When you should hire a property manager

First, a correction

In the companion piece I said the decision comes down to how involved you want to be. That was not the whole truth. For me it was partly about cost, and I should say so plainly.

Here is the arithmetic that stopped me. Airbnb takes 15.5% of the booking. The tourist levy is 12.5% of the nightly rate, plus roughly three dollars a night in environmental levy. Then management at 20%. Then cleaning. Then maintenance, the pool, the garden. Then, if you have one, the mortgage.

Stack those and 20% is not a slice of the profit — often it is the profit. If the villa is a side thing and only needs to cover its own costs, that may be fine. If you need the house to actually earn, twenty per cent is an enormous amount to hand over, and you should at least know that is what you are doing.

That said, plenty of people should hand it over anyway. Here is when.

Getting the concept right, before you list anything

This is the one I would pay for, and the one almost nobody talks about.

I spent years as a photographer, shooting hotels and guest houses. A property management company once sent me to a villa that would not sell. Can you get us a proper photo, they asked.

I told them I am not a magician. If this house is not selling, the problem is not the photograph. The problem is the house. You have to turn it into what guests actually want, and to do that you have to understand why anybody books a villa in the first place.

They are not booking a house. They are booking an experience. If you cannot translate your building into an experience, no lens will save you and no amount of marketing will either.

A good manager has seen forty of these. They will tell you what to change before you spend money photographing it: what to take out of the living room, why that bedroom reads as an afterthought, what guests in your price bracket expect to find by the pool. They know what to ask a photographer for, and what the standard is — which you probably do not, and which is not obvious.

Get the concept right and something quietly enormous follows: the questions stop. Guests stop asking, because the answers are already in front of them. A well-set-up house is a house that generates almost no work. Get it wrong and you will be answering messages for years about a problem you could have fixed in a week.

Somebody has to actually be there

Our system answers guest questions, including with an assistant trained on your specific house, and you can teach it so the same question never reaches you twice. That handles a great deal.

It does not handle a burst pipe at eleven at night. It cannot drive over when the power goes out, or let in a guest whose flight landed six hours late. Software schedules; it does not show up.

If you are not on the island, or you are on the island but do not want to be the person who shows up, you need someone who will. Being that person is genuinely worth money.

The trades, already hired

You can contract a cleaner, a gardener, a pool company and a handyman directly. I do. It works, and it is usually cheaper.

But a larger manager has all of them in-house. When something breaks it is one message instead of four, and it is their problem to chase. You will probably pay more than the sum of the separate parts — that margin is theirs, fairly — and in exchange you stop thinking about it.

The other side, honestly: with a big company you become one property among two hundred. Something that would take me an afternoon takes a week, because you are in a queue. That is the cost of the convenience, and it is why I would not choose it. Your tolerance may differ.

Staff you do not have to find, or replace

Related, but not the same. Finding a cleaner you trust is not the hard part. Replacing one in February, mid-season, when they stop answering the phone — that is the hard part.

A manager has a bench. You have a problem. That difference only shows up on the day it matters, and on that day it matters a great deal.

The rules, and the tax

Aruba is tightening up. The government has said every vacation rental will need to be registered, and the inspection and hygiene department is becoming the body that licenses and enforces it. On top of that there is the tourist levy, the environmental levy and BBO.

A manager who files this properly every month is removing real risk from your life. If paperwork in a language you half-read is the part you dread, that is not a small thing to buy.

Their name brings some bookings — with a catch

An established manager has a website with traffic, repeat guests and a reputation. Some bookings arrive because of their name, not yours. That is real value.

The catch is what you are renting. In most arrangements those guests are theirs, not yours. You will not get the contact details, the booking history or the relationship. Stay ten years and leave, and you start from nothing — because in the sense that matters, you never had anything.

I would ask hard questions about this before signing. Not because it makes a manager the wrong answer, but because it is the part that is easiest not to notice until you want to go.

Language

Your guests may be American. Your plumber, your cleaner and the tax office are not. A local manager moves between Papiamento, Dutch, Spanish and English all day without thinking about it. If you do not, that gap turns small problems into slow ones.

You would simply rather not think about it

The most common reason, and the most honest one.

Some owners have enough money that the difference between 20% and doing it themselves is not interesting. They do not want the data, the dashboard or the decisions. They want the house to look after itself and the money to appear.

There is nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly rational thing to buy, and it is what a manager sells at its purest. If that is you, the rest of this article is noise.

And one thing our software does not do

Villa OS does not create your listings on the other platforms. You still have to build the Airbnb listing, the Vrbo listing and any others you want — write them, photograph them, keep them current. It is not a huge job, but it is a real one, and it is skilled work the first time you do it.

A manager does that for you, and does it having done it before.

What to ask before you sign

If you decide a manager is right, these are the questions worth asking early.

• What is the fee, as a number? Of the companies in the Aruba directory, only two publish one. Everyone else will tell you on a call. Get it in writing.
• What is included, and what is billed on top? Cleaning, linen, maintenance call-outs, photography, listing creation — any of these might sit inside the percentage or outside it.
• Who owns the guest data? If you leave, what do you take with you?
• How do I get out? Notice period, and what happens to bookings already on the calendar.
• How many properties does the person handling mine look after? This is the question that predicts how you will actually be treated.

Where this leaves us

We make software for people who would rather run their own place. Obviously that is what I would prefer you did — but not everyone should, and pretending otherwise would be a sales pitch rather than an argument.

If a manager is the right answer for you, the Aruba directory lists everyone we could find on the island, ranked on what they publish about themselves rather than on whether they pay us anything. Nobody in it is a customer of ours. That is rather the point, and how the ranking works is published in full.