What short-term rental management actually costs
Management fees are the question owners ask most and get the least straight answer on. This page has the market ranges, our published rate, and the arithmetic for comparing a cheap fee against a full-service one. Run your own numbers before you talk to anyone. Including us.
Last updated August 2026
Full service runs 20–35%. Listing-only runs 8–15%.
Those two bands describe the short-term rental management market in this region. They buy very different amounts of work, which is why the percentages sit so far apart.
| Model | Typical fee | What the owner still handles |
|---|---|---|
| Listing / remote management National platforms, remote co-hosts |
8–15% | Cleaner scheduling and quality, maintenance and vendors, supplies, after-hours problems, neighbors, local licensing |
| Full-service local management A manager with people in your city |
20–35% | Approving larger expenses. That's close to all of it. |
A percentage on its own tells you very little, because two managers quoting different numbers are often charging on different bases and doing different amounts of work. Before you compare any two quotes, find out what the percentage is calculated on and what it buys.
Three tiers, published, and the same for everyone.
We put our pricing on the website because an owner should be able to do the arithmetic before talking to a salesperson. This is the rate for every owner we work with. Keeping it the same for everyone is what lets us staff the work properly.
18%
Essential management. This is also the tier we offer for properties outside the greater Puget Sound region, where we can't put our own people on the ground.
25%
Full service, including cleaner management, property inspections, maintenance coordination, and local tax and licensing compliance.
30%
Everything in Pro, plus we absorb the small consumables and carry furniture damage coverage, so a broken lamp doesn't become an owner invoice.
Which tier applies is mostly a question of geography rather than preference. Every tier is available in our home market. Outside it, we offer Basic, because we can't do on-the-ground work in a city where we've no people.
A lower percentage of a smaller number isn't a saving.
The management fee is a share of a total that the manager influences. The comparison worth making is what reaches your account after the fee, using each manager’s realistic booking performance rather than assuming both produce the same revenue.
That comparison, on a Puget Sound three-bedroom, uses the booked-nights bands we publish in every property report: 50–60% of nights for an owner-managed or lightly-managed listing, and 65–75% for a professionally managed one. The remote fee below is 12%, the midpoint of the 8–15% band.
| Remote / listing-only | Full-service local | |
|---|---|---|
| Nights booked | 50–60% | 65–75% |
| Gross booking revenue | $32,000 | $41,000 |
| Management fee | 12% → −$3,840 | 25% (Pro) → −$10,250 |
| Revenue after the management fee | $28,160 | $30,750 |
| Owner’s remaining workload | Cleaners, vendors, supplies, guest problems, after-hours calls | Approving larger expenses |
Property expenses come out of both columns identically — utilities, insurance, repairs, consumables, licensing. Neither figure above is what you take home. The point of the table is the gap between the two, and who's doing the work that produced it.
This won't hold for every home. An owner who's good at this, in a market with little competition, can close most of that gap. Run the arithmetic on your own address rather than taking either version on faith.
A management fee is a payroll decision.
Look at the fee from the manager’s side of the table for a minute. The arithmetic explains a lot about what happens after you sign.
A company charging 10% on a home that grosses $40,000 earns $4,000 a year from that property. Out of that comes the person answering guest messages, the person who picks up the phone when something breaks, insurance, software, a vehicle, and the office. At that price the arithmetic only closes at volume, which means each person carries more properties. That's the mechanism behind the experience owners describe when they leave a cheap manager: the Saturday message that went unanswered until Monday, the maintenance issue that waited a week, the small problem that became a three-star review.
None of that requires anyone to be lazy or dishonest. A smaller fee buys less, and the first thing it buys less of is people’s time. When you compare two quotes, the question underneath the percentage is how many properties the person handling yours is also handling.
The cost that shows up later
Owners who leave an underperforming manager tend to pay for it twice. There's the revenue that was never earned in the first year. Then there's the recovery: new photography, a rebuilt listing, weeks of thin bookings during the handover, deferred maintenance surfacing all at once, and a review history that starts over if the listing was on the manager’s account rather than yours.
That second bill is the one nobody budgets for, and it's usually larger than the fee difference that prompted the original decision.
Cleaner scheduling and cleaner management are two different jobs.
New owners almost always treat cleaning as a solved problem. Find a cleaner, connect the calendar, and the turnovers happen. The scheduling portion is fairly easy to automate but managing the people who perform the cleaning is a whole other thing. Within a couple of months you can read the difference in your reviews.
Scheduling is telling the cleaner when.
A calendar sync sends the dates. When a guest books, checks in, or checks out, the cleaner’s calendar learns about it. This is largely automated and it works most of the time.
The caveat is that shared calendars poll rather than push, so every hop adds delay. A same-day booking, an early checkout, a cancellation or an extension can land after the cleaner has already planned the day. A guest books at nine in the morning for that night; the cleaner’s calendar finds out around noon; the cleaner is forty minutes away on another job. Automation created the task. A person reassigns it.
Management is everything the calendar can't say.
The dates are the least of what a cleaner needs to know. The calendar knows a booking exists. It doesn't know that this one is two couples rather than a family, so the king should be split into twins. It doesn't know the last guest mentioned the coffee maker was sticky, or that the owner is arriving Friday, or that the shower door has started catching and should be looked at before it fails on somebody.
