Before the 48 hours start: notice periods and permits
More owners are shopping managers this winter than I have seen in a while. Part of that is the industry — Vacasa agreed in December to be acquired by Casago for $5.02 a share, about $128 million (Vacasa newsroom, December 30, 2024), and owners with homes at national brands are asking reasonable questions about who they are actually working with now. When that agreement was announced I argued that the question worth asking was not the price but who holds your management agreement.
But the conversation stalls in the same place almost every time. The owner says: "I have bookings on the calendar. If I switch, I lose them, and I lose two months while somebody rebuilds my listing."
You do not. I went through what a 48-hour switch actually involves last May; here is the whole thing again, with the homework that comes before it.
Before the clock starts
Two things have to be true before day one. First, your existing agreement has to allow it — check your notice period, because a 30-day notice period means the clock starts when you send the notice, not when you decide. Second, we confirm the permit situation for the address, because I will not take a home I cannot operate legally.
That is the homework. Now the two days.
Day one, morning: the calendar
The first job is protecting revenue that already exists.
We pull every confirmed reservation on your calendar — dates, guest names, party size, rates, special requests, anything already promised. Those reservations are honored. A guest who booked your home in November for a March weekend still has that stay at that price. Nothing about a management change should touch a booking a guest already paid for.
The mechanics of how those reservations carry over depend on whose account the listing lives on, and that is the single most important thing to sort out on day one. If the listing is on an account you control, this is straightforward. If it lives on a manager's account, we build your listing on your own account and coordinate the handoff so the existing stays are covered. Either way, the reservations get honored — but the path is different, and it is worth ten minutes on the phone to get right.
This is also the argument for owning your own accounts. If you take one piece of advice from this whole post: the Airbnb and Vrbo accounts your home is listed on should be yours. Not your manager's. That single decision is the difference between a switch being an afternoon and a switch being a project.
Day one, afternoon: the listing
While the calendar work is happening, the content work starts.
Photo order. The first five photos decide whether anyone reads the rest. Most listings I inherit lead with the wrong room.
Title and headline. Specific beats clever. The title's job is to tell the right guest that this is their house.
Description. Rewritten around what the home actually is, with the practical details that prevent bad reviews — parking, stairs, street noise, check-in.
Amenities. Almost every listing I take over has amenities left unchecked that are sitting right there in the house. Those are filters. An unchecked box is a search result you do not appear in.
Rates. Our pricing work starts immediately. Rates, minimum stays, orphan gaps, the next 90 days.
Day two: the physical side
Locks, access, and turnover.
We swap or reprogram the entry lock so it integrates with our systems and codes rotate per guest. We confirm the cleaner situation — sometimes we keep your existing cleaner if they are good and want the work, sometimes we bring ours. We check the supply closet and order what is short. We take over guest messaging that day, which means the next guest who texts at 10 p.m. reaches us and not a dead number.
By the end of day two the home is live under our management, your reservations are intact, and the pricing work is running.
What takes longer than 48 hours
I would rather be straight about this than oversell it.
A brand-new listing takes about two weeks, not two days. A home that has not been rented before needs photography, a supply build-out, locks installed, a cleaning setup from zero, and a permit if it does not have one. Two weeks is realistic, and rushing it produces a listing that underperforms for a year.
Professional photos take a week or two even on a switch, if the existing ones are weak. We work with what you have on day one and upgrade when the photographer can get there.
Review history does not transfer between accounts. If your listing has to move to a new account, the reviews attached to the old one stay there. This is real and it is the main reason to think carefully about the account question. We rebuild a review base quickly by pushing occupancy hard in the first six to eight weeks — that is exactly what we did on a Fisk/Meharry four-bedroom that came to us on a brand-new account — but I am not going to pretend it is free.
What it costs to try
Nothing, and leaving costs nothing either. We are month to month with 30 days' notice, one fee on nightly revenue — 18% at one or two homes, 17% at three or four, 16% at five or six — with cleaning, maintenance, and supplies passed through at what they actually cost, all of it written out on one page.
If it does not work, you go, and you take your accounts and your listing with you. I would rather earn the next month than trap you in the next year.
If you are already listed and you have been putting this off because you thought it meant losing a season, talk to Boost Rentals. Send me the listing link and I will tell you exactly what your switch would look like, including whichever parts of it are inconvenient.
— Chris Hetzner, Boost Rentals