Short-term rental management companies, priced as a line item

Management is the largest controllable expense in a short-term rental. It is bigger than your insurance, bigger than your utilities, and on a leveraged door it is frequently bigger than your entire annual cash flow. This site compares short-term rental management companies the way you would underwrite any other operating cost: what it does to net operating income, what it does to break-even occupancy, and what happens to it when you add a fifth door.

We track 19 companies and platforms — national full-service operators, franchise networks, demand-only firms and the software an owner runs alone. No scores, no league table. The fee ranges, contract terms and coverage below come from company pricing pages and filings where those exist, and are marked as unpublished where they do not.

What a short-term rental management company actually does

"Management" is six separate jobs, and the word is used for firms that do all six and firms that do two. Before you compare a percentage against a percentage, work out which of these you are buying:

1. Demand. Listing copy and photography, channel distribution across Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and direct, and dynamic pricing. This is the piece software replaces most easily.
2. Guest operations. Inquiry response, check-in instructions, the 11pm lockout, damage claims, refund decisions. Mostly automatable, right up until it isn't.
3. Turnovers. Cleaning, linen, restocking, quality checks between stays. This is a vendor-management problem, not a software problem, and it is where remote managers thin out.
4. Maintenance and inspections. The HVAC call, the hot tub, the quarterly walk-through. Watch for supervisory markups here — VTrips is reported to add roughly 10% on maintenance work on top of its management fee.
5. Money. Payout handling, owner statements, trust accounting, year-end tax documents. Whoever does this is usually the one holding your platform accounts.
6. Compliance. Permit renewals, occupancy tax collection, life-safety requirements. The most unevenly covered job of the six — see what managers actually take responsibility for.

Three models, and what each one costs against gross bookings

Full service, roughly 20–35%. The company takes all six jobs and lists the property under its own accounts. AvantStay, VTrips, Natural Retreats, Portoro and the franchise networks — iTrip Vacations, Grand Welcome, Casago, SkyRun — sit here. Almost none of them publish a rate: eight of the managers tracked here quote only on request, which means you cannot comparison-shop without submitting to a sales process. Where owners do report figures, they cluster at 25% and rise to 30–35% for smaller units in weaker markets, because the fee has to cover a fixed local cost base.

Demand-only and tiered, roughly 10–18%. Evolve publishes 10% for its Core tier and 15% for Plus, plus a $250 one-time onboarding fee. RedAwning publishes 10/15/18%, and Awning — which RedAwning acquired in 2024, so treat them as one company rather than two quotes — mirrors those tiers. Air Concierge publishes 12% for its remote Offsite tier. The thing to understand is that the cheap tier buys marketing and booking. Cleaning, guest access, restocking and vendor coordination stay with you or with vendors you hire and pay. A 10% demand-only fee and a 25% full-service fee are not the same purchase, and stacking them in one column is the single most common mistake in STR underwriting.

Software you run yourself. Hostaway and Guesty are property-management systems aimed at operators with real door counts; Hospitable is an automation layer starting free and topping out at $99/month plus per-property fees; Turno does turnover scheduling and nothing else; TIDY prices at 3.9% of gross bookings with a $19/unit/month floor and an optional $39/unit/month cleaning and maintenance add-on. This is the only category where the listing, the reviews, the Superhost status and the payouts stay in your name — those five are the only companies here where that is true. It is also the only category where you are still the host of record, which means you keep the liability and the 11pm phone call.

The same house, four ways to run it

Every calculation on this site uses one property so the numbers reconcile across pages. It is a three-bedroom in a drive-to leisure market — unremarkable on purpose, because the argument does not depend on a trophy asset.

Demand-only column assumes a 10% published fee plus a $3,000 annual local operations budget, because that tier does not include turnovers. Software columns use TIDY's published 3.9% plus the $39/unit/month operations add-on; the VA column adds $600/month for part-time guest communications. Flat-priced alternatives change the shape of that row — Hospitable's top tier is $1,188 a year regardless of revenue — but buy less of the operating job.

