Property Management Fees Exposed: The Real Cost of Hiring A Manager

welcome back to the short terminal riches podcast this week we're breaking down management fees management fees in terms of uh what a property manager would be charging you for your for your property to professionally manage it and they're all across the board and I've got 19 of them and we're going to just run through them one by one I'm going to start with more specific to short-term rentals and then kind of back it out into long-term rentals and some of them blend together and some of

them are specific to each one and we're also going to just end with a couple questions that you should be asking yourself in regards to your property management or before you pick a property manager and this really started after doing some market research and deaths in Florida and I was pulling up random reservations just to do a bit of study on the on the market there and one of the listings I pulled up had a reservation for around a thousand dollars and when I broke down

the detail it was a lot of fees and there were some that I hadn't seen in there now this was a reservation a direct booking through a company I'm not going to say the name but I will say it starts with a V and it ends with an A and it rhymes with so maybe that gives you a little insight they're one of the biggest property managers in the nation with around 44 000 properties under management I believe and now I'm sure their fees are different

in every market and I don't want to say anything bad I know that a lot of people out there probably have a really good experience with this company but I know that there are others that don't as well so let's go ahead and just break down some of these fees I think the most common one and this is the same whether it's a short-term rental or it's a long-term rental and that's just a base management fee although this management fee can really range I mean anywhere

from 10 to 40 to even 50 percent in the short-term Rental World especially in some traditional vacation rental markets that are dominated by short-term rentals and there's not a lot of traditional housing sometimes there's some management companies in those areas that are really they have a firm hold on the market and they're charging a lot of management fees although if you've listened to podcasts for a while then you probably know that I don't think that's necessary to be working with one of those companies anymore so

if you miss our management series we did on Virtual management go back and check that out those are episodes one 74 through 177 we did four different ones a lot of things that we do with my personal portfolio just to give you a little idea there so that that's the first fee that's the management fee and it ranges across the board sometimes if you're working with a co-host you might get paid automatically and then maybe you pay the co-host afterwards the traditional way that a property

manager is going to collect this fee is to collect all your revenue and then send you a direct deposit hopefully it's a direct deposit no one's sending checks or anything these days but then they'll take their commission out of that the next fee they're very common on short-term rental listings is a cleaning fee although if you've been doing a lot of study lately you've probably seen that there's quite a few people recommending not having a cleaning fee and the claim fee is really one of those

things that it could be a revenue source for some of us or it might just be pass through as in I pay a hundred dollars my housekeeper and I charge a hundred dollars to the guest but this is one place where you can work with your pricing and strategize a little bit to see if it affects your occupancy to me a just rough rule for charging a housekeeping fee is maybe half of the night's stay or the average daily rate so if your average daily rates

400 you might be able to charge a 200 cleaning fee again it depends on the size of the property and you really got to do some more study to kind of break it down so I just want to talk about the general fees today just to give a quick overview the third one is one that's not always charged on Direct booking websites but most the big companies are going to see this this is what they call their booking or the reservation fee so of course Airbnb

has this this can be anywhere from 14 to 18 percent VRBO has this booking.com has this and direct booking websites like the one I referred to earlier without saying their actual name they charge for this as well although it's a little more disguised and it might come across in with the wording guest service fee or something like that but it's actually a direct booking fee just like what Airbnb would charge so a lot of times these companies are charging a management fee to manage your property

maybe it's 20 maybe it's 30 percent and then they're also charging a another fee on top of that for their direct bookings and so you got to add those up and just make sure you know what you're getting really that's what it comes down down to in the end the next fee you might see and again this is going to be on more of these direct booking sites or with your your property manager not through a direct OTA like Airbnb or VRBO but it's an advertising

fee and again there's different lingo going around in the industry so these could be the same thing you just want to make sure you check with your property manager to know what they're charging your guests for your property but that's another one could be an advertising or some sort of marketing fee on top of a reservation next up number five we have a technology fee and again this these might all be the same thing an advertising technology fee guest service fee but it's just important that

we know what they are and what fees are being charged I do think it's very important to have the right technology in place and of course you know that if you've listened to the podcast for a while we've got almost 200 episodes now I can't believe it and if you've missed a lot of them you're just tuning in well welcome you can head over to striches.com we've got a ton of resources for you there and we've got a lot of episodes on technology you can just

go to the little handy dandy search box and type in technology or you can see that we've even got it broken down by category we also have the favorite X stack that I use with my personal portfolio under our recommended resources so make sure you check that out as well next up we might have a Furnishing or Decor setup fee so this is going to be more in the setup of your listing if your property is not already set up uh when you start working with

