Two owners said yes the same week. Percentage of what, exactly?

Why is cleaning excluded from your base at all? The guest pays it, it shows up in the booking total, and you are the one hiring and rescheduling the cleaner when a checkout runs late. I understand you do not want to look like you are marking up someone else's labor, but coordination is work and right now you are doing it for zero.

Run it against what long term management pays and you will see why co-hosting charges what it does. On my small buildings the manager takes 8 percent of collected rent and touches the unit maybe four times a year. Your condo turns 40 or 50 times. $435 a month for 50 turns is under nine dollars a turn before you have answered a single message.

Pull the condo documents on A before you price anything. Beach market, two bedroom, self-managed for three years, and I would want to see the declaration and the rules as amended, not the summary the owner emails you. Associations add minimum stay language all the time, and an owner operating against a rule nobody enforced yet is a problem that becomes yours the week enforcement starts.

Same for insurance. Ask for the current policy declarations page and see whether short term rental use is actually covered or whether the owner assumed the platform's coverage handles it. Those are different things and the gap only shows up after a claim. Get your own liability coverage sorted too, and confirm with the carrier in writing what it does and does not cover when you are acting for someone else.

How many guest messages does a booking actually generate? I have tried to get a straight answer to this from anyone and the range I hear runs from four to forty. That number is the whole labor model for you, and if it is closer to forty then A at $435 is a part time job you are paying to keep.

What gets left out of the math is the 11pm call. Hot water out, lock dead, ice maker flooding the kitchen floor. You need two plumbers, two electricians and a handyman who answers, and you need them before the first one is needed, not during.

Also decide now who authorizes spend and up to what. I would put a dollar threshold in the agreement, say anything under $250 you handle and bill through, anything over you call the owner. Without that you will either be fronting money or leaving a guest sitting in a cold unit while you wait for a text back.

The licensing question is not theoretical. In the state I am getting licensed in, managing real property belonging to another for compensation falls under the real estate license law, and short term rental management is not carved out. Other states carve it out or handle it through a separate registration. It genuinely varies, so the only useful move is to read your own state's license law definitions and then confirm with the state commission or a licensed professional there.

What I would not do is assume the word co-host protects you. The statute cares what you do and what you get paid, not what the platform calls the role.

Two is the worst number of properties. At two you have all the systems overhead of a business and none of the density that makes it work. My team hit sanity around eight in one market with one cleaning crew we could actually schedule.

What I would take from your post is that B is the real client and A is a favor priced like a client. If you take A, put a monthly floor under her. Something like 15 percent of net bookings or $600, whichever is greater. She has a slow season and you still work every one of those nights answering inquiries that do not convert.

Put hours against it or you are guessing. A, 178 nights, say 55 stays. Fifteen minutes of messaging per stay if you are automated and disciplined, thirty if you are not. Turn coordination, ten minutes each when nothing goes wrong. Two site visits a month at twenty five minutes of drive each way. Pricing review an hour a week across both. Owner reporting an hour a month.

That is somewhere between 90 and 160 hours a year on A alone. At $5,220 you are between $33 and $58 an hour before tools and before your car. B is better on every line because the revenue is higher and the turns are fewer.

The assumption doing all the work in that range is the messaging minutes. Track it on the first property for sixty days and you will know whether your model is real.

Which one would teach you more, though? Not which one pays. If the condo is twenty five minutes away and turns fifty times a year, that is a very fast education in what actually breaks, and B two hours out with 141 nights lets you hide from your own systems for longer.

I've had the fee base fight come up the same way every time over five years in this business. Here is how I would set it.

Base your percentage on what the owner receives from the platform after platform host fees, before you subtract cleaning. Then charge the cleaning through at actual cost with a stated coordination fee per turn, something like $15 to $25, disclosed on the statement. That way you are not hiding a markup and you are not working turns for free. Excluding cleaning entirely from the base and doing the coordination anyway is the mistake I made in year one and it cost me about a fifth of my margin for two seasons.

