Looking for advice from an expert STVR manager

[Andy Whitcomb]

Hey guys! I have owned and managed STVR's since 2015 and have developed a pretty decent nack for it. I've leveraged my background as a furniture designer to create unique and beautiful experiences for guests, and they pay top dollar to stay at my properties. I've been a superhost for years, and we have been 95-100% occupied since long before covid.

My business partner and I currently have 3 cabins, and we really want to scale up to buy more. We have incredible returns and plenty of investors wanting to jump in with us...

But..

The management of these properties is killing me. It was no problem when we had one cabin, then we had 2 and it was still manageable, but once we added the 3rd cabin it get exponentially more crazy. It seems like every day something is going wrong! For example, the other day one of the jets on the hot tub broke. Not a big deal, except then all the water drained out and our guests couldn't use the hot tub overlooking the river, which is a huge selling point. I had to refund them $300. Then, since I couldn't the part to repair it for 2 weeks, I had to message every guest who was coming in and either give them a discount, cancel their reservation, or try and reschedule to another date. These are cabins in the woods, so we have issues like power outages, neighbor's construction noises, internet outages (a big deal when people are planning to "work from home" at the cabin), guest thought they reserved two nights when it was only one, cleaner forgets to show up... all sorts of things that add up.

It seems like the littlest issue gets compounded into much larger issues that cost us lots of money. I'm sure I'm not the only one who deals with these things. So, my question is: What are professional STR managers are doing to keep operational, maintenance, and cleaning issues to a minimum and everything running smoothly? 

And, a second question... If I were to hire this out to a manager, would they actually be able to do a better job then me or would it be worse because they aren't as invested?