The spread between the most and least expensive way to run this house is $13,458 of annual cash flow and about 320 basis points of cap rate. Nothing else on the operating statement moves the deal that far.

Two honest caveats before anyone screenshots that table. First, the right-hand columns are not free — they are paid for in hours, and the hourly rate implied by the full-service column is roughly $52 for the first door, which is a bad wage for some readers and a great one for others. Second, if you plan to sell, do not capitalise your own labour into the exit price. A buyer underwriting the same property will usually assume a market management expense, which means the sweat-equity version of that cap rate largely evaporates at the closing table. It shows up in your cash flow, not in your appraisal. The full scenario grid — weak year, base year, strong year, and the break-even occupancy for each model — is on management fees and cash flow.

The comparison table

Ordered by how much of the operating job each option takes off your hands, most to least, then alphabetically inside each group. That is an evaluation sequence, not a ranking: nobody here is "number one", and the correct answer changes with your door count, your market and how far you live from the property.

Fees marked "not published" are exactly that — the company quotes on request. Where a third-party or owner-reported figure exists we label it as reported rather than treating it as a price. Confirm every number directly with the company before you sign anything.

Heads up: this site is operated by TIDY. We include TIDY in our comparisons and tell you when we do. TIDY is in the table above because it is one of the options an STR operator will actually consider, and it is flagged as ours so you can discount it accordingly.

What to do at each portfolio size

One door

This is the only size where full service is an easy call, because the fee is small in absolute dollars and the alternative is you personally answering messages on holiday. If the property is a plane ride away and grosses under about $50,000, take the manager and accept the thin cash flow — you are buying appreciation and optionality, not yield. If it is within driving distance, software plus a good cleaner is a $3,000 solution to a $16,500 problem. Grand Welcome is worth a look for a trial run specifically because its homeowner FAQ states a month-to-month agreement with 30 days' notice, which is unusually short for full service.

Two to four doors

The awkward middle. Too many doors to enjoy self-managing, too few to justify staff. This is where hybrid setups earn their keep: software for demand and guest communication, a cleaner you pay directly, a handyman on call, and full service reserved for the one outlier property you cannot service. Watch the per-unit pricing shape carefully here, because it varies wildly — Guesty's cheap Lite tier stops at three listings, Hospitable's per-property increments climb steeply at the top tier, and percentage-based pricing scales with revenue rather than door count.

Five to nineteen doors

The full-service premium now exceeds the loaded cost of a person. Five model doors gross $330,000; a 25% fee on that is $82,500 a year, against roughly $15,200 for per-unit software across the same five. The $67,000 gap funds a full-time operations coordinator with room left over. That does not automatically mean hire — it means the decision has changed from a fee comparison into a build-or-buy decision, with all the payroll, turnover and management overhead that implies. See scaling a portfolio for where each model breaks.

Twenty doors and up

At this size you are a management company whether or not you meant to become one, and the questions change: trust accounting, owner statements if you take on third-party doors, staff scheduling, and licensing in states where managing property for others requires it. It is also the size at which percentage-based pricing of any kind deserves scrutiny — 3.9% of $1.32 million in bookings is $51,480, which is real money against flat per-unit tooling that does less. Run both numbers.

Reading a fee quote properly

The headline percentage is the beginning of the cost, not the end. From the companies tracked here, the extras that show up after signature:

• Onboarding. Evolve charges $250 one-time, plus $25 per additional property. Hostaway's onboarding is reported at $300–$1,000 or more, though it publishes no pricing at all.
• Cleaning and maintenance billed on top. AvantStay bills these separately from its percentage. VTrips is reported to add a roughly 10% supervisory markup on maintenance work.
• Furnishing packages. Awning sells these from $3,000. Useful if you need them, not a management cost if you don't.
• Per-transaction fees. Turno's $10/month headline sits above marketplace and card fees charged on every clean. Guesty adds payment and booking-engine surcharges.
• Exit terms. TIDY, disclosed as the operator of this site, lets you cancel any time but still charges its fee on reservations already in progress or starting within 30 days. Vacasa requires 90 days' written notice. AvantStay typically runs a 12-month term. Air Concierge's 12% Offsite tier is explicitly a one-year contract — a long lock-in for a remote service.