Occupancy tax comes out of the base always. It was never your money.

B's filing request gets its own line. Permit renewal at a flat annual fee, tax filing at a flat monthly fee. Two reasons. It shows the owner what compliance actually costs, and when the local rules change and the filing gets harder you can reprice that line without reopening the management fee. Say plainly in the agreement that you prepare and submit, the owner remains responsible for the tax, and they should have their own accountant review it.

On A, hold at 20 with a floor and let her walk if she walks. Fifteen percent quotes come from people who are buying the first ten clients and will be gone in eighteen months. If she comes back in April when her calendar is empty, your price is still your price.

And get the state license question answered before either contract, because retrofitting a compliant structure onto live accounts is much worse than starting right.

Following up because @fathom sent me back to the documents and it changed the picture. A's association amended its rules eighteen months ago to a seven night minimum stay in season. The owner has been taking three and four night bookings the whole time and told me nobody has said anything.

So her 178 nights are not 178 nights under the rules as written. If she has to run seven night minimums from Memorial Day to Labor Day, her ADR probably holds but the calendar gets a lot of unsellable gaps, and my 15 percent of a smaller number is worse again.

@thatch, the coordination fee per turn is the piece I was missing. That reframes the whole thing for me.

Scope creep in co-hosting looks like restocking. It starts with coffee pods and paper towels and six months later you are buying a mattress topper on your own card at nine at night because a guest complained.

Write the consumables policy into the agreement. Either the owner keeps a float with you, say $400 replenished monthly, or you invoice at cost with receipts and a handling percentage. Also define what a deep clean is versus a turn, and how often it happens, or you will be arguing about baseboards in August.

On the money flow point @warrant raised, this is where property managers get caught. If guest funds or owner funds pass through an account you control, several states treat that as handling client money and require a designated trust or escrow account with specific record keeping, and the rules differ state to state on what qualifies. Confirm with your state commission or a licensed professional there before you open any account.

The easy version for a new co-host is to stay off the payout path entirely. Payouts go to the owner. You invoice monthly against a statement you produce. It is less tidy for reimbursements and it keeps you out of a whole category of trouble while you are learning.

A year ago I would have been too embarrassed to ask this. When a guest wrecks something, who actually eats it? You are managing the account, you file the claim, the platform decides. If the platform pays nothing, does the owner look at you and ask why you did not screen better? I would want that written down before the first booking, because it will happen.

How are you picking markets? I have been listing towns by permit regime and half of what I thought was a short term rental market turns out to be capped, grandfathered to existing operators, or in the middle of a council review. Your B owner asking you to handle the renewal is a signal that market has real rules, which is fine, it just means your value there is compliance as much as pricing.

Walk from A. $435 a month, twenty five minutes each way, fifty turns, and an association rule the owner is already running against. That is not a client, that is a hobby with a legal exposure attached.

I have taken the thin one to fill the calendar plenty of times and it never once turned into the good client. It turns into the one that calls most and pays least. Put those hours into finding a second B.

Check what the owners' loans say. Plenty of residential mortgages have occupancy and use language that does not sit comfortably with nightly rentals, and some insurance policies are written the same way. This is the owner's problem legally, but it becomes your problem operationally when a carrier non-renews mid-season and you are the one rebooking guests.

One line in your intake form asking whether the lender and the insurer have been told in writing about the short term use. Their answer tells you a lot about how carefully that owner runs things.

The ceiling on this business is cleaners. Everything else scales with software. I watched an operator I know go from four to eleven properties in one summer and the thing that broke was a single cleaning crew that could not do three same day turns in two towns.

If you are picking between two markets, pick the one where you can get a second cleaning team on standby. That is a harder question than the fee percentage and it decides whether you can grow past six.

