How to Evaluate a Property Manager for Your Short Term Rental

Not all property managers are created equal. Here’s how to evaluate a potential property manager for your income producing short term rental.

Part of a great real estate strategy is keeping your passive income truly passive by hiring a property manager in your area. This will allow you time to focus on other endeavors while knowing your property manager is maximizing rents and keeping guests content. You can only be sure your property is well taken care of and performing at a top level if you pick the right property manager. Read on for my tips to ensure you select the best team in your area.

Licensing and Insurance

In most states a license and applicable insurance is required to do business as a property manager. It is possible to research these items in some cases, but not always. A conversation should be had with your chosen team to determine if they can legally do business in your state. With the rise in popularity of Airbnb style properties many companies are popping up overnight and may not necessarily be properly suited to manage your property. With inability to do business legally, you may be saddled with unnecessary liability or worse a future lawsuit.

Number of Properties Under Management

It is a good idea to do research and determine the total number of units under management by your chosen property manager. If they manage hundreds of properties or only a couple, there are pros and cons to both. With hundreds of listings, the fear is that your property manager may not prioritize your property and it will eventually get lost in the shuffle. On the pro side, the manager may be very sophisticated and able to take on your property even though they are already managing hundreds of other properties. (See reviews and guest feedback below to further determine if the high number of units managed is truly a good or bad thing in your case.)

When you find a manager that has only a couple of properties under management, then they may lack experience. However, you may find that this is a new property manager who has sufficient capacity and may even offer a discounted fee due to the new nature of their business.

Reviews and Guest Feedback

If the number of properties under management is high or low, you may want to review the number of reviews and correlate that data to the number of properties. For example, if your chosen property manager has hundreds of properties under management then they should also have thousands of reviews. If they don’t showcase many reviews on their website, then there may be a lack of understanding on how to collect the data (which is a huge problem for repeat booking expectations) or they may have many negative reviews that they are choosing not to publish.

Guest feedback is very important to the business of short term rental property management since most travelers book on seeing prior guest experiences. If you find a property management company that has a low number of properties under management and hundreds of amazing reviews, then rest assured that you have found a great company to manage your property.

Quality of Website & Images

When you are reviewing the property management company’s online footprint you should find more than just listings on OTAs (such as VRBO and Airbnb). The company should absolutely have a direct booking website. I find that travelers have become savvy as of late in googling the property that they’ve found on Airbnb and booking directly with the property manager to save the expensive booking costs that Airbnb passes on. This is also a great business practice and part of an advertising and marketing strategy (see more below).

Reviewing the quality of the manager’s direct booking website and associated images and graphics is extremely important. Professional look and feel garners more bookings, as does quality images. For travelers to spend hundreds or even thousands per night on your property they will want to see every angle possible of the property and will ultimately look elsewhere if images are subpar or data is sparse.

Web Presence & Advertising Partnerships

Since most travelers book travel online web presence is of utmost importance. A quick Google search should tell you if your company is well known and how easy they are to find. This will be a future indication of how easy your property will be to find. You will also want to ask about the property manager’s marketing strategy and what sort of advertising partnerships they invest in. Most strong property managers will employ a social media and/or marketing person.

Knowing the right things to look for when screening your future property management team can save you future headaches and net you thousands of dollars in additional rental income if you find a strong management company that knows what they are doing.