Carrying what people say back to the person who can fix it
Guests, owners and managers all notice things. Somebody has to turn that into a specific instruction for a specific cleaner, and then check the next turnover to see whether it took.
Somebody checks work they didn't do
Photographs from consistent angles at the end of a turnover, and spot inspections in person. New cleaners get checked hard for the first month or two, established ones at random after that.
Reporting what broke, the day it broke
A cleaner in a hurry works around a small stain on the couch. The clock on recovering that cost is already running, and it runs out quietly.
Putting the house back the way it was photographed
Cleaning removes what the last guest left. Staging restores what the listing promised. A spotless room that doesn't match its photos still produces an accuracy complaint.
Par counts on every consumable
Coffee, paper, soap, toilet paper, batteries, light bulbs. A count also tells you the day a hair dryer goes missing, rather than three weeks later when a guest complains there's not one.
Continuous, because the standard drifts and the people change
Cleaning has one of the highest turnover rates of any service trade. A managed program keeps a bench, trains against the same checklist and the same staging photographs, and audits new people harder, so the owner never experiences the changeover.
The damage clock is the clearest example.
Airbnb’s host damage protection terms give a host fourteen days from the responsible guest’s checkout to notify Airbnb of a complaint, and thirty days to file the request with evidence. Fourteen days sounds generous until you notice where the clock starts: at a checkout you weren't present for, on damage you don't yet know exists.
The real deadline is earlier than either of those, and it isn't written in the policy. Once the next guest is in the room, you can no longer prove who caused it. A stain found three weeks later is unrecoverable no matter how clearly the terms are written, because the evidence is gone. So someone has to look at the house between guests, and report what they find the same day.
The terms cut the other way too. Airbnb’s coverage does include extra cleaning to remove guest-caused stains, pet accidents and smoke odor. What it excludes is normal turnover cleaning, and it pays only the amount above the cleaning fee you already collected. Owners talk themselves out of valid claims as often as they file hopeless ones.
Why any of this shows up in revenue.
Airbnb’s Guest Favorite designation requires an average rating above 4.9, and Superhost requires 4.8 across a rolling year, both with cleanliness as a scored subcategory. At 4.9 there's almost no margin for error. A handful of cleanliness complaints across a year can move a listing out of a badge that feeds ranking, which feeds views, which feeds bookings. One poor turnover isn't one poor night.
Everyone uses the same pricing software. The difference is whether anyone is watching it.
Almost every serious operator in this business runs one of the same three or four dynamic pricing tools. We do too. They blend market comps, occupancy and booking pace with a listing’s own performance and output a nightly rate. Anyone claiming proprietary pricing technology is describing a subscription.
A pricing tool is a set of instructions you write once. It keeps following them after they stop being right.
A new listing has no recommendation for two to three weeks
The software needs consistent price history before it can suggest anything specific to your property. Somebody has to set the opening number and watch what it does to views and inquiries.
A national tool catches the big ones
It knows about a stadium concert. It doesn't know about a four-hundred-person wedding block or a supplier conference announced last week in Snohomish County.
The single night between two bookings
It sits empty unless somebody drops the minimum stay for exactly that gap. Nobody watching from a phone catches these.
Settings written in January describe a market that's gone by spring
Comp sets go stale as neighbors change their ratings and amenities. Six weeks after a new property opens nearby you can be the cheapest on the block without ever deciding to be.
Even the pricing companies themselves employ people for this. One of the largest publishes that its own revenue management team steps in to set prices by hand for specific events, because bookings for those dates appear too late for the system to detect the demand on its own. That's a sensible design. It's also an admission that the software is a starting point.
We won't quote you a percentage of extra revenue for active pricing. Every published figure on that comes from a company that sells one side of it. The work is setting and re-setting the base price, rebuilding the comp set as competitors change, moving season boundaries to match local reality, loading known events months ahead, adjusting minimum stays with demand, clearing orphan gaps, checking that the cleaning fee and rate still make sense together on a two-night stay, and confirming the rates reached every channel. Somebody sits down and does all of that, month after month. That's part of what the management fee pays for.
The things worth knowing before you sign with anyone.
Most of these apply to any manager you're considering, including us. Where a question has an answer we can give about ourselves, it's here.
How much does short-term rental management cost in the Puget Sound region?
If I hire a manager, whose Airbnb account is the listing on?
What happens to my bookings and reviews if I leave my manager?
How do I tell whether a manager is actually doing a good job?
What does the cleaning fee pay for, and does anyone mark it up?
Can I still use my own property, and what does that cost me?
What do I have to pay for myself, on top of the management fee?
Does my homeowners insurance cover short-term renting?
Should I hire a manager at all, or self-manage?
Who is responsible for lodging taxes — me, the platform, or the manager?
About the figures on this page. The percentage ranges describe the broader short-term-rental management market and are provided for general education. The worked example is an illustration built from the booked-nights bands we publish. It is not a projection for any particular home, and it is not a quote, an offer, or a prediction of what any property will earn. Actual revenue varies with market conditions, seasonality, property condition and presentation, regulation, competition, and factors outside any manager’s control.
Platform policies described here, including Airbnb’s damage protection, AirCover and host cancellation terms, are summarized in plain language as of August 2026 and change without notice. Verify current terms with the platform before relying on them.
Nothing on this page is financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Fees, inclusions and terms for any engagement are established only in a signed management agreement.