a property management company so just make sure you're thorough with your your questions and you know exactly what the management companies providing you what they're charging you what your contract terms are and all those types of things I'm going to get to a couple more specific questions you want to make sure you ask in just a second here next up we have a maintenance fear some sort of coordination fee and again this can really range too so I know some of the long-term property managers I

work with they can charge anywhere from 10 to 20 percent to purchase items on my behalf to coordinate them to have them delivered to a property to have them installed or maybe there's a bathroom remodel and they don't have their own in-house contractors and so they Outsource it and then they charge twenty percent on top so you can see this range I would recommend that you try to negotiate the higher ticket items with a lower rate so maybe you need to buy a thousand dollar refrigerator

for example if you don't have the time to actually shop that yourself then I would try to negotiate some of those one-time ticket items down just a little bit so next up you might see this one's a little more rare but a seasonal rate adjustment fee so a revenue manager for example the property manager that's going in and editing your prices some companies are charging for this on top of the management fee on top of guest service fees and on top of all these other things

number nine we have guest communication fee and this is pretty much what property management is for right especially when it comes to short-term rentals we're not hiring a property manager and expecting to do all of the communication ourselves although there is another company out there managing lots of lots of rentals almost thirty thousand not going to say that name either but uh uh I guess it rhymes with devolve or it has the name in the middle I'll let you leave that one your imagination but they're

managing almost 30 000 properties from what I understand they maybe aren't handling the communication the whole way through so make sure that is something you're checking on as well key exchange fee this one hopefully is becoming less and less common but sometimes we have condominiums that don't allow us to install automatic door locks or they have a gate or there's some sort of common door and a key actually needs to be exchanged maybe it could be coordinated with the housekeeper number 11 we have an administration

fee now this could be another name for management it could be a name for backend office work whatever it happens to be but sometimes this is showing up on your statement as well number 12 is very similar but I've seen this one show up too and that's a financial reporting fee or a monthly statement fee so there's different names for all these fees number 13 and this is a pretty common one for short-term rentals is a credit card processing fee as we know the credit card

companies charge us to process payments we use stripe and it's about three percent that's one of the nice things about working with Airbnb is we don't have that additional credit card processing fee but this is a very common one that'll show up on property management statements something we charge for because it's something we have to pay for it and it's a percentage off of the total amount number 14 inventory and inspection fees so if you're working with a full traditional property manager hopefully they're helping you

out with some inventory and they're checking on your property from time to time but you might see this show up as an additional fee in there number 15 a security deposit management fee this one's a little less common but we need to be taking security deposits depending on the OTA the listing site we're using and it does take some work collecting and managing a deposit and charging a deposit if it turns out that there is some damage in your unit so you might see this showing

up in your statements as well number 16 late payment fee now this is one that's probably going to show up more with a long-term rental one of the nice things about short-term rentals is that we get all of our payment up front right that means we don't have to evict someone for non-payment unless you're focusing more on medium term stays in which case you might be collecting monthly payments and then you might see this late payment fee show up as well remember when a guest stays

more than 30 nights or some cities it's only 28 nights they actually become a tenant so the laws change and that's something you want to take note of number 18 utility management fee the more properties you add the more utilities can kind of become a pain in the butt and sometimes utility company doesn't let someone work on behalf of your properties without having notarized documents and we don't want the lights to go out on a property Dewey so this is one we definitely have to check

it's definitely less common but you could see this one showing up as well and last but not least we have some emergency situations sometimes don't we things out of our control and very common for a property management company to have an after hours fee some sort of emergency fee for actually showing up to the property sometimes you see this with maintenance technicians where they have a normal rate then an after hours rate is twice as much it can be really really high so those are 19

fees that you're probably going to be showing up it's a big decision working with a property manager so you shouldn't take it lightly one of the things that I like to ask or at least in regards to my long-term rentals which I work with a lot of property managers on is are you investing in property as well it's nice to have a manager that comes from an owner's perspective so with that said if you guys been listening to podcast podcast for a while you know that

we're managing other properties now and of course we're coming from an owner's perspective we're actually using my team to manage your short-term rentals so be happy to chat with you about that if you're at all interested you can go to striches.com there's a little Property Management button there and we can connect over Zoom see if your property makes a good fit hope that gave you a little better insight into some of the fees that might be showing up and maybe there's some in there that you

didn't know about and until next time I hope you have a fabulous day want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that's r e s t methods.com