Self Managing an out of star vacation property

[Jaime P.]

Hi guys, I am new here and this is my first post. We live in FL and have a vacation rental in NC and have had a management company manage it for a while now. Between the 20% management fee, cleaning fee, jacuzzi cleaning fee, and misc fees, their take is 40-50% every month. Further, they have done a horrible job cleaning and the guests have left two bad reviews on VRBO due to lack of cleanliness, which I believe it is the kiss of death. This is completely unacceptable. My wife has decided to do the management herself. We are putting an electronic keypad for front door, hiring our own cleaning crew and a person who will be on call for emergencies, repairs and maintenance and inspections before and after each rental. I know there are a lot of other factors we need to do consider such as contracts, credit cards payments etc. Any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[Matt Jones]

Running a vacation property should be considered operating a service oriented business, that comes with a lot of challenges. What sites are you listing the property? Most sites manage the payment processing from guest to guest, if you are going to manage the payments than I would suggest building a WP website, using Stripe or PayPal to manage the credit card payments. Contract templates can be found online, definitely have all your contracts reviewed by a lawyer. As far as finding a cleaning crew you can contract this out, but maybe find a few people to work with so if one can't clean for one day you have someone else to reach out to. There are several freelancers out there cleaning shared rental properties, you just have to tap into them.