Three years of your own records, read in full: 9 software programs, 2,460 reservations, 31,800 guest messages, 1,180 phone calls and every owner statement since October 2023.
Two labels are used throughout this document. From your data means the figure was counted from your own records. Our estimate means it is a projection, and the assumption behind it is stated beside it so you can disagree with it.
This document also uses two kinds of money. Gross bookings means the rent guests paid for all 16 homes, before platform fees and lodging tax. Your own revenue means what the business itself earned: the rent on the 5 homes you own, your commission on the 11 homes you manage, and the cleaning fees guests paid.
01The short version
Vacation Rental Business is a sound business that is losing bookings and goodwill in three places it cannot currently see.
What is working
- Gross bookings reached $1,480,000 in the last twelve months, up 1.9% with one home fewer. From your data
- Summer is close to full. 86.0% of summer nights sold, at an average of $560 a night. From your data
- Guests like the homes. The average Airbnb review score across the 16 homes is 4.71. From your data
Where you are losing money
- Guests who ask a question and wait. 620 people asked a question before booking. 190 of them waited more than four hours or never got an answer, and only 21 of those booked. 36% of all inquiries arrive between 8 in the evening and 8 in the morning. From your data
- Nights nobody can buy, and guests nobody invites back. 318 nights sat empty between two bookings because the gap was shorter than the home's minimum stay. 2,210 guests have stayed with you in three years, and none has ever been invited to return. From your data
- Problems that are known and not fixed in time. 62 stays began with a cleaning complaint and 47 homes were not ready at check in time. 17 maintenance items have been open more than 30 days. You gave back $14,280 in refunds and credits. From your data
The three things to fix, in order
- Answer every inquiry within minutes, at any hour. What it is costing you: about $29,600 a year in gross bookings. Our estimate
- Sell the gap nights and invite past guests back. About $33,500 a year in gross bookings. Our estimate
- Keep one record of what is wrong at each home, and send every owner statement on time. About $6,000 a year in refunds. Our estimate
The one number to improve first: the share of inquiries answered within one hour. Today it is 42%.
These figures are what each problem is costing you. They are not a promise of what will be recovered.
02What you asked for
On our first call, you were asked: if you could wave a wand and have one thing in your business handled automatically, perfectly, every time, what would it be?
Your answer, word for word:
"Every guest gets a good answer within a few minutes, day or night, and it is not me typing it at midnight. I want to turn my phone off at nine and not lose a booking for it."
The records agree with you. You sent 4,180 guest messages yourself last year, and 1,460 of them between 8 in the evening and 8 in the morning. Inquiries that arrive in those hours wait a median of 9 hours 20 minutes. Fix 1 is built around your answer.
03What we looked at
| Software | What was read | Period |
|---|---|---|
| OwnerRez | 2,460 reservations, 2,210 guest records, 31,800 guest messages, 620 inquiries in the last year, every owner statement | October 2023 to September 2026 |
| Airbnb and Vrbo listings | All 32 listings, their settings, 382 reviews in the last year | October 2025 to September 2026 |
| Direct booking website | Listings, rates and the bookings it sent to OwnerRez | October 2025 to September 2026 |
| PriceLabs | Base prices, minimum stay rules and gap night rules for 16 homes | Current settings and 12 months of changes |
| Cleaner scheduling app | 850 turnovers, who was assigned, when each was finished, photos | October 2025 to September 2026 |
| QuickBooks Online | Every invoice, bill, refund and the general ledger | October 2023 to September 2026 |
| Quo phone system | 1,180 inbound calls and 3,900 texts | October 2025 to September 2026 |
| Google Business Profile | Views, calls, website clicks, reviews | April 2025 to September 2026 |
| Maintenance spreadsheet | 214 items logged in the last year | October 2025 to September 2026 |
What was missing. The direct booking website has no visitor tracking, so we cannot see how many people start a booking and stop. Nobody records why an owner leaves. Airbnb does not pass on a guest's email address. The maintenance spreadsheet has no closing date on 58 of its 214 items.
