Published
Eleven questions worth asking any Sydney short-stay manager
Written to be used against us as much as anyone else. If a manager cannot answer these plainly, that is the answer.
On money
1. What is the management fee, and is GST on top of it or inside it? 2. What else is deducted from my revenue that is not the management fee — cleaning, linen, consumables, restocking, callout fees, marketing? 3. Is cleaning charged to the guest or to me, and what happens on a booking where it cannot be? 4. Is there a setup or onboarding fee, and what specifically does it cover?
A manager who cannot give the fee as a number without a meeting is managing the conversation, not the property.
On reporting
5. Can I see a real owner statement, with the owner's details removed? 6. Does the statement show gross revenue and every deduction in dollars, and do the deductions sum exactly to the payout? 7. Can I get the booking-level detail behind any figure?
If a statement cannot be reconciled to bookings, an owner has no way to check any of it, and the absence of an error is not the same as its absence.
On operations
8. Who answers a guest at midnight, and what is the actual escalation path? 9. Who cleans — employees, a contracted team, or whoever is available — and what happens on a same-day back-to-back in a building with a booked lift? 10. How is a maintenance issue approved and at what dollar threshold do you contact me?
On compliance
11. Will you check my strata by-laws and my building's position on short-term letting before I spend money on furniture, and will you tell me if the answer is no?
This is the question that most reliably separates a management business from a listing service. An operator paid on revenue has an obvious incentive not to ask it.