What Do Property Managers Do for Owners?

Running a short-term rental can be a great way to make extra income, but managing a STR property requires time, effort, and attention to detail. It can easily turn into a full-time job, especially if you own several properties. So many property owners choose to outsource vacation rental management to professional property managers to ease the burden.

But what do property managers do? Does it make sense to consider a vacation rental manager for your short-term rental property? In this blog, we’ll take a look at the specific services that property managers provide for owners to help them turn their rentals into a source of passive income.  

What Do Property Managers Do?

Property managers are hired to handle the daily operations of vacation rental properties so property owners can focus on investing in quality properties and enjoy the benefits of their investment without having to worry much about the details.

Not all STR hosts hire property managers—they choose to self-manage their properties and use short-term rental software like Hospitable to streamline their operations and manage their listings across multiple channels hassle-free.

So, what do property managers do? Every property comes with its unique needs, and the responsibilities of property managers may vary depending on the type of short-term rental they oversee and their contract with the owner. Still, the primary responsibility of a vacation rental manager is to optimize occupancy rates and maximize income for property owners.

Property managers are responsible for managing the day-to-day tasks involved in running a vacation rental while ensuring a great guest experience. Let’s take a look at key tasks vacation rental managers focus on when handling daily operations.

• Marketing properties—create and optimize property listings on popular OTA platforms, such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com.
• Pricing strategy—use market data to strategically price each rental to maximize income for owners while ensuring that the rates remain competitive and fair for guests.
• Reservations—manage bookings and cancellations, make sure booking calendars are synced across multiple channels to avoid double bookings.
• Guest screening—check guests before approving their bookings, implement short-term rental agreements, enforce house rules and policies to keep properties protected, and avoid neighbor complaints.
• Guest experience—communicate with guests and provide customer support throughout the stay, coordinate check-ins and check-outs, and encourage guests to leave reviews.
• Cleaning and maintenance—oversee regular cleanings between stays, schedule routine maintenance, and respond to urgent repair requests.

Is Hiring a Property Manager Worth It?

Hiring an experienced property manager for your short-term rental allows you to have a stress-free experience, knowing that everything runs smoothly. You can earn money from your property without the hard work of being a vacation rental host and have more time to focus on bigger decisions.

But hiring a professional to manage your STR property comes with a cost. Property managers charge fees for their services, which are higher than those of traditional long-term rentals. Most vacation rental managers use a commission-based pricing model, which means that they charge a percentage of the monthly income.

The standard short-term rental property management fees range between 15% and 30% of monthly revenue, depending on the services offered. Property managers may also charge additional fees for extra services.

So, if you are not ready to pay a percentage of your rental income to a property management company and don’t want to give up complete control over your property's daily operations, a better alternative is to self-manage your rental and use technology to automate your routine hosting tasks.

What is the other thing that all property managers do? They all use automation software that handles most of the routine tasks for them. So, when looking at the long list of tasks that a property manager completed for you for the 30% revenue cut, read between the lines—most of that was done with software that you could’ve used yourself.

Using automation software allows you to streamline your operations, save time, and minimize costs associated with managing your property. For example, if you opt for Hospitable, you’ll be able to automate 90% of daily tasks with the help of AI and self-manage all your listings stress-free, even remotely.

How Hospitable Can Help You Manage Your Properties on Your Own

Although running a short-term rental involves juggling many responsibilities, with the right software tools, it’s not as time-consuming as you might think. Hospitable is an all-in-one short-term rental software that offers a comprehensive solution for self-managers, helping them manage their rentals seamlessly.

With AI-powered automation, Hospitable can save you many hours of your time a week and put your entire short-term rental business on autopilot. Let’s briefly overview the advantages of our STR super app that can help you manage different aspects of your business.

Hospitable directly integrates with major OTAs such as Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and Agoda to sync data so you can manage all your listings from a single dashboard and don’t worry about juggling calendars, messaging, and cleaners across bookings.

You can use our built-in Dynamic Pricing tool that will automatically adjust your listing’s rates based on real-time market data to maximize revenue and optimize occupancy. This feature is available to all users on our Host, Professional, and Mogul subscription plans at no extra cost.

You can gather a team of cleaners, maintenance, and other supporting members, and our system will assign tasks to them automatically based on your booking calendar. You just need to set rules. Hospitable will automatically create a task for your team members whenever you receive a new booking and notify them about the new job coming up via email and SMS.

With Hospitable, you can automate 90% of your guest communication with the help of AI:

• You can schedule automatic messages before and after specific stages of the guest’s journey or based on the day of the week to provide your guests with vital information in small digestible chunks exactly when they need it.
• You can set automatic answers to common guests’ questions. Our AI will detect when they are asked and will send an instant response on your behalf using your pre-written answers.
• You can take advantage of the Suggest with AI and Improve with AI tools in your Hospitable’s Inbox to draft and correct personalized responses when you message guests manually.
• You can create a digital guidebook and upload it to the Knowledge Hub to educate the AI about your properties, policies, and local area, and Hospitable will use this info when drafting accurate responses to your guests.

If you install smart locks, Hospitable will help you automate creating and sending unique door codes to guests shortly before check-in. The codes are automatically deleted when reservations end. Hospitable integrates with many popular smart lock systems. You may visit our Integrations page to see the full list.

Hospitable also allows you to automate temperature control and optimize energy usage in your vacation rental property. Our system integrates with Ecobee and Honeywell smart thermostats and will automatically adjust your thermostat settings based on your booking schedule. 

With Hospitable, you can build a direct booking website to drive repeat direct bookings and become less dependent on OTAs. Your Hospitable Direct properties will also get listed on Google Vacation Rentals, and you will be able to get bookings with zero investment in promotion and without paying high third-party fees.