How to hire a vacation rental property manager

The company you choose matters less than the questions you ask before you choose. Owners who are unhappy two years in are rarely unhappy about the percentage — they are unhappy about something that was decided in a five-minute conversation nobody wrote down. This is the process we would run, the eighteen questions we would ask, the clauses we would argue over, and the order of operations for leaving.

The process, in order

Step 1 — Establish your own baseline first

Get twelve months of your own numbers on one page: gross accommodation revenue, cleaning fees collected, cleaning costs paid, maintenance, supplies, utilities, taxes, and occupancy by month. If the property is new, use two comparable listings in your market and be pessimistic. Without a baseline you cannot evaluate any pitch, because every pitch contains an implied "we will do better than what you have now" and you will have no way to test it.

Step 2 — Build a shortlist of four, deliberately mixed

Two local operators, one national brand, and one non-manager option — software or a co-host. The mix matters more than the length. Four candidates from the same category teaches you the category's price band and nothing else.

Check for shared parents before you count your options. Awning and RedAwning are one company with identical 10%, 15% and 18% tiers since RedAwning's acquisition in April 2024. Portoro absorbed Summer's management book. VTrips grew through more than twenty acquisitions, so the local team may have been someone else entirely two years ago. Two names is not always two options.

Step 3 — Find out who you would actually be signing with

This is the step that changed most in 2025 and 2026, and it is now the highest-value five minutes in the whole process. Casago acquired Vacasa in April 2025 for about $130 million and then sold nearly all of its roughly 32,000 units to local franchisees and regional operators, completing in August 2026 with all but around 600 units divested. iTrip runs more than 100 locally owned offices. Grand Welcome runs 70-plus locations. SkyRun describes itself as a network of locally owned businesses.

So the question is not "what are Vacasa's reviews like". It is: what is the legal name of the entity on the agreement, who owns it, how long have they operated in this market, and how many homes do they run here? National review aggregates are close to meaningless for a franchise — iTrip's aggregate third-party scores are poor, around 1.3 out of 5 on Trustpilot and 1.0 at the BBB, while individual offices carry good owner testimonials. Both are true. Neither describes your town.

Step 4 — Ask for a proposal in writing, with a sample statement

Ask for three documents: the fee schedule, the management agreement itself, and a complete owner statement for a comparable property covering a full month. The third one is the tell. Statements are where the fee structure meets reality — markups, linen charges, cleaning margins and reimbursables all show up there and nowhere else. A company that redacts a peer's statement for privacy and shows you the line-item structure is behaving well. A company that will not show you the shape of a statement at all has answered a different question than the one you asked.

Step 5 — Interview, using the list below

One conversation, one hour, notes taken. Send the questions in advance; a good operator will thank you for it, and the ones who find it exhausting have told you something about how they will handle your third email in November.

Step 6 — Call two owners in your market

Ask for references and specify the shape: two current owners in this market, plus — the important one — one owner who left in the last year. The reaction to that request is worth more than the calls. Nobody keeps every client, and a manager who cannot name a departure either has not had one or does not want you talking to them.

Step 7 — Read the agreement with the red-flag list open

Not the brochure. The agreement. Everything that will hurt you in year two is in there, usually in a clause about renewal, exclusivity or termination.

Eighteen questions to ask

Money

1. What is your fee, and is it calculated on accommodation revenue only or on gross including cleaning and pet fees?
2. What one-time charges apply — onboarding, listing creation, photography, furnishing?
3. What does the guest pay for cleaning, what does the cleaner receive, and who keeps any difference?
4. What markup do you apply to maintenance and repairs, and above what amount do you need my approval to spend?
5. Are there monthly minimums, or charges in months when the property does not book?
6. When do I get paid each month, and against what documentation?

Operations

7. Are your cleaners employees, a dedicated vendor, or a marketplace — and what happens on a Thursday when one cancels?
8. How many properties does the person responsible for my home look after?
9. What is the after-hours escalation path, and who physically attends the property at 11pm?
10. How far is your nearest staffed office from my property, and who holds keys?
11. How do you set and change nightly rates, and can I set a floor price?
12. How many nights a year can I block for my own use, and are peak dates restricted?

Control, compliance and exit

13. Whose accounts will the listing sit under, and what happens to the listing, the reviews and the Superhost status if I leave?
14. Who owns the photographs and the listing copy afterwards?
15. Which permits, licences and lodging tax filings are yours and which remain mine — in writing?
16. What licence do you hold in this state, and is booking revenue held in a trust account?
17. What is the notice period, is the term automatically renewing, and what happens to bookings already on the calendar when I terminate?
18. Can I speak to one owner in this market who left you in the last twelve months?

