Density in one city or spread across jurisdictions when you build the book to 20 units

I've been mapping out what a 20 unit co-hosting book would look like before I take a single owner, and I keep landing on the same fork.

Density in one submarket is the operational answer. One ordinance to learn, one permit process, one set of inspectors, one cleaner crew that can do four turns in a morning without driving, one storage unit of shared linens and consumables. Your cost per turn falls as you add units in the same loop, and your pricing gets better because you're watching twenty comparable calendars in the same market instead of guessing. If your city has an annual registration you learn it once and you get good at it, and that expertise is genuinely worth something to owners.

The cost is that every unit answers to the same council. Caps, primary residence requirements, permit lotteries and enforcement changes are all local and they can arrive on one vote. Rules and how they're applied vary a lot by city and state, so anyone building either way should be reading the current ordinance and getting a local attorney's read rather than taking a forum consensus. A capped market can shrink your whole book at once, and there is no clause that saves you from a book that no longer legally exists.

Spread across two or three jurisdictions caps that risk. It also multiplies everything else. Two cleaner labor pools to recruit and lose, two compliance calendars, two sets of local rules you only half know, more driving, no linen sharing across markets. I've seen the argument that a resort market plus a business or medical travel market smooths seasonality, so a February hole in one is a February peak in the other. I've also seen the argument that anything under 20 units spread over two markets is just two small businesses that are each too small to run well.

There's a third position, which is stay small on purpose. Six or eight units in one market, charge 22 to 25 percent, do the work yourself, never hire a coordinator. Lower ceiling, much lower fixed cost, and you can walk away from a bad owner without breaking your staffing.

Where do you actually come down?