Your cleaning fee is the one price you set once and never revisit
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Most co-hosts set the cleaning fee in week one and let it drift away from what a turnover actually costs. Your cleaner raises the rate by $10, laundry moves to a service, soap and coffee get pricier, and the fee guests pay stays exactly where you typed it on day one. Run that across eight units for a year and the gap has to come out of somebody's margin. It's usually the owner's, and they find it at the annual review. Build the fee from the real cost of a turnover, not from the listing next door. Add up the cleaner's pay, laundry (in-house or service), consumables like soap, coffee and paper goods, and the time you spend on the restock run. Use your own invoices, not a rule of thumb. Then decide on purpose whether guests cover all of it, most of it, or whether some of it rides in the nightly rate. Those are three different strategies. Having none is the fourth, and it's the one that quietly loses money. The fee and the nightly rate are one price in the guest's head, so move them together. A $90 fee is a rounding error on a seven-night stay and a hard pill on a one-night stay. If a unit books mostly one- and two-night stays, I'd lean toward trimming the fee and nudging the nightly rate up a little. If it books long stays, hold the full fee. Pull last quarter's bookings by length of stay for each unit before you touch anything. The answer is different per property, and it's sitting in your reservation export. Re-price the fee on a calendar, not when you remember. Put two recurring reminders in your calendar, one in January and one in July. Each time, take the last six months of cleaner invoices, divide by the number of turnovers, and compare the result to what the fee collects. If the two are more than about 10% apart, adjust. Before you do, check how your PMS or booking channel applies a changed fee to reservations that already exist, so you're not guessing. Put the arithmetic in the owner report, and settle who keeps the difference. Show cost per turnover next to fee collected, one line per property. If guests are paying more than a turnover costs, the owner agreement should already say whether that surplus is the owner's or yours. If it says nothing, you have a dispute waiting for a slow month. This week, pick one property, find its last six cleaner invoices, and do the division. It takes ten minutes and you'll know whether the fee has drifted. |
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 set a rate floor by checking what the unit next door charges, and that tells you nothing about whether you make money. Your neighbor may have a paid-off mortgage, a cleaner who charges half what yours does, or no management fee to split. The only floor that protects you is built from what it costs you to host one stay. Add up what one turnover costs before the guest sleeps a single night. Take the cleaning fee you pay, the laundry, the restocked supplies, and any per-stay charge...
Most supply runs are triggered by a guest message, not by a count. The first "we're out of toilet paper" text is the moment you learn the closet was empty. By then you're buying at retail on a Saturday, and the guest has already decided what kind of host you are. Running out is a systems failure, and a cheap one to fix. Set a par level for every consumable at every unit. Par is the minimum you must have on the shelf after a turnover, written as a number. For a unit that sleeps four, something...
A permit that lapses by a day can cost an owner more than a bad week of pricing. Whatever your market requires, whether a license, a registration or a tax account, it has a date attached, and when it lapses the listing may have to come down until it is sorted out. Nobody notices a renewal date until it has passed. Across ten units that is ten permit dates plus the tax filings behind them, and you are usually the only person watching. Build one sheet with one row per unit. Columns: city or...