My co-host told me she cleared $60k last year managing six units and I keep running the math and it doesn't add up

The part that matters most isn't the percentage, it's whether the management agreement itemizes who pays the cleaners. If the contract says "owner pays cleaning fees collected from guests" and she's marking those up 30% before passing them through, that's just margin she built into the ops layer, totally legal, but you're right that it's not 20%. I've seen the same structure on the landlord side - my triplex isn't STR but I've had contractors quote me "at cost" and then the invoice had a 15% handling fee buried in it. The question I'd be asking before I signed anything is: does she show you the actual cleaner invoice or just a line item that says "cleaning, $180."

What's the ownership structure on those southern utah holds - are they in your name personally or an LLC, because that changes what you can even negotiate on the management side without creating a mess later.

Your math is right and your instinct to wait is right, though the reason is probably different from what you think. The $60k itself is not the problem. Margin stacking is completely normal in service businesses, and a co-host who built five revenue lines instead of one is often better at running the operation than someone who clips 20% and calls it a day. The issue is that none of it was disclosed up front, and that is rarely an accident. The pattern that shows up again and again in deals that go sideways is that opacity in one contract tends to show up in how everything else gets handled. A co-host who lets owners believe it is a flat 20 when it is effectively 30 is often the same one submitting cleaning invoices from a related LLC and skipping the itemization on supply costs. The structure is not inherently bad. The non-disclosure is a character tell. For your southern utah properties specifically, before you sign anything with anyone, request a sample owner statement from a property they currently manage. A real one, redacted is fine. You want to see every line item that flows through that statement. Setup fees, photography, linen replacement, supplies, any platform fee they pass through. If they will not show you that document, you have your answer in about four minutes. Co-hosting agreements in that market run from 15% all-in to effectively 35% once every markup is counted, and owners on the low-fee version often net less because the co-host has no incentive to push rates. You want someone incentivized to perform, and you want the full fee structure in writing before the first guest checks in.

Your co-host may have genuinely segmented it in her own head, where base management is 20% and everything else counts as "services." That framing is common, and it lets someone say a true thing that creates a false picture. Setup fees alone on six units could be 1,500 to 3,000 per property depending on market, so call it 12k sitting completely outside the recurring split. Then if she is invoicing cleaning at 175 and paying her crew 130, that 45 spread across six units running 4 to 5 turns a week adds up faster than the percentage does. Southern utah runs seasonal hard, and both moab and the zion corridor have shoulder months where gross drops 35 to 40%, so the cleaning markup becomes proportionally more important to her revenue in the months when percentage income tanks. None of that is automatically predatory, but it is a different p&l than owners are modeling when they decide to hand over a property. The thing worth having before you put those two long holds into rotation is an actual owner statement from one of her current six. A real monthly reconciliation showing gross collected, her fee line, cleaning invoiced, supplies, and net to owner. If she runs clean books, that is one conversation. If she gets hesitant about showing even a sanitized version of a real statement, that tells you more than any math does.