Both listings run from my Airbnb account, with payouts landing in my bank

Look hard at the permit language before you look at the fee. Most short-term rental ordinances I have read require the permit in the property owner's name and a designated local contact who has to respond within some window, often thirty to sixty minutes, and the rules differ city to city so read yours rather than mine. If you are named as that contact, you have taken on a duty to the city, not just to her. Ask whether the ordinance requires the permit number in the listing, because if the listing lives on your account you are the one publishing it. And ask what happens to the permit if she sells. In a lot of capped markets it does not transfer, which means your book of business can evaporate at closing.

What does termination actually do to bookings that are already on the calendar. If she gives notice in March and you are holding sixty confirmed reservations through August on your account, who cancels them, who eats the platform penalties, and who refunds the guests. That is the clause I would want written before I argued about the percentage.

Her account, your co-host permissions, payouts to her, invoice monthly. Every problem in your post gets smaller.

Your 18 percent is not 18 percent. 18 percent of $86,100 is $15,498. Then the cleaning gap. You are paying $145 and collecting $125 on the 2BR, and you did not say what the 3BR costs to turn but a 3BR is never cheaper. Call it $20 a turn across 210 turns and that is $4,200 straight out of your fee, so you are at $11,298, which is 13.1 percent. If the 3BR gap is $40 instead of $20 your effective take drops toward 11. Either the guest cleaning fee goes up or the contract says cleaning is billed at cost to the owner. Right now the contract says you subsidize her turns and call it a service.

@verity, holding the payouts is the only reason I have never been stiffed. I ran three units on an owner's account for eight months, invoiced monthly, and spent the last two of those months writing follow-up emails to a man who had already spent the money on a boat. Control of the cash is real. The cost of it is that a 1099-K arrives with your name and the gross on it, and you get to explain the pass-through to your accountant every year. That is a real conversation to have with a CPA before Friday, not after.

If you do end up holding funds, a separate account per owner with her name in the account title is the minimum, and even that does not answer the licensing question you already flagged. What I would ask the attorney specifically is whether collecting rents or nightly revenue on behalf of an owner triggers a property management or brokerage license in your state, because in some states the co-host exemption is thin and in others it does not exist at all. The answer changes whether section 4 is a preference or a problem.

Price the local contact obligation as labor, because it is labor. Two in the morning, guest locked out at the house twenty minutes away, that is you in the truck. How many of those happened last year in the export data. If it is eight, fine. If it is thirty, your 13 percent is buying a pager you can never put down and you should be charging a per-incident call-out on top of the percentage.

The goodwill assignment is the clause I would fight over, and I do not think it can be enforced the way her lawyer thinks it can. Review history on a platform account is not really transferable property, it is a term-of-service artifact, and the platform gets to decide what it does when a listing moves. So you would be signing a promise you cannot actually perform. That is a bad thing to have your name on regardless of how the relationship goes. Ask her lawyer to describe the mechanical steps by which you deliver 340 reviews to her account. If nobody can describe it, strike it.

54 percent occupancy on the 3BR looks like a shoulder season hole. Ask what she did with January before you inherit it.

Basic question since I am still learning the vocabulary here. When you say 18 percent of accommodation revenue net of cleaning and taxes, does that mean the guest pays $186 plus a $125 cleaning fee plus tax, and your 18 percent only applies to the $186 line. Because @windlass's math only works if that is what it means, and the way owners talk about the fee and the way co-hosts talk about it never seem to match.

@pike, yes, that is what it means, and the definition should appear once in the contract with a worked example attached as an exhibit so nobody argues about it in month nine.

Halyard, the asymmetry is what bothers me. She gets a thirty day termination and an assignment of everything your account accumulated. You get an obligation to be the city's contact at three in the morning. Symmetry would look like a fixed initial term with a wind-down that covers every reservation already on the books, a named insured position for you on her short-term rental policy, and an indemnity from her for anything arising out of the physical condition of the properties. Right now you carry account suspension risk and she carries none of it. If she walks over asking for that, she was going to be a difficult client anyway.

I am genuinely unclear on something. While her share of that $86,100 is sitting in your business account, whose money is it. If you got sued over something unrelated, or your bank froze the account, is her money exposed. That feels like the sort of thing that has a clean answer somewhere and I do not know where to look for it.

@windlass is right about the cleaning gap and it compounds. My cleaner raised rates twice in three years and the listing fee only moves when I remember to move it. Whatever you sign, put the cleaning fee on a review date, or write it as pass-through at actual cost. Eating $4,200 of turnovers is a slow way to talk yourself out of a business that otherwise works.

Section 4 is not the worst clause in that contract. Go find the tax paragraph. Platforms collect and remit some layers of lodging tax in some jurisdictions and not others, and which layers get collected varies by state and often by city within the state, so you have to check the actual registration for these two addresses rather than assume. If the city or county tax is not being collected by the platform, someone is filing a monthly return, and if the listing sits on your account with your payout method, the taxing authority's first phone call is to you. I would want a paragraph that says she is the taxpayer of record, that she is responsible for registration and filing, and that she indemnifies you for it, and I would want a licensed tax professional to look at it because I am not one.

Also check whether her existing bookings were taken under her permit number. If the listing moves accounts and the permit number stays displayed, you have published a permit that is not yours.

Say you sign this and it works. Owner number four shows up next spring and wants the same arrangement. Do you have four sets of books, four sub-accounts, four tax headaches. The account structure you pick on Friday is the one you are stuck with at ten units unless you want to migrate listings later, which is exactly the thing everyone in this thread says is hard to do.

210 turns and your cleaner is the whole business. Lock in that relationship before you worry about section 4.