Confidence. High on bookings, nights, rates, reply times, turnovers and money. Medium on maintenance, because of the missing dates. The value of slow answers and of gap nights is an estimate and is labeled as one.
04The shape of your business
16 homes, 5,600 nights to sell, 3,400 sold. Owners blocked 240 nights for their own use. Of the nights left, 60.7% were booked, at an average of $435 a night. From your data
The year has three seasons, and each one behaves like a different business. From your data
| Season | Nights sold | Occupancy | A year earlier | Average nightly rate | A year earlier | Gross bookings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summer, June to August | 1,183 | 86.0% | 88.1% | $560 | $548 | $662,480 |
| Spring and fall, March to May, September, October | 1,421 | 60.0% | 63.2% | $390 | $384 | $554,840 |
| Winter, November to February | 796 | 42.9% | 41.5% | $330 | $326 | $262,680 |
| Total | 3,400 | 60.7% | $435 | $1,480,000 |
Spring and fall slipped by three points against the year before. That is where most of your 2,200 empty nights are: 947 in spring and fall, 1,060 in winter and 193 in summer.
Where the gross bookings went. From your data
| Homes | Gross bookings | What the business earned from it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homes you own | 5 | $520,000 | $520,000 in rent |
| Homes you manage | 11 | $960,000 | $211,200 in commission, at 22% |
| Cleaning fees paid by guests | 16 | $157,250 | |
| Total | 16 | $1,480,000 | $888,450, your own revenue |
Growth is slowing. Gross bookings rose 5.9% two years ago and 1.9% in the last twelve months. You had 17 homes a year ago and 16 now, so each home earned more: $92,500 against $85,400. From your data
Three homes are 28.9% of gross bookings. Homes 1, 6 and 7 brought in $428,000. From your data
One owner is 39.2% of your commission. The owner of homes 6, 7 and 10 paid you $82,720 of your $211,200. From your data
Every home compared. From your data
| Home | Yours or managed | Bedrooms | Nights sold | Occupancy | Gross bookings | Review score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yours | 4 | 262 | 71.8% | $148,000 | 4.88 |
| 2 | Yours | 3 | 248 | 67.9% | $112,000 | 4.81 |
| 3 | Yours | 3 | 240 | 65.8% | $104,000 | 4.76 |
| 4 | Yours | 2 | 196 | 53.7% | $72,000 | 4.52 |
| 5 | Yours | 2 | 214 | 58.6% | $84,000 | 4.72 |
| 6 | Managed | 5 | 238 | 70.6% | $156,000 | 4.90 |
| 7 | Managed | 4 | 230 | 66.9% | $124,000 | 4.84 |
| 8 | Managed | 4 | 226 | 67.5% | $116,000 | 4.79 |
| 9 | Managed | 3 | 172 | 49.0% | $62,000 | 4.48 |
| 10 | Managed | 3 | 221 | 64.8% | $96,000 | 4.77 |
| 11 | Managed | 3 | 215 | 62.0% | $90,000 | 4.74 |
| 12 | Managed | 3 | 208 | 63.0% | $84,000 | 4.80 |
| 13 | Managed | 2 | 158 | 43.3% | $46,000 | 4.41 |
| 14 | Managed | 2 | 201 | 59.3% | $68,000 | 4.69 |
| 15 | Managed | 2 | 192 | 55.7% | $62,000 | 4.66 |
| 16 | Managed | 1 | 179 | 52.5% | $56,000 | 4.66 |
| Total | 3,400 | 60.7% | $1,480,000 | 4.71 |
The three homes with the lowest review scores are also the three with the lowest occupancy. Part 9 explains why.
This picture decides the order of everything below. The business does not need more homes first. It needs to sell more of the nights it has, and to keep the owners and guests it has.
