Short-Term Rental Property Management Software
Learn about key features that are crucial for managing multiple properties efficiently.
Running a vacation rental property management business demands sophisticated tools to manage everything from channel distribution and dynamic pricing to guest communication and financial reporting.
That’s where short-term rental property management software comes in, streamlining the day-to-day operations so that you can save time and scale with less stress. For professional property managers handling large portfolios across multiple platforms, advanced STR property management software is the backbone of efficient operations and a crucial success factor.
What Is Short-Term Rental Property Management Software?
Short-term rental management software is an all-in-one platform designed to centralize and automate daily tasks, providing a singular hub for all operational needs from booking management to guest communication to team coordination and owner reporting.
Instead of juggling multiple tools, STR property management software brings everything in one place and helps keep things running smoothly. Robust short-term rental property management software like Hospitable, which covers every aspect of vacation rental management and streamlines operations, allows you to focus on strategy and growing your business while maintaining quality across your properties.
Best Short-Term Rental Property Management Software: Key Features to Look For
When choosing short-term rental property management software, it’s important to remember that the right solution depends on your property portfolio size, budget, and operational needs. The right software should simplify your work and not add to your stress.
Comprehensive short-term rental property management software includes features designed to address common challenges in managing vacation rental properties and to support growth objectives. When evaluating a STR property management system, it’s important to look for key features that can transform your business, keeping it organized and efficient. Let’s dive into the essential features to help you effectively manage your vacation rentals.
Automated guest communication and AI
Timely communication with guests is essential for running a profitable vacation rental business, but it’s very time-consuming and requires round-the-clock attention. To address this challenge, the best short-term rental property management software solutions, like Hospitable, come with AI-powered automation features like scheduled messages and pre-programmed answers that make it possible to put routine guest messaging on autopilot.
No matter how many properties you manage, with Hospitable, you can ensure consistent communication with guests across multiple booking channels at key touchpoints in their journey without significant manual effort. Our system uses AI to handle 90% of guest messages, so your team can focus on tasks that require a personal touch.
Hospitable’s AI tools help quickly draft detailed, context-aware responses for tricky guest questions and unusual requests, and improve the clarity and tone of the messages that you’ve drafted.
You can help our AI to write better messages by uploading your properties’ guidebooks to the Knowledge Hub, and our AI will use this information automatically to generate more accurate responses to specific guest questions.
You can even opt for a fully automated AI Inbox and set up times when our system can automatically reply to guest inquiries without your review. Hospitable is the only PMS that offers this feature.
Hospitable is also the only property management solution for short-term rentals that features Issue Alerts. Our system automatically scans guest messages for mentions of issues such as broken locks, noise, or leaks. It highlights the conversation in your Inbox when help is needed, keeping your team informed.
Task and team management
For property managers with multiple STR properties, coordinating cleaning and maintenance is a considerable challenge, but short-term rental property management software can help solve it and ensure that your properties are always guest-ready. Tools like Hospitable include features that allow you to schedule turnover cleanings, assign maintenance tasks, and track your team’s progress.
With Hospitable, you can invite your teammates to work with you on our platform using their own logins.
Assign clear roles and choose what properties your team members can access, what information they can see, and what they can do to keep everyone focused.
Set your task rules, and our system will assign tasks automatically based on the booking schedule.
Our system will send reminders to notify your cleaners about new tasks via email, SMS, or iCal feed.
Add custom checklists with detailed instructions to any task so your teammates know exactly what they are expected to do.
View, filter, and manage all property tasks in one calendar to quickly check what has already been done and what task is next.
Dynamic pricing
Pricing your rentals correctly can be tricky, and managing rates manually across a portfolio of properties can be daunting. Most STR property management systems, including Hospitable, integrate with third-party dynamic pricing tools that automatically adjust nightly rates in response to changing market conditions to maximize your revenue while staying competitive.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that although advanced dynamic pricing tools that integrate with your PMS allow you to apply different pricing strategies across multiple listings while streamlining the process, they can be costly. To help you save money on third-party pricing tools, Hospitable has a built-in dynamic pricing engine that adjusts nightly rates automatically based on demand fluctuations, competition, and seasonality.
While many of our competitors offer their dynamic pricing tools as paid add-ons, Hospitable users don’t have to pay to use our built-in Dynamic Pricing solution. It is included in Hospitable’s Host, Professional, and Mogul plans at no extra cost.
You can enable Hospitable’s Dynamic Pricing feature for some or all of your properties and let our pricing engine take care of updating nightly rates for you to maximize revenue and optimize occupancy. The rates are updated automatically every 24 hours based on real-time market conditions. They are immediately pushed to your connected booking channels, including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and your direct booking website.