Four things that changed the shortlist in 2026

Vacasa is now a franchise network. Casago acquired it in April 2025 for around $130 million, and by August 2026 had sold nearly all of the roughly 32,000 units to local franchisees and regional operators — a deliberate reversal of a decade of roll-up. Vacasa's own site still presents a single national brand. For a multi-market investor this is the important one: your counterparty is a local franchisee, and the terms, fee and quality are set market by market.

Awning and RedAwning are one company. RedAwning acquired Awning in April 2024. They share fee tiers. Getting quotes from both is not a competitive process.

Franchise brands are not national standards. iTrip Vacations, Grand Welcome, Casago and SkyRun all operate as networks of locally owned offices that set their own fees and contract terms. A glowing recommendation from an owner in one market tells you very little about the office in yours, and aggregate review scores tell you less — iTrip's third-party aggregate ratings are poor while individual offices have genuinely happy owners.

Houst has no US coverage. It is one of the largest STR managers globally and appears in plenty of US-facing lists, but as of this research it operates in about 35 cities across the UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, the UAE, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. A US owner cannot hire them. We keep it in the table so you stop wondering.

Common questions

What do short-term rental management companies charge?

Full-service short-term rental managers generally take 20–35% of gross booking revenue, and most of them do not publish the number. Demand-only companies that market and book but leave turnovers to you run about 10–18%. Software you operate yourself is priced per unit or as a low single-digit percentage of bookings. On a door grossing $66,000 a year, that range is roughly $3,000 to $20,000 of annual cost for the same house.

Is a short-term rental management company worth it for an investor?

It depends entirely on where your break-even occupancy sits. On our model door, a 25% full-service fee pushes break-even to about 57% occupancy while running the property yourself with software puts it near 45%. If your market clears 70% occupancy, a full-service manager is affordable. If you underwrote 55%, the fee is the deal.

What is the difference between full service and half service for an STR?

Full service means the company handles demand, guests, turnovers, maintenance and money — you approve things and receive a statement. Half service, or demand-only, means the company markets and books the property while cleaning, guest access, restocking and vendor management stay with you. The 10% you see advertised almost always buys the second thing, so comparing it directly against a 25% full-service fee is comparing two different jobs.

Do I keep my Airbnb listing if I hire a manager?

Almost never. Across the companies tracked here, every full-service, hybrid and demand-only manager — Evolve included — lists the property under its own platform accounts. Only software you run yourself leaves the listing, the reviews, the Superhost status and the payouts in your name. That matters at exit: review history built under a manager's account generally does not come with you.

At how many units does it make sense to stop paying a full-service manager?

Around four to five. The gap between a 25% fee and per-unit software is roughly $13,000 a year per door on our model property. At about door five that gap exceeds the loaded cost of employing an operations person full time, which is the point where you are choosing between renting someone else's team and building your own.

Do short-term rental managers handle permits and lodging taxes?

Some collect and remit occupancy taxes, because they hold the accounts and the money. Very few take responsibility for your permit — registration is generally issued to the owner and the property, and a revocation lands on you regardless of who filed the paperwork. Ask specifically who is named on the tax registration and what happens to it when the contract ends.

Is Vacasa still a national short-term rental management company?

Not in the way it was. Casago bought Vacasa in April 2025 and by August 2026 had sold nearly all of the roughly 32,000 units to local franchisees and regional operators. Signing with Vacasa today generally means signing with an independent franchisee on that franchisee's terms, so a five-door portfolio across five markets can mean five different counterparties.

Keep going

• Management fees and cash flow — fee structures against occupancy and ADR scenarios, break-even occupancy by model, and the hiring versus automating versus self-managing threshold.
• Scaling a portfolio — one door to five to twenty, where each model breaks, and the hybrid setups that work in between.
• STR regulations and management — permits, licensing and lodging taxes, and which of those a manager will actually own.
• About this site — who runs it, how it makes money, and how the data is compiled.