05Where the money comes from and where it goes
You kept 10.5 cents of every dollar of your own revenue. Operating profit was $93,000 on $888,450, before any pay to you. From your data
| Where your own revenue went | Amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Mortgage interest, property tax, insurance, utilities and repairs on your 5 homes | $318,000 | |
| Pay for your 3 staff | $172,000 | |
| Contract cleaners | $136,000 | |
| Airbnb and Vrbo fees on your 5 homes | $53,100 | |
| Other overhead: insurance, vehicle, permits, accounting, card fees | $46,430 | |
| Linens and supplies | $41,000 | |
| Software | $14,640 | |
| Refunds and credits to guests | $14,280 | |
| Operating profit, before your pay | $93,000 | |
| Total | $888,450 |
Airbnb and Vrbo were paid $151,256. From your data
| Where the booking came from | Stays | Gross bookings | Share | Fees paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airbnb | 459 | $769,600 | $119,288, at 15.5% | |
| Vrbo | 221 | $399,600 | $31,968, at 8% | |
| Direct, your own website and phone | 170 | $310,800 | $9,324 in card fees, at 3% | |
| Total | 850 | $1,480,000 | $160,580 |
Under your management agreements, platform fees come out of the owner's share. So you paid $53,100 of the $151,256, on your own homes, and your owners paid $98,156. A direct booking costs 3%. Every guest who books direct is money saved for you on your homes and for your owners on theirs.
44 returning guests came back through Airbnb or Vrbo. They already knew you. About $9,900 in platform fees was paid to reach them a second time. Our estimate, at the average fee rate of 12.9%.
Two homes earn less than they cost. Home 4, which you own, brought in $72,000 in rent and cost $79,400 to carry and run. From your data Home 13, which you manage, paid you $10,120 in commission and cost about $13,400 to serve. Our estimate, sharing staff pay across homes by their messages, turnovers and maintenance items, plus the refunds you paid on that home.
9 homes have had the same base price in PriceLabs for more than 18 months. PriceLabs moves each night's price around the base price you set. If the base is old, every night is priced from an old starting point. From your data
Refunds and credits: $14,280 across 71 stays. $8,940 followed a cleaning problem or a late check in. $5,340 followed something broken, and $3,100 of that was for items already on the maintenance spreadsheet when the guest arrived. From your data
Software costs $14,640 a year across 11 tools. Two of them do the same job as a tool you already pay for, at $78 a month. From your data
06Who stays and who drifted
Guests
12.0% of stays were by a returning guest. 102 of 850. From your data
Few first time guests come back. 702 guests stayed with you for the first time between October 2023 and September 2024. 63 of them, or 9.0%, have returned since. Of those 63, 24 have come a third time. A guest who returns once is likely to keep returning. From your data
Returning guests stay longer. 5.1 nights on average, against 3.9 for a first time guest. From your data
Nobody invites them. OwnerRez shows no message of any kind to a past guest after the review request. You hold an email address for 1,240 of your 2,210 past guests. From your data
Owners
Two owners left in the last twelve months and one joined. In three years, three have left and two have joined. The two who left last year had homes that produced $118,000 in gross bookings, or $25,960 in commission to you. From your data
No reason was recorded for any of them. The emails show one pattern. Both owners who left last year had received their statement late in at least 7 of their last 12 months, and both had written to ask about a repair they had not been told about. From your data
38% of owner statements went out late. Your agreements promise a statement by the 10th of each month. Of 136 statements, 52 were sent after the 10th. From your data
07How new guests find you
748 stays were by first time guests. From your data
| Where they booked | First time guests | Returning guests |
|---|---|---|
| Airbnb | 429 | 30 |
| Vrbo | 207 | 14 |
| Direct | 112 | 58 |
| Total | 748 | 102 |
You pay for almost every new guest through a platform fee. 636 of 748 first time guests came through Airbnb or Vrbo. That is the cost of being found, and it is a fair cost for a guest you have never met.
