Reading Your Owner Statement, Line by Line
The Fed held its benchmark rate at 3.50–3.75% on January 28, which is a roundabout way of saying nobody's carrying cost is about to change and the money you make this year has to come from the operation rather than from refinancing.
Which makes February a good month to actually read your statement.
Most owners do not. They look at the deposit, compare it to last February, and file the PDF. I understand why — statements in this industry are frequently designed to be unreadable, and there is a reason for that.
Here is every line on ours.
Gross booking revenue
Everything guests paid, by reservation, with dates. If your statement does not break this out per reservation, ask why. Aggregate revenue with no reservation detail means you cannot check anything against your own calendar.
Cleaning fees collected, and cleaning paid out
Two separate lines, and they should be close to each other. Cleaning fees collected from guests go to the cleaner. We do not mark them up and we do not keep the spread, and what that fee buys is a three-to-five hour turnover with a restock to par at the end of it. If a statement shows cleaning collected but not cleaning paid, the difference went somewhere and you are entitled to know where.
Platform service fee
Airbnb's host-only fee — currently 15.5% for software-connected hosts, after it stepped up half a point on December 1 — comes out here. It is deducted before anything else, and critically, before our management fee is calculated.
Nightly revenue
This is the number our fee is based on: owner payout minus the cleaning fee minus the platform service fee. It is the amount of money the property actually generated for you from nights sold.
The distinction between charging on this figure and charging on gross is the single largest fee variable in short-term rental management, and it is invisible unless you look. A 20% fee on gross and an 18% fee on nightly revenue are not two points apart. On a typical Nashville home they are thousands of dollars apart.
Management fee
18% of nightly revenue for one or two properties. 17% at three or four. 16% at five or six. At six or more homes it converts to a one-time $1,000 per home instead.
That is the entire fee, and it is published in full on our fee page with the month-to-month terms beside it. There is no onboarding charge, no technology fee, no revenue-management upgrade, no linen program, no accommodation protection, no annual account fee.
Maintenance and supplies
Pass-through at cost. The vendor's invoice amount, with the invoice available if you want it. No markup, no coordination percentage. That itemization is also what makes a statement usable by an accountant when depreciation questions come up.
This is the line where most of the industry makes money it does not disclose, and it is the reason I can recommend preventive work without an owner wondering whether I am inventing it. A manager who profits on maintenance has an incentive that points away from your interests. We removed the incentive rather than asking you to trust us with it.
Owner payout
What lands in your account.
The three lines to check on anyone's statement
If you are with another manager, ignore everything above and check these three:
One: is the management fee calculated on gross or on net? Find the base. Multiply it out yourself and confirm the fee matches. If you cannot identify the base, that is the finding.
Two: does cleaning collected equal cleaning paid? If not, ask what the difference is.
Three: is there a markup on maintenance? Ask for one vendor invoice on a recent repair and compare it to your statement line. A manager who will not produce the invoice has told you the answer.
None of those questions are hostile. Any manager running a clean operation can answer all three in an email in about four minutes. They are the same three I have been asking owners to run since the first time I wrote out the five figures a statement owes you.
What we changed this year
Nothing structural, but we tightened the reservation-level detail after a few owners asked to reconcile against their own Airbnb exports. If you want the raw data rather than the summary, ask and you will get it. It is your property.
Owners also have my direct line. If a line on a statement does not make sense, the correct amount of effort required to get an answer is one text message.
If your statement raised a question
Read this month's before you file it. Take ten minutes. If something does not add up and you would like a second opinion from someone who reads a lot of these, send it over. I will tell you what your effective rate actually is, and I will tell you if your current manager's numbers look fine — that happens more often than you would guess from marketing copy, mine included.