Every result on the first page of Google for "full service airbnb management" is a company selling its own service. Vacasa. Awning. Evolve. AvantStay. The regional player who comes up #1 in your city. They're all real businesses, and for the right owner, full-service is the right call. The problem: nobody on that first page is going to tell you when it isn't.
Below: what a full-service company actually does, what 20-35% of gross looks like in dollars, and the alternative we run every day. A trained VA in your own PMS, your own pricing engine, your own cleaning roster. The same operational coverage at a fraction of the take. Honest tradeoffs both ways.
Disclosure: we place trained VAs. We don't sell software, we don't take a percentage of your bookings, and we don't run your property. This page exists because we get operators on calls every week who didn't realize the VA option existed.
Vendor-neutral. Every one of Vacasa / Awning / Evolve / AvantStay / your local boutique will list a version of these six. Tier-up adds premium cleaning, branded marketing, design services. Tier-down strips guest comms or pricing.
Your listing goes up on Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com. Sometimes through their own white-labeled channel manager, sometimes through a third-party PMS. They handle the photo gallery, the title, the description, the calendar sync across platforms.
An engine (usually their proprietary one) sets nightly rates based on local supply, day-of-week, season, and booking pace. You don't see the inputs; you see the output rate. Most full-service co's won't let you override it without a phone call.
A shared call center or rotating team handles inbound messages on Airbnb, VRBO, email, and SMS. You're one of hundreds of properties they staff. Response time is usually fine; personalization is rare unless you're at the premium tier.
They either employ a regional cleaning crew or coordinate with a vendor pool. The 11 AM checkout → 4 PM check-in window is theirs to solve. Quality varies wildly between markets and tiers.
When the dishwasher breaks at 9 PM, their dispatcher calls their vetted vendor. You see the invoice on your monthly statement. Markup on vendor bills is common and rarely disclosed up front. Ask the question on the sales call.
Monthly statement showing gross bookings, their fee, pass-through costs (cleaning, supplies, maintenance), and your net payout. Trust accounting is required in most US states the moment they hold guest deposits on your behalf. Verify they're licensed for property management in your state.
Reference portfolio: a 2-3BR STR clearing $80,000 gross per year. Adjust up or down for your market. Fee ranges are publicly cited. Awning's own page calls "25-40% the industry average"; Evolve publishes a 10% floor; Awning publishes the same floor. Vacasa is custom-quoted and not published per listing.
The low end of the public market. Limited service depth at this tier: channel listing, pricing engine, and booking handling. On-the-ground maintenance and premium cleaning typically aren't included. Verify what's included on your specific listing in your specific market.
Where most regional and mid-tier national full-service co's land. Includes guest comms, cleaning coordination, maintenance dispatch, owner statements. The 'standard' full-service offer.
What Awning's own page calls 'the 25-40% industry average': premium tiers, hands-off luxury management, brand-name operators where the marketing reach is the value. The high end is where the math gets brutal at portfolio scale.
Two things the percentage doesn't include, but you'll see on the statement: pass-through cleaning fees (charged to the guest, paid to the cleaner; variance hits you if a guest trashes the unit), and maintenance vendor invoices (often with a coordination markup that isn't always disclosed up front). Ask both questions on the sales call.
Pure passive-income posture. You bought the property as an investment, you don't want a Slack channel, you don't want to learn what a PMS is. Full-service is the product. The 20-30% take is the price of full disengagement.
You bought a cabin in Gatlinburg, you live in Chicago, and you don't have a cleaning vendor or a handyman within a 5-hour drive. The full-service co's regional operations footprint earns its take. Building your own vendor network remotely is a multi-month effort.
First year, first listing. The lower-floor full-service offer (10-15%) lets you see the channel performance without committing to a software stack, a hiring decision, or a VA you'll have to train. Reconsider at year two.
Premium luxury market. AvantStay or a similar brand-name operator does drive incremental bookings their brand commands a price premium on. If your ADR is $1,200/night and brand-aligned guests find you through their portal, the math sometimes works at the high end.
The full-service company's coverage is real. So is the math on doing the same work yourself with a trained operator and the tools the full-service co's already use under the hood.
We're not anti full-service. We're anti paying 25-40% of gross for the assumption you can't run the work yourself. Every trained Airbnb VA we place arrives knowing Hostaway, Guesty, PriceLabs, and Turno on day one. Embedded in your stack in 3-5 days. We carry the contractor relationship and the payment routing, so it's one contract with us and one monthly invoice instead of an offshore-contractor relationship you assemble yourself. You direct the work; we own the placement and the replacement pipeline.
We place, we don't manage. You keep the deed, the bookings, the entity. We just place the operator who runs the day-to-day.
45-minute call. We map your portfolio, your current stack (or the one you'd buy), and have a shortlist of trained operators on your desk in 4 days. No pitch if full-service is the right answer for you. We'll say so.
