2025 Annual Letter to Boost Owners
Dear Owners,
Thank you for another year. This is the fourth of these letters I have written, and the one I have most enjoyed putting together — because most of what changed in 2025 is the kind of thing you only notice as an absence. Fewer messages from me about a problem. Fewer cleans that needed a second visit. Fewer weekends where something sat because the right person was not available.
Here is what actually changed, and why.
We grew the team, and we grew it in the right place
The easy way to grow a management company is to add doors and hope the existing people absorb them. That is how service quality quietly degrades, and it is the single most common complaint owners have about the national managers.
So this year the team grew ahead of the portfolio rather than behind it. That is the whole strategy in one sentence: capacity first, doors second. It is slower, it costs more in the short run, and it is the reason your guest messages still get answered at the same speed they did when we were half the size.
If you have wondered why I sometimes turn down a property, that is why. A home I cannot run properly is worth less to me than the one I already have.
Cleaning: more inspections, and paying for quality instead of assuming it
Cleaning is where a short-term rental is won or lost. A guest forgives a slow reply. They do not forgive a hair in the shower, and they say so in writing, permanently, on your listing.
Two changes this year:
More eyes, more often. We added inspections beyond the post-clean check — the quarterly walkthrough now sits alongside more frequent spot checks between guests, so a slipping standard gets caught in a week rather than in a review. The checklist behind it is the same one we have published since 2023, because a standard you cannot show an owner is not a standard.
We put money behind it. Cleaners are now paid on quality, not only on turnover. A clean that passes inspection and produces a clean review earns more than one that merely happened. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, because it is easier to pay a flat rate and complain afterwards. Incentives change behaviour in a way that a checklist alone never has.
If you want to see exactly where that money goes, I wrote it out line by line in what your cleaning fee pays for. Nothing in it has a markup on it.
What the numbers did
I lead with these every year because they are the only honest scoreboard in this business — a guest's review is the one thing neither of us can talk our way out of.
Average review score: 4.85 → 4.91. For context, that score moved 0.03 in 2023 and 0.01 in 2024. This year it moved 0.06. That is not drift; that is the inspection and incentive changes above showing up in writing.
92% of all reviews were five stars, up from 89%.
38% of the homes are now marked "guest favorite", up from 29% — the largest jump we have had, and the metric most directly tied to cleanliness scores.
97% of owners hold Superhost status, the same as last year. I would rather tell you it held flat than dress it up: at 97% there is very little room left, and the honest goal is keeping it there as the portfolio grows.
The first three moved together, in the same year we started paying for clean quality and inspecting more often. I do not think that is a coincidence.
What has not changed, on purpose
One fee: 18% of nightly revenue. 17% from three properties, 16% from five. Supplies and maintenance are billed at the vendor's actual cost, with nothing added.
Month to month, 30 days' notice. No minimum term, no auto-renewing year, no exit fee. We would rather earn it every month than lock you in for one.
Your listing stays yours — your account, your name, your review history attached to your home rather than to us.
You get my direct line, not a ticket queue.
Looking at 2026
The permit work is the thing I am most excited about. Metro's short-term rental process has become genuinely difficult — two notarized documents, a licensed inspector, certified-mail neighbour notices that have to land before you file, and a portal that cannot save and return. We now run that end to end, and a permit is an asset rather than paperwork: it attaches to the property and it is increasingly hard to get a new one.
If you know an owner drowning in that process, send them my way.
Thank you for trusting me with your homes. It is not a small thing to hand someone the keys to a $400,000 asset and ask them to look after it, and I have not forgotten that any of you did.
Sincerely,
Chris Hetzner
Owner, Boost Rentals
P.S. Follow along for Nashville updates, owner tips, and a look behind the scenes:
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