What Your Manager Should Be Doing (And Probably Isn’t)

The Baseline

You’re paying 20-30% of your revenue for professional management. That fee should buy more than a listing on Airbnb and a monthly statement. Here’s what active management looks like — and if your current manager isn’t doing these things, your fee is paying for passive operation, not active optimization.

Weekly Pricing Reviews

Not “we use a pricing tool.” The tool runs on autopilot. A human reviews it weekly: checking booking pace, comparing against competitors, overriding the algorithm for events it misses, adjusting minimum stays for approaching dates, and activating gap night recovery pricing.

Ask your manager: “What pricing change did you make for my property this week?” If they can answer with specifics, pricing is being managed. If they can’t, the tool is running and nobody’s watching.

Continuous Listing Testing

Your listing title should be tested in 2-week cycles. Your hero image should be tested. Your description should be updated seasonally. Your photo sequence should be optimized based on which images produce the highest engagement.

Ask: “When was the last time you changed something on my listing?” If the answer is “at onboarding,” you have set-and-forget management.

Proactive Owner Communication

You should hear from your manager before you have to ask. Monthly performance summaries with context — not just numbers, but what the numbers mean and what’s being done about them. Quarterly strategy calls to discuss the upcoming season, competitive changes, and optimization plans. Immediate notification of any issue — maintenance, guest complaint, regulatory change.

If your manager’s only communication is a monthly statement with no commentary, they’re reporting, not managing. Reports tell you what happened. Management tells you what’s happening and what’s being done about it.

Operational Quality Control

Photo-verified turnovers. Preventive maintenance schedules. Vendor quality tracking. Guest screening. Same-day conflict resolution. These aren’t premium add-ons. They’re the operational foundation that produces the review scores that drive ranking that drives revenue.

Ask: “How do you verify cleaning quality?” If the answer involves trust rather than systems (photos, checklists, verification), quality depends on individual performance rather than process — and individual performance is inconsistent by nature.

Performance Benchmarking

Your manager should be able to tell you — at any time — how your property’s ADR, occupancy, and RevPAR compare to the top 10% of comparable properties in your micro-market. Not the market average. The top 10%. If they can’t produce this comparison, they’re not benchmarking — which means they don’t know whether your property is performing well or just performing.

The Test

Call your manager and ask five questions: What’s my current RevPAR compared to top-10% comps? What listing changes have you made in the last 30 days? What’s my booking pace compared to last year? How many gap nights did I have last month? What’s your plan for the upcoming season?

If they answer all five with specifics and data, you have active management. If they answer with generalities or can’t answer at all, you have a manager who’s collecting a fee for operating your property — not optimizing it. And the difference between those two things is 1.7X.