Direct bookings are growing slowly. 21% of gross bookings, against 19% a year earlier. From your data
Your Google profile is seen 1,900 times a month. In 18 months it produced 640 website clicks and 210 call clicks. It has 46 reviews at 4.8, and 6 arrived in the last twelve months. From your data
Each step from question to booking. From your data
| Step | Count |
|---|---|
| Inquiries received | 620 |
| Inquiries answered | 580 |
| Inquiries that became a booking | 155, or 25.0% |
The other 695 stays were booked without a question first.
What cannot be measured yet. The direct booking website records a booking and nothing before it. Adding visitor tracking is part of Fix 2.
08How fast you answer
Fewer than half of inquiries are answered within an hour. 260 of 620, or 42%. The median wait is 1 hour 50 minutes. From your data
How fast you answer decides whether you get the booking. From your data
| Time to first reply | Inquiries | Became a booking | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Within 1 hour | 260 | 91 | |
| 1 to 4 hours | 170 | 43 | |
| More than 4 hours | 150 | 20 | |
| Never answered | 40 | 1 | |
| Total | 620 | 155 |
The long waits happen at night. 223 inquiries, 36% of the total, arrived between 8 in the evening and 8 in the morning. Their median wait was 9 hours 20 minutes, against 48 minutes during the day. 148 of the 190 slow or unanswered inquiries arrived in those hours. From your data
A guest asking at ten at night is often asking three hosts the same question. The first good answer usually gets the booking.
One call in five is missed. 236 of 1,180 inbound calls went unanswered. 61 of those came from numbers that are not in OwnerRez, and were never called or texted back. From your data
What this is worth. The 190 slow and unanswered inquiries produced 21 bookings, or 11%. If they had booked at 20%, which is still below what your one to four hour replies achieve, that is 38 bookings and not 21. 17 more bookings at your average of $1,741 is $29,600 a year in gross bookings. Our estimate
09What guests say
382 reviews in the last twelve months, 44 of them four stars or lower. From your data
| What the 44 lower reviews were about | Reviews |
|---|---|
| The home was not clean on arrival | 19 |
| Something was broken | 14 |
| A slow reply from the host | 6 |
| Other | 5 |
Three homes hold more than half of them. Homes 4, 9 and 13 received 23 of the 44. Their scores are 4.52, 4.48 and 4.41. Every other home is at 4.66 or higher. From your data
What guests praise: the locations, the kitchens, and how easy it is to get in. What guests complain about: a home that was not ready, and a broken item nobody warned them about. Both match the records in part 10.
7 Google reviews have no reply. Every Airbnb review has one.
10How your week runs
850 turnovers, and 323 of them on the same day a new guest arrived. That is 38%. From your data
47 homes were not ready at check in time. That is 5.5% of turnovers. 31 of the 47 were same day turnovers on a summer weekend. From your data
62 stays began with a cleaning complaint, or 7.3%. From your data
29 turnovers had no cleaner assigned 24 hours before the guest arrived. The cleaner scheduling app shows the job as open until someone on your staff notices. From your data
Cleaners upload photos for 3 turnovers in 10. 255 of 850. Where there are no photos, nobody on your staff sees the home before the guest does. From your data
One cleaning team does 34% of your turnovers. 289 of 850. From your data
The maintenance spreadsheet holds 38 open items. 17 have been open more than 30 days. 214 items were logged in the year. The median time to close one was 9 days. From your data
23 guests complained about something that was already on the spreadsheet. The item was known. The guest was not told and it was not fixed. From your data
Your own hours. You estimated 26 hours a week on guest messages, 11 of them in the evening and at night. Your estimate. OwnerRez supports it: you sent 43% of all replies last year.