Channel manager
A reliable channel manager that synchronizes listings across platforms is one of the most critical components of comprehensive STR property management software. For example, Hospitable’s Channel Manager integrates directly with major OTAs, such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, as well as Google Vacation Rentals and your Direct booking website to automatically sync data across each booking platform.
This feature allows you to manage listings and availability from one dashboard, without worrying about juggling different websites. It ensures that booking and property information is consistent across all your channels. Our system will protect you from double bookings with instant calendar sync across platforms, ensuring that your pricing and availability rules are consistent everywhere you list.
Listing management
When you list vacation rentals across multiple booking channels, making changes to property descriptions and other details, and adding or removing photos for each listing can be rather time-consuming. Short-term rental property management software with listing management lets you update photos, descriptions, and amenities in one place across all platforms.
For example, with Hospitable, you can manage and update your Airbnb, Booking.com, and Direct listings much more quickly in a single platform. As property management software, Hospitable manages aspects of your listings on Airbnb, Booking.com, and Direct, including calendars, property details, photos, amenities, and booking modes. So if you want to make edits to your listing details or calendar (availability, pricing, discounts, fees), you need to make them on Hospitable, and they are automatically pushed to all three accounts simultaneously.
Direct booking website builder
Listing the properties you manage across multiple OTAs to reach a wider audience and increase bookings is only the first step toward success. Accepting direct bookings helps you save on commission fees and generate more revenue, which means you need a direct booking site for your business.
You don’t need to hire a developer for that. Comprehensive property management software like Hospitable provides tools to create a vacation rental site with booking capabilities. With Hospitable Direct, you can easily launch a fully functional direct booking site with built-in tools for payments, guest screening, and property protection.
You may launch branded direct booking websites for each property owner or manage everything under one. We’ll list your properties on Google Vacation Rentals, and you’ll have an opportunity to get direct bookings without paying high third-party fees.
Smart lock and smart thermostat automations
Short-term rental property management software that integrates with smart locks and thermostats lets you offer your guests automated self-check-in and optimize energy use at your properties.
While many STR software solutions offer smart lock management as a paid add-on, with Hospitable, the smart lock and smart thermostat automations feature is included with the Professional and Mogul subscription plans. The Professional Plan includes 2 smart devices (smart lock and/or thermostat) per active property, and the Mogul plan includes 4.
If you connect the supported smart locks to your account, our STR super app will automatically create unique access codes for each booking and share them with your guests in a messaging flow. You can also connect your smart thermostats to your Hospitable account and sync them with your booking schedules to save on energy costs while maintaining guest comfort.
Hospitable really stands out with its smart thermostat automation, since most of our competitors don’t offer this feature at all.
Security deposits
STR property management software can help you automate different aspects of managing security deposits that you can add to your listings to help cover the costs of potential damage that guests may cause during their stay.
Hospitable has a built-in Security Deposit feature that helps hosts and property managers collect, hold, and automatically release refundable deposits to protect their properties and bottom lines without extra work. This feature is currently available for Direct Premium, Airbnb, and Booking.com reservations.
You can add Hospitable’s automatic deposit to any of your properties by entering the amount you'd like to collect between $100-$5000. Then, Hospitable will automatically collect the deposit 2 days before check-in and release it to your guests after their stay if no charge request is submitted. Hospitable will also handle all guest communication to inform guests about the deposit amount and collection dates.
Guest verification
Guest screening is one of the best ways to mitigate the risks of dealing with bad guests. This process involves proactively assessing the risk posed by each guest through thorough legal checks. But when you manage multiple properties, manual background checks are not an option because you don’t have the time or resources to physically screen every guest.
With Hospitable’s Guest Verification, you can verify each guest’s identity without extra work. For Direct Premium bookings, guest verification is automatic, and each primary guest must verify their identity after submitting their booking request. Guests need to upload their ID, take a selfie, complete contact info, and, in some cases, complete background checks.
You can also request ad-hoc verification for guests who booked through Airbnb or other OTAs. Hospitable will send them a secure link via SMS or email to complete the steps in their guest portal to finalize their stay.
With Hospitable, you can also ask your guests to sign their rental agreement right after their ID checks. This functionality works for general short-term rental agreements and additional services, such as equipment rentals. You just need to create an agreement template, then our system will automatically populate it with the guest and booking details for each new reservation, and your guests will be able to sign their agreement digitally.
