The five numbers every owner statement should show
Nashville closed 2023 with a full downtown. The Music City Bowl drew 50,088 people to Nissan Stadium on December 30, the night before the New Year's Eve crowd arrived, which is about as good as a December week gets here.
So this month a lot of owners are opening a statement expecting a big number and trying to work out whether they got one. This post is about the statement itself, because in my experience most owners have never been taught to read one, and most managers are not eager to teach them.
The five numbers
A statement should let you get to five figures without a calculator. If it does not, it is a marketing document.
1. Gross booking revenue. Everything the guests paid you for the nights, before anything comes out. Not "net revenue," not "owner revenue" — the top line.
2. Pass-throughs. Cleaning fees paid to the cleaner. Supplies. Maintenance. Taxes where applicable — and Nashville's occupancy tax is a guest-side tax that sits on top of your revenue rather than coming out of it. These are costs, and the only question that matters about them is whether the number on your statement equals the number on the vendor's invoice. At Boost it does. We do not mark up maintenance or supplies — you pay the vendor's actual cost, and it shows as its own line rather than getting folded into a management fee.
3. Platform fees. What Airbnb or Vrbo took. This is not your manager's fee and it should never be presented as though it were.
4. The management fee, with its basis stated. This is the line where the industry gets slippery. "18 percent" means nothing on its own. Eighteen percent of what? Ours is 18 percent of nightly revenue — that is gross booking revenue minus the cleaning fee and minus the platform fee. It is a smaller base than gross, deliberately, because I do not think a manager should earn a percentage of the money that goes straight to the cleaner.
If your statement shows a percentage applied to gross including cleaning fees and taxes, your effective rate is meaningfully higher than the number in the marketing.
5. Net to you. The deposit. The number everybody actually looks at.
The test to run this month
Take your December statement and answer three questions.
Can I find the gross? If the first number on the page is already net of something, ask for the gross.
Does the cleaning line match what the cleaner charges? Ask. If your manager will not tell you what they pay the cleaner, you are being marked up.
What is my effective rate? Divide the management fee by gross booking revenue. That is your real number, regardless of what the website says. Do it for three months and take the average.
I have had owners run that math on a previous manager's statements during a first call and get genuinely angry, not because the rate was outrageous but because it was not the rate they thought they were paying.
How ours is built and why
Monthly, per property. Gross, then pass-throughs itemized by vendor and date, then platform fees, then the management fee with the base shown, then net. Reservation-level detail is available if you want it, and some owners do — the ones who are actually underwriting want to see length of stay and booking lead time, not just totals.
The fee tiers are on the page too: 18 percent of nightly revenue for one or two homes, 17 percent at three or four, 16 percent at five or six — the same numbers, with the base they are taken on, that you will find on our fee page.
I built it this way because I own homes myself and I have received the other kind of statement. When a manager hands you one number, you cannot tell a bad month from a bad manager. That ambiguity is not an accident, and it is worth a lot of money to the person who benefits from it.
What a good January looks like
Honestly? Quieter than you want. Nashville's January is the trough. The bowl game and New Year's pull revenue into the last three days of December, and then downtown empties out and the weather does what it does.
Do not read a soft January as a broken listing. Read it against your own January last year, and read your February and March pace against the same point last year — and against what the year ahead is shaped like for the market as a whole. That comparison tells you something. The raw January number does not.
Use the slow weeks. This is the right month for the deep clean, the touch-up paint, the mattress you have been putting off, and the photo refresh. Everything you do in January shows up in April pricing, and the repricing pass we run on every home every week is what turns it into a rate.
If you want a second set of eyes on your statement — including one from a previous manager — send it over. I will read it with you and tell you what your effective rate actually is. Get started here.