Most questions are the same questions. We read a year of incoming guest messages. 6,830 of 11,200, or 61%, were one of twelve questions: the door code, parking, wifi, early check in, late check out, dogs, the hot tub, beach gear, trash day, the grill, extra guests, and directions. From your data
11Your software and your records
The tools are good. Two of them are not set up fully, and two do not share information with each other.
| Tool | What it does for you | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| OwnerRez | Reservations, guest messages, owner statements, the direct booking website | Keep. It is the main record. |
| Airbnb and Vrbo | Where 79% of gross bookings come from | Keep. |
| PriceLabs | Nightly prices and minimum stays | Keep. Review 9 old base prices. Turn on gap night rules for 10 homes. |
| Cleaner scheduling app | Assigns and tracks turnovers | Keep. Require photos, and flag open jobs 48 hours ahead. |
| QuickBooks Online | The books | Keep. Stop typing expenses twice. |
| Quo | Phones and texts | Keep. Add a text back on missed calls. |
| Google Business Profile | Search and reviews | Keep. Reply to 7 reviews. |
| Maintenance spreadsheet | What is broken at each home | Keep and fix. Add a date opened, a date closed and one person responsible for each item. |
| Two overlapping tools | A second channel tool and a guidebook app | Cancel. $78 a month. |
Gap night rules are on for 6 of your 16 homes. PriceLabs can shorten the minimum stay and lower the price when a gap between two bookings is too short to sell. On the 6 homes with the rule, 58 gap nights went unsold. On the 10 without it, 260 did. From your data
Expenses are typed twice. Each cleaner invoice and repair bill is entered in QuickBooks, then entered again in OwnerRez as an owner expense. Your office manager estimates 6 hours a week. Statements wait for that typing, which is why 52 went out late. From your data and your office manager's estimate.
Record gaps. 970 past guests have no email address on file. 58 maintenance items have no closing date. 4 owners have no phone number in OwnerRez.
Access. 5 people who no longer work with you still have a working login: 3 former cleaners in the cleaner scheduling app, and 2 former staff in OwnerRez and Quo. From your data You should deal with this this week.
What only one person knows. Which home can take an early check in. Which owner wants a call before any repair over $200. Who to phone for each hot tub.
12What breaks if you are away for a month
- Night messages stop. You answer almost all of them.
- Prices stop moving. Only you log in to PriceLabs.
- One owner is 39.2% of your commission, with three homes on one agreement.
- One cleaning team does a third of your turnovers.
- Four short term rental permits renew in January. The dates are on your own calendar and nowhere else.
- Owner statements depend on one person and six hours of typing a week.
None of these is a crisis today. Each one could become a crisis after a single event.
13What AI is worth using here
Worth doing now
- An answer to every inquiry within minutes, at any hour, written in your voice from answers you approve once. The twelve common questions are answered at once. Anything about a refund, a discount, a safety concern or an upset guest waits for a person, and that person is told right away.
- A text back within a minute to every missed call.
- A weekly list of gap nights for the next 60 days, with the minimum stay or price change that would make each one sellable, for you to approve.
- An invitation to past guests, twice a year, for the quieter months, drafted from each guest's own stay history.
- Reading every guest message and review for a problem at the home, and adding it to the maintenance spreadsheet the same day with the home, the date and the guest's words.
- A check of each owner statement against the cleaner invoices and repair bills before it goes out, so it is right and on time.
Not worth doing yet
- Letting AI set your prices. PriceLabs already does that well. Your problem is nine old base prices and ten missing rules, and those are settings, not software.
- An automated voice on the phone. A guest who is locked out at eleven at night wants a person. A text back and a number that reaches someone keeps that.
- Checking cleaners' photos by AI. You get photos for 3 turnovers in 10. Get the photos first. Then decide whether anyone needs help looking at them.
- Replacing OwnerRez with a larger program. Nothing in this analysis is caused by OwnerRez. Switching would disrupt a whole season and fix none of it.
14The options, the three fixes and the scorecard
Option A: do nothing. The business stays profitable. The losses in this document continue at roughly their current size, you keep answering at night, and late statements remain a reason for an owner to leave.