Upsells
Vacation rental software tools like Hospitable go beyond basic property management, offering upsell features that let you offer your guests extra services or hotel-level amenities for an additional fee to improve the guest experience and increase your income. With Hospitable, you can offer paid upsells to your guests in their Guest Portal without sounding pushy.
Create a catalog of your offerings with early check-in, late checkout, and custom upsells unique to your property.
Send your guests the link to their guest portal, which our system creates automatically for each booking.
Your guests will see all the available offerings listed in their guest portal. When they purchase any of them, Hospitable will take care of handling payments, payouts, and taxes.
If a guest opts for an extended stay, Hospitable will automatically adjust the scheduled messages and smart lock codes’ validity according to the new timings.
Analytics and reporting tools
To grow a successful short-term rental property management business, you need to know what’s working and what’s not, which means you need software with property management data analytics tools that will provide meaningful insights for strategic decision-making.
With Hospitable’ Metrics and Reporting, you can access all the necessary data about your performance across your entire portfolio in easy-to-read metrics dashboards. Metrics is our advanced analytics system that allows you to explore data from all your connected channels and calendars in one place and understand how your business is performing without spreadsheets or exports.
With Metrics, you get more flexibility to track the metrics that matter and more control.
Build your own dashboards tailored to your specific properties and business needs.
Apply advanced filters and groupings at the dashboard level to slice your property’s performance by listing, time period, channel, or custom segments.
Add relevant data widgets from our expansive searchable library.
Search or filter widgets by type (bar chart, pie chart, and single value) and category (messaging, occupancy, reservation financials, reservations, reviews, upsells, and owner statements).
Save configurations for recurring analysis and share insights with your teammates.
Create a shareable view of the selected dashboards to send to the stakeholders without forcing them to create an account.
With Hospitable, you also get Copilot, your AI assistant that helps you access real-time insights, analyze your property performance, and efficiently manage operations. Just type simple questions in plain English, and Copilot will analyze your account to provide you with instant answers tailored to your data.
You can use Copilot to check revenue, occupancy rates, length of stay, and booking trends; analyze guest reviews to identify patterns and improvement opportunities; track workload distribution across your team; and much more. It’s important that the more you use Copilot, the smarter it gets, and its suggestions feel more useful over time.
Owner portals
Owner portals allow you to keep your property owners informed by giving them 24/7 access to information about their revenue and their property’s performance, which helps build trust, reduce micromanagement, and increase confidence in management decisions. For example, Hospitable’s Owner Portals feature makes it easy for property managers keep their clients updated through real-time dashboards and monthly statements.
You can create a branded owner portal for each of your clients that gives them access to a dashboard to track occupancy rate, average daily rate, revenue, and payouts across their properties. Owners can view details of published or paid monthly statements and invoices, or download them in PDF format. They can also add their own stays from their Owner Portal’s Calendar when they want to spend a few nights at their property.
Hospitable is the only short-term rental property management software that supports Owner Payouts. This feature allows you to schedule a payout to your property owners when you publish their monthly statements and then pay the amount through Hospitable. As a property manager, you need to connect your business bank account to Hospitable and invite your owners to connect a bank account in their Owner Portal and verify it.
Integrations with accounting software
When managing financials for multiple vacation rental properties and owners, bookkeeping and accounting can be quite complicated. That’s why the best short-term rental property management systems integrate with trusted accounting software to help make your job more organized and stay tax-ready.
With Hospitable’s accounting integrations, you can automate and streamline your accounting process and ensure accurate financial reporting. Currently, the accounting connection with QuickBooks is included for users on the Mogul plan. If you connect your QuickBooks account with Hospitable, your reservation financials and transactions will be synced seamlessly into QuickBooks.
Hospitable will sync reservation revenue and expense data from your owner statements, automatically categorize transactions within QuickBooks, and ensure accurate financials in your balance sheet and profit and loss reports.
Final Thought
Short-term rental property management software is an all-in-one solution that enables property managers to manage every aspect of their vacation rental properties from a single platform. By centralizing data across multiple booking channels and automating routine processes, vacation rental software reduces time spent on administrative tasks, enabling you to operate more efficiently and scale faster.
Advanced property management solutions like Hospitable can dramatically streamline your day-to-day operations, positioning your STR property management business for sustained success.
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Table of contents
What Is Short-Term Rental Property Management Software?
Automated guest communication and AI
Task and team management
Dynamic pricing
Channel manager
Listing management
Direct booking website builder
Smart lock and smart thermostat automations
Security deposits
Guest verification
Upsells
Analytics and reporting tools
Owner portals
Integrations with accounting software