4 of my 12 listings sit in a city about to cap non-primary rentals at 60 nights

Run the pivot math before you decide anything else, because it usually decides for you. A beach property grossing $62k on 210 nightly bookings is running maybe $295 a night. The same unit on 30-plus-day furnished stays in a seasonal beach town might get $3,200 a month for four or five months and much less the rest of the year, so call it $28k to $34k gross. At 18% that's $5k to $6k per property against your current $11k, and mid-term work justifies a lower fee than 18% because there's no nightly turnover. Realistically you're looking at 10 to 12% on a smaller number, so those four go from $45k to something like $14k combined. That's roughly the same as the capped-nightly scenario, which means the pivot isn't a rescue. It's a way to keep the owners while the market resets.

The number that actually determines your outcome is the ops person. $52k across 12 listings is $4,333 per listing per year, and it's a fixed cost that doesn't shrink when four listings lose two thirds of their revenue. Whether you can absorb that depends on how fast you can add listings in your home city, and the honest constraint there is sales capacity, not ops capacity. If you're not already generating owner leads at two or three a month in your home market, redeploying capacity means paying someone to be underutilized for a while.

On grandfathering: existing-registration carve-outs are common in draft short-term rental ordinances and often get narrowed or dropped between draft and adoption, and the rules differ by city and state. A land use attorney in that jurisdiction is the person who can read the draft against local practice, and that's worth the hour before you write anything to your owners.

The risk you haven't raised is your owners' balance sheets. Four out-of-town owners who bought underwriting 210 nights at $295 may not be able to hold at $28k gross. If two of them sell, you lose the listings regardless of what the ordinance does, and a buyer of a capped beach property is usually a second-home user who doesn't rent at all. Ask each owner now what their debt service is. That answer tells you how much of the beach four you're actually fighting for.

The cleaner network is the asset you're underweighting. Two seasons of a reliable turnover crew in a beach town is not reproducible in six months, and if the ordinance passes those cleaners lose most of their volume and take other work. Even if you come back in three years the crew is gone. That argues for keeping some presence there, even at a loss, if you think the cap gets loosened.

Any chance one or two of those owners would actually establish primary residence there? People do restructure their lives around a $62k gross asset. Long shot but it's four phone calls.

Your $130k fee revenue against a $52k ops salary plus $4k of PMS is already thin before the ordinance. Post-cap you're at roughly $99k of revenue carrying the same $56k of direct cost, which leaves you about $43k before your own time, marketing, insurance and the software you didn't list. I'd model the case where you lose two beach owners to sale as well, because that's $77k of revenue against $56k. The decision isn't beach versus home city. It's whether the business supports a full-time ops person at 12 listings at all, and I don't think it does with four of them capped.

Which way is the registration cap written, first come or lottery? If it's a hard number of permits issued and your owners already hold registrations, the caps sometimes end up more valuable than the nightly count, because nobody new can enter. Four capped-but-permitted units in a closed market is a different asset than four capped units in an open one.

Worth asking whether any of the four owners would consider selling to somebody who wants the permit and keeps you as co-host. You'd be introducing the buyer, so you keep the management contract through the transfer instead of losing the listing. Whether the registration even transfers with a sale depends entirely on how the ordinance is written, and a lot of them specifically kill it on change of ownership.

I've watched service businesses die from holding a shrinking market too long out of attachment to the operation they built there. Sextant's number is the one I'd act on. If you keep the beach four, keep them at a fee that reflects mid-term work and pull your ops person's time out of that market almost entirely, even if service quality drops. Owners in a capped market have nowhere better to go.

One thing on the owner conversations: send them the ordinance draft yourself before someone else does. Being the person who explained the 60-night cap and what it does to their numbers is how you keep the relationship when the revenue drops. Owners who find out from a city mailer tend to conclude their co-host wasn't paying attention.