Option B: fix it yourselves. Everything here can be done by your own office with this document as the plan. The PriceLabs settings are an afternoon. The limit is the night hours, which only another person or a program can take from you.
Option C: Sannidhi does it. The three fixes below, in order.
| Fix | What gets done | What it is costing you | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Answer every inquiry | Replies within minutes at any hour, in your voice. Text back on missed calls. Hard questions passed to a person at once. | About $29,600 a year in gross bookings. Our estimate | Included |
| 2. Sell the empty nights | Gap night rules on all 16 homes. Nine base prices reviewed with you. Two invitations a year to past guests. Email addresses collected at booking. Visitor tracking on the direct website. | About $33,500 a year in gross bookings. Our estimate | Included |
| 3. One record for each home | Every guest complaint logged the same day. Each item given a person and a date. Cleaners' photos required. Open cleaning jobs flagged 48 hours ahead. Expenses entered once. Statements checked and sent by the 10th. Old logins removed. | About $6,000 a year in refunds. Our estimate | Included |
Together the three places you are losing money cost about $69,200 a year, or 4.7% of gross bookings. About $37,200 of that would be your own revenue. The rest would go to your owners. Our estimate
Fix 2 is the larger loss. Fix 1 comes first because it is what you asked for, and because it gives you your evenings back.
Every cost, stated plainly
- Sannidhi: $500 a month.
- New software: none. Two tools are cancelled, which saves $78 a month.
- Your time: one hour a week to read the Monday report and make the decisions it asks for. About three hours in the first two weeks to approve the answers that go out in your voice.
How the estimates were built. Fix 1 is 17 more bookings at $1,741 each. Fix 2 has two parts. If one in five of the 260 gap nights on the 10 homes without a rule had sold at 80% of your average rate, that is 52 nights at $348, or $18,096. If 1 in 100 of the 1,240 past guests with an email books one stay in the quieter months, that is 12 stays at $1,287, the average booking outside summer, or $15,444. Fix 3 is half of the $12,040 in refunds that followed a cleaning problem, a late check in, or a fault that was already known.
What is not counted. Keeping one owner is worth about $19,200 a year in commission, your average for a managed home. Your own hours are not counted either. Both are real. Neither is in the cost figures above.
What comes first. Fix 1 starts in the first week. Fix 2 starts with the PriceLabs rules, since those take a day. The five old logins are removed on day one.
Your scorecard
These are your main numbers as of 30 September 2026. The same ten are measured again every quarter, and your Monday report tracks them in between.
| Main number | Today | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Gross bookings, last 12 months | $1,480,000 | OwnerRez |
| Occupancy, last 12 months | 60.7% | OwnerRez |
| Average nightly rate, last 12 months | $435 | OwnerRez |
| Unsold gap nights, last 12 months | 318 | OwnerRez and PriceLabs |
| Inquiries answered within one hour | 42% | OwnerRez |
| Inquiries that became a booking | 25.0% | OwnerRez |
| Direct bookings, share of gross bookings | 21% | OwnerRez |
| Turnovers finished after check in time | 5.5% | Cleaner scheduling app |
| Owner statements sent on time | 62% | OwnerRez |
| Your hours a week on guest messages | 26 | Your estimate |
Occupancy and nightly rate change with the season. At each quarter they are compared with the same months a year earlier.
What we could not tell from your records
- Why owners leave. Nobody records a reason. A short closing call and one line in OwnerRez fixes this from now on.
- How many website visitors start a booking and stop. Visitor tracking closes this gap.
- Whether your three best homes are priced too low in summer. 74% of their summer nights were booked more than 90 days ahead, which suggests they are. A test in one summer week would tell us.
- How much staff time each home takes. Nobody logs hours by home. Our figure for home 13 is an estimate.
- Whether a person who asked on Airbnb later booked on Vrbo. The platforms hide enough of the guest's details that the two cannot always be matched.