The rule that exists today is not the rule you are managing under in three years. Ordinances get amended, caps get added, and grandfathering provisions are written differently everywhere, sometimes tied to the owner and sometimes to the property.

So I would ask your B owner for the permit itself, the issue date, and whatever the current ordinance text is. Then put a clause in your agreement about what happens to the fee if the property loses the right to operate nightly. If it converts to 30 day minimum stays, your work drops enormously and your percentage should reflect that rather than either of you arguing about it later.

Your A math has a hole. You subtracted cleaning to get $34,800 and took 15 percent for $5,220, but you said your base is net of cleaning and occupancy taxes and you never subtracted the taxes. If lodging tax in that market runs 10 to 12 percent of the rental line and it is inside your $41,200, the base is closer to $31,000 and the fee is around $4,650. That is a $570 a year difference and it is entirely in a definition you have not written down yet.

Also confirm whether the platform is collecting and remitting the tax or whether the owner is. It changes what number even appears in the gross figure the owner sent you, and owners routinely hand over the top line number without knowing which one it is.

One more. Platform host service fees come off before the owner ever sees the money. Decide whether your percentage sits above or below that line and say so in the contract with an example calculation attached. An example calculation ends more disputes than a paragraph of definitions.

How did two owners find you at the same time when you have no properties under management yet? I am at zero and the first client problem looks larger to me than any of the pricing questions in this thread. Was it referral, or were you posting somewhere specific, or did you just ask people you already knew.

I would not sign a twelve month term on the first two, in either direction. Ninety days, then reprice with actual data from your own statements. You currently have the owner's numbers and the owner's memory of the numbers, and those are rarely the same. After a quarter you can hold 20 with something behind it.

Two markets is the mistake, not two properties. Everything that breaks at scale breaks along geography first, cleaners, handymen, key handoffs, the drive when a guest is locked out on a Friday night. I would rather have four properties within fifteen minutes of each other at 15 percent than one at 20 percent two hours away.

What did it cost you to be ready to say yes to these two? I am trying to build the actual startup number for a co-hosting business and everyone talks about the fee and nobody lists the setup. Insurance, tools, a lockbox or smart lock budget, a linen par set, whatever legal work the agreement took.

@thatch's floor is the part I am taking away from this. A percentage alone means the owner's slow season is your slow season even though your workload barely drops, since inquiries and calendar work continue whether or not anyone books.

@lantern, the seven night minimum changes the whole shape of A. Run her calendar again on seven night blocks and see what the realistic booked nights are. In a lot of beach markets the weekly stay is the norm anyway and the number barely moves, in others you lose a third of the shoulder season because everyone wants four nights.

What matters more is that she has been operating against an amended rule and told you nobody has said anything. That is the answer to whether you take her at 15. If she is relaxed about the association rule she will be relaxed about the tax filing, the permit and the insurance, and every one of those becomes a conversation you have to have twice. Price that or skip it.

If you do take her, put a line in the agreement saying you manage the listing in accordance with the association rules and local ordinances as they exist, and that you will set the minimum stay accordingly. Then set it to seven and let her argue with you before the contract rather than after.

@flint is half right about walking. I would still take A, but as a flat $600 a month for the first season with a written review at day 90, no percentage at all.

Flat fee on the learning unit is underrated. You find out what your true hours are without the revenue swings hiding it, and the owner cannot tell herself she is paying you more than the two people who quoted 15. Then you convert her to a percentage with a floor once you have your own data. The risk is she gets used to the flat number and fights the change, so put the conversion mechanic in the original agreement.

Get a backup cleaner before your first booking, not after your primary one gets sick on a Saturday in July with two turns waiting.

Coming back to say I got an answer from my state commission on the licensing question and it took nine days by email, so start that clock now rather than after you sign.

@lantern, what did you land on with A? Going back through the thread, it looks like the seven night rule did more to your decision than the five percent ever did, and I would be curious whether you priced the compliance work on B separately in the end or folded it in.