How to Self-Manage Your Vacation Rental or Airbnb Without a Property Manager

So you just bought a vacation home in a wonderful place. Perhaps you bought it as a second home and want to rent it out occasionally to others. Or your bought it as an investment property and aim to make money from rental cashflow and appreciation.

The next question is how do you manage the property and do you need a property manager?

People are often shocked to find out that property managers for vacation rentals charge around 35% of revenue. So, if you’re serious about making money from rental cashflow there is pretty much no way to make that work using a property manager. What’s more is the manager is never going to give your property the same attention that you will because they have no “skin in the game” and they also manage the properties of many others so their attention is limited. Your property gets a bad review on Airbnb? No big deal for them because they have other properties, but you might be sunk.

But before you decide to self-manage, you need to recognize that you’re signing up for a part-time job as a small business owner of a little hotel. If well managed it might only take a few hours a month, but you’re ultimately responsible for making sure that the cleaners come, dealing with plumbing leaks, or noise complaints. A couple of times a year something will happen that seriously stresses you out! But that might happen if you have property manager as well.

So, if you elect to self-manage, there are two things you need to handle: customer acquisition (getting guests) and operations (making sure the house is clean and ready for each guest).

Customer acquisition is a solved problem. You just post the the property on Airbnb and Vrbo. Potentially you could post it on Booking.com, TripAdvisor or some other local sites as well. It requires work to figure out how to have a great listing, how to price it properly, and dealing with guest messages.

Operations is a bit trickier, but really it involves having a “crew” of people you can rely on. The key person in this system is your housecleaner. I’d suggest you find a housecleaner that you can pay extra to be your feet on the ground property manager who can stop by the house if things need attention and also keep the place stocked with things like shampoo, soap, and sponges, etc. This is the critical piece of your operations so spend a lot of time getting this right. Beyond your housecleaner / operations point person you need to know the right contractors to call on. Have the number on file for a good handy-person, plumber, and electrician.

The reality is that it doesn’t really matter if you live near the property or not. Last time we were in Sonoma we had a stressful problem that a bird got trapped in our chimney. Since we were there, we tried getting the bird out ourselves and it really stressed us out because we couldn’t do it. Ultimately, we called a wildlife specialist who managed to free the bird and safely release it. The fact that we were there didn’t change that the right solution was to call a specialist contractor.

If there is an issue that requires a plumber, you’re going to need to call a plumber whether you live 5 miles away or 5,000 miles away.