How Much Time Do You Spend Managing Your STR

[Max Dauer]

For the short-term rental self-managers, how much time do you spend managing your STR every week? How do you spend that time?

[Lauren Kormylo]

I'm about the same as @Michael Baum, maybe an hour or two more in season when I'm fully booked. Sending a personalized greeting to guests when they book, answering their questions, programming lock codes, logging new bookings in my records and notifying my cleaners of them and any requests for early check in, paying cleaners monthly, ordering supplies, updating my listing descriptions about once a week even if it's just a sentence here or there (helps with rankings on the platforms, esp. Vrbo).  I also spend time each week checking Airbnb and Vrbo calendars, making sure pricing is good (I use PriceLabs but sometimes it needs tweaking), and I had a problem with Vrbo this fall blocking the entire 2025 calendar for no reason. I've also had to re-sync calendars between Vrbo, Airbnb and Houfy.  Every so often I will look at my listing in private or incognito mode to make sure it's showing up to the general public.

Closer to their stay, I text guests (who want it) a guest book that I put together with local restaurants, things to do, parking, etc.  That took quite a while to do when I first wrote it, to gather all that info and do the research.  But now I just take a little time at the beginning of each season to update it with new restaurants, venues, or changes. 

I live on the other side of the country - 3 time zones earlier than my STR, so when I have guests staying, I wake up about 6 AM my time to check my phone, to make sure I see any early morning messages or problems. But that's not very frequent. You do have to make sure you respond quickly to any guest messages.