Two co-hosting offers at once, and the real question is a percentage of what

Why is cleaning excluded from the base fee at all. The guest pays it, it shows up in the booking total, and the manager is the one hiring and rescheduling the cleaner when a checkout runs late. The instinct not to look like marking up someone else's labor is understandable, but coordination is work, and doing it for zero doesn't change that.

Run it against what long term management pays and the co-hosting fee starts to make sense. On small buildings, a manager typically takes 8 percent of collected rent and touches the unit maybe four times a year. This condo turns 40 or 50 times a year. $435 a month for 50 turns is under nine dollars a turn before a single message gets answered.

Pull the condo documents on A before pricing anything. Beach market, two bedroom, self-managed for three years, and the declaration and the rules as amended matter more than the summary an owner emails over. Associations add minimum stay language all the time, and an owner operating against a rule nobody enforced yet is a problem that becomes the new manager's the week enforcement starts. Same for insurance. Get the current policy declarations page and check 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. Confirm with the carrier in writing what liability coverage does and does not cover when 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 carry all the systems overhead of a business and none of the density that makes it work. A portfolio tends to find sanity around eight in one market with one cleaning crew that can actually be scheduled. The read here is that B is the real client and A is a favor priced like a client. If A stays on, put a monthly floor under her. Something like 15 percent of net bookings or $600, whichever is greater. She has a slow season and the manager still works every one of those nights answering inquiries that don't convert.

Put hours against a short-term rental before comparing two properties, or the comparison is a guess. Take a property doing roughly 55 stays a year: fifteen minutes of messaging per stay if the operation is automated and disciplined, thirty if it is not. Turn coordination at ten minutes each when nothing goes wrong. Two site visits a month at twenty five minutes of drive each way. Pricing review at an hour a week. Owner reporting at an hour a month. That lands somewhere between 90 and 160 hours a year on a single property, which at typical net revenue works out to somewhere between roughly $30 and $60 an hour before tools and vehicle costs. A property with higher revenue and fewer turns wins on every line. The assumption doing all the work in that range is messaging minutes, and tracking it on a real property for sixty days is the way to know whether the model holds.

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.

The fee base fight comes up the same way across this business, and here is how to set it. Base the percentage on what the owner receives from the platform after platform host fees, before subtracting 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 the markup is not hidden and the turns are not worked for free. Excluding cleaning entirely from the base while still doing the coordination is a common early mistake, and it can cost a fifth of a manager's margin for a couple of seasons before it gets corrected. Occupancy tax comes out of the base always. It was never the manager's 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 that line can be repriced without reopening the management fee. State plainly in the agreement that the manager prepares and submits, 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 tend to come from operators buying their first ten clients who will be gone in eighteen months. If she comes back in April when her calendar is empty, the price should still be the 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 @wendy_park48 raised a point worth chasing in the documents, and it changes the picture. If an association amended its rules to a seven night minimum stay in season, but the owner has been taking three and four night bookings the whole time, those booked nights are not the real baseline under the rules as written. Run seven night minimums from Memorial Day to Labor Day and the ADR likely holds, but the calendar picks up a lot of unsellable gaps, which makes any percentage of that smaller number worse than it first appeared. @monica_tran3, the coordination fee per turn is the piece worth isolating. That reframes the whole comparison.

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 @dmitri_248 raised, this is where property managers get caught. If guest funds or owner funds pass through an account the manager controls, 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. Confirming with the state commission or a licensed professional there before opening any account is worth doing first. The simpler path for someone new to co-hosting is to stay off the payout path entirely. Payouts go to the owner, and the manager invoices monthly against a statement they produce. It's less tidy for reimbursements, but it keeps a new operator out of a whole category of trouble while learning the business.

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? A useful practice is listing towns by permit regime, since much of what looks like a short term rental market turns out to be capped, grandfathered to existing operators, or in the middle of a council review. An owner asking for help with a renewal is a signal that market has real rules, which is fine, it just means the 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 an operator's problem when a carrier non-renews mid-season and someone else is left rebooking guests. One line in an intake form asking whether the lender and the insurer have been told in writing about the short term use 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 in place today is not the rule that governs 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 the right ask is the permit itself, the issue date, and whatever the current ordinance text is, along with a clause in the management agreement about what happens to the fee if the property loses the right to operate nightly. If it converts to 30 day minimum stays, the workload drops enormously and the percentage should reflect that rather than being argued over later.

The A math has a hole. Subtracting cleaning gets to $34,800, and 15 percent of that is $5,220, but if the base is supposed to be net of cleaning and occupancy taxes, the taxes were never subtracted. If lodging tax in that market runs 10 to 12 percent of the rental line and it is inside the $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 nobody has 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 an owner sends over, and owners routinely hand over the top line number without knowing which one it is. One more point. Platform host service fees come off before the owner ever sees the money. Decide whether a 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.

A twelve month term on either of these is not the move. Ninety days, then reprice with actual data from the resulting statements. Right now the manager only has the owner's numbers and the owner's memory of the numbers, and those are rarely the same. After a quarter there's something behind holding 20.

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. Four properties within fifteen minutes of each other at 15 percent will generally outperform one property at 20 percent two hours away, once the operating friction is priced in.

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.