If you only ask three, ask 13, 15 and 17. Listing ownership, tax responsibility and exit terms are the three that are effectively impossible to renegotiate afterwards.

Contract clauses worth arguing over

None of these are automatically disqualifying. They are the places where the agreement stops being about service and starts being about leverage.

• Auto-renewing multi-year terms. A twelve-month initial term is normal — AvantStay is typically a 12-month term with mutually agreeable termination clauses, though the notice period is not published. An auto-renewing term with a narrow window to opt out is not. Ask for the renewal date in writing and put it in your calendar the day you sign.
• A long lock-in on a cheap tier. Air Concierge's nationwide Offsite tier is 12% of gross bookings excluding taxes and is explicitly a one-year contract. Twelve months is a long commitment for a remote, coordination-only service. Low rate and long term is a combination to weigh, not a bargain to grab.
• Exclusivity and blocked owner nights. Some agreements restrict your own use of the property in peak weeks. If you bought partly to use it, this clause is worth more to you than two points of fee.
• Silence on listing ownership. If the agreement does not say what happens to the listing on termination, the answer is that they keep it. Grand Welcome's homeowner FAQ is unusually candid here — it notes that VRBO reviews can sometimes transfer while Airbnb offers no review-transfer process — and we would rather see that written plainly than left out.
• Unbounded maintenance authority. "Manager may undertake repairs as necessary" with no dollar threshold is a blank cheque. Set a number.
• Indemnities that run one way. Read who carries the risk for guest damage, for injury, and for a regulatory breach. If every sentence protects them, ask for the reciprocal one.
• Termination that strands your calendar. Vacasa's published terms allow cancellation with 90 days' written notice, with bookings checking out before termination honoured, and no standard early-termination fee — a reasonable benchmark. What you are testing for is whether bookings taken under the old manager transfer, cancel, or sit in limbo.
• No trial and no way back. Evolve has no long-term contract and refunds management fees inside the first six months under its Risk-Free Guarantee. Grand Welcome states month-to-month with 30 days' advance notice. Those exist, which means a twelve-month lock-in is a choice rather than an industry necessity. Ask for the same and see what happens.

What good looks like

A short benchmark set, taken from companies that publish their terms. Month-to-month with 30 days' notice. A published rate card rather than a bespoke proposal. A stated go-live timeline — Grand Welcome describes two to three weeks through onboarding, walk-through, photography and owner approval before publishing, which is a realistic and honest number. A named local person responsible for your property. A sample owner statement provided without a fight. And a clear, unhappy-making answer about what happens to your reviews, given before you ask rather than after.

You will not get all six. Two or three, plus references who answer their phones, is a good outcome.

How to leave a manager you already have

Exiting badly costs a season. Exiting in the right order costs a fortnight. Do it like this.

1. Read the termination clause first, and diarise the dates. Notice periods of 30 to 90 days are typical. Count backwards from the date you want to be operating independently, not forwards from today.
2. Decide what replaces them before you serve notice. A gap between managers is a gap in your calendar, and a calendar gap in your peak month is the expensive version of this mistake.
3. Rebuild your listing in parallel, under your own account. Assume the reviews do not come with you. Assume the photographs may not either unless the agreement says otherwise. New photography is a two-week lead time — start it now, not after.
4. Serve notice in writing, by the method the contract specifies. Email is often not sufficient. Keep proof of delivery.
5. Agree in writing what happens to bookings on the calendar. Which reservations they honour, which transfer, who holds the deposits, and who refunds if a guest cancels in the gap.
6. Recover your property and your data. Keys, codes, remotes, linens and inventory. Then the less obvious ones: guest history, your permit and tax registration numbers, vendor contacts, and the final owner statement with reimbursables reconciled.
7. Take the local relationships with you. Your cleaner, your handyman and your pool company usually work for several owners and are often happy to keep working for you directly. This is the most underrated asset in the whole handover, and it is the part that makes the next arrangement work.

Owners who have been through this once tend to choose differently the second time — not necessarily cheaper, but with much more attention to who owns the listing and how the exit works. That is the entire argument of this page, arrived at the expensive way.

What follows is about TIDY, because the question it answers comes up most often at the end of an exit. Everything above it still applies: read the terms, price it against your baseline, and check what you own when you leave.