Handing a property to a manager is a month of quiet. You have signed something, the money has stopped being your problem, and there is very little to look at.
That quiet is where bad relationships start, because you have no way to tell an operation that is working from one that has filed you. Here is what should actually be happening, and what you should be able to see.
Before anything else: the things you must not lose
Whatever else happens, you should end the first week holding these, in writing:
- What the fee is charged on. Gross, net of channel fees, or net of expenses. These produce very different numbers from the same month.
- What is authorised without asking you. A spend limit, in a figure. "We will use judgement" is not a limit.
- Who answers a guest at 9pm, and what they can decide alone.
- When the statement arrives and what it will contain.
- How you get the property back. Notice period, what happens to future bookings, who holds the listings.
That last one matters most at the moment you are least inclined to ask about it. A manager who has thought about their own exit terms is a manager who has thought.
Week one: they should be reading, not doing
A good first week looks slower than you expect.
Listings, past reviews, whatever bookings already exist, the maintenance history, and the property itself. If a manager is already changing things on day two without having been there, they are applying a template rather than reading a property.
What you should see: questions. Specific ones, about things only you know. Where the stopcock is. Which neighbour has the spare key. Why the previous cleaner stopped. A manager asking nothing has not looked.
Week two: the listing and the photographs
This is where the first visible work usually lands, because it is the cheapest lever and the one most often unpulled.
Expect a rewrite that says more about what the property is and less about how "cosy" it is, and expect some of it to be sentences that turn the wrong guest away. If the rewrite is all superlatives, it is marketing rather than operations, and it will produce bookings that leave middling reviews.
Photographs may take longer, because good light is a scheduling problem rather than a task. On a remote property it is a stay, not a visit, so a manager saying "we will shoot it properly next month" is being honest rather than slow.
Week three: the operational plumbing
Less visible, more important.
Channel calendars linked in both directions across every pair. Three channels means six links, and half-configured is the normal state of the world. Ask for the last-sync timestamp per channel — not "sync is on", the timestamp. A feed that quietly stopped looks exactly like one that works. There is more on why in why your calendars disagree.
A turnover that is a process rather than a person's goodwill. Who, how often, what they check beyond cleaning, and what they are allowed to fix without a phone call.
Somewhere the paperwork lives that is not one person's inbox.
Week four: the first statement
The first statement is the real test, and it is worth reading harder than any that follow.
It should let you follow the money top to bottom without arithmetic of your own: what came in per channel, what the fee was and what it was charged on, what was spent and on what, and what is left. If you find yourself adding things up to check, that is the finding.
Ask for a receipt behind one expense line. Not because you suspect anything — because the answer tells you whether receipts exist and whether asking is an event. We wrote separately about what to demand from a statement.
The early warning signs
Roughly in order of how reliably they predict trouble:
- You cannot get a straight answer about the fee base. Everything else follows from this one.
- Nothing has changed and nothing has been explained. Either the property was already perfect or nobody has looked.
- You hear from an account manager rather than from anyone doing the work. Every question now takes two hops and loses something at each.
- The first statement is a summary. A single revenue figure with three channels poured into it is a decision to be unauditable.
- A late expense reopened a month you had already been sent. A statement that changes after the fact is not a record.
What good looks like at day thirty
You know what the fee is charged on. You have seen a real statement and could reconcile it if you wanted to. Something specific about the listing is better and you were told why. You know who answers at 9pm and you have their name. And the first thing that broke was handled and mentioned, rather than handled and hidden or hidden and handled badly.
None of that requires you to be involved. It requires the operation to be legible, which is a different thing and the only one worth insisting on.
Our own version of this is on the property management page, including the part where we tell people we are not the right fit. If you are still deciding whether to hand anything over at all, that question has its own piece.