If you’re paying a property manager to provide full-service support—handling day-to-day operations, guest communication, pricing, marketing, and listing management—then you should be doing minimal to no work related to your short-term rental. That’s the whole point of hiring a professional.
Of course, there are still some things that fall under what we’d consider asset management. If the roof springs a leak and needs to be repaired or replaced, that’s outside the scope of a vacation rental manager. While a good manager will flag the issue (and may even help coordinate a solution), big capital repairs are ultimately the owner’s responsibility.
Beyond that? You shouldn’t have to micromanage your manager. If you feel like you have to chase them down for updates or double-check their work, something’s broken. In our view, that’s grounds for letting them go.
A good manager should help you do less work and earn more revenue. That’s the entire promise. If you’re spending a lot of time managing your manager—or worse, doing their job for them—you’re basically paying for peace of mind you’re not actually getting. And that’s not a trade worth making.
At Vinifera Homes, we always say that if any one of our clients ever felt they needed to hover over us to get the job done right—we’d tell them to fire us. Property owners deserve better than that. The most work our clients ever have to do is in the first month of onboarding, where we ask owners to complete a detailed form, so that we ensure all the important facts and quirks (we literally have a question where we ask about property quirks) are collected, documented, and codified into our standard processes. We supplement this information with a detailed walk-through of the home, video recordings of important aspects or processes we need to show to vendors or guests, and continuous refinement of our knowledge base for the property, so that owners have the peace mind of knowing their home and guests are well taken care of.
Written by Anish Patel, Head of Owner Relations at Vinifera Homes (anish@viniferahomes.com)
