Nine questions worth asking any manager.

This is the question that matters most and the one most often answered vaguely. Cleaning is what your guest reviews. It is also the service most management companies do not perform — they hold a relationship with a contractor, and the contractor is whoever is reliable and available in that suburb. That works until a changeover is missed, and then it becomes a conversation between two companies while your guest is standing at the door with a suitcase.

Listen for the difference between “we have a trusted cleaning partner” and “they are our staff”. Both sound reassuring. Only one means the company you are paying can direct the person in your house.

They work for us. The Cleaning Company started as a cleaning business in 2012 and every turnover on a managed property is done by our own employed team — no subcontractors, no agency staff. We did not add cleaning to a management company; we added management to a cleaning company. An assigned pair learn your property, and if they are on leave you hear before the visit and the replacement works from the written scope.

Percentages are not comparable until you know the base, and this is where the largest differences hide. The same headline number can be charged on gross booking value, on revenue after platform fees, before or after GST, with or without the guest’s cleaning fee inside the base. Two companies quoting the same figure can be thousands of dollars a year apart on the same property.

Ask each company to run the same calculation on the same booking — a twenty-night month at your actual nightly rate, with your actual cleaning fee. If they will not, that is your answer.

15% + GST of accommodation revenue — the booking total after the cleaning fee comes out. The cleaning fee itself, which the guest already pays, comes to us and covers the turnover, the linen and the guest amenities. Two lines and no third. GST is recoverable if you are registered. The full breakdown is on our management page.

Income estimates in this industry almost always show gross revenue minus the management fee and stop there. No cleaning, no linen, no consumables, no maintenance, no vacancy, no GST. That is not the number that lands in your account, and most owners do not discover the gap until the second or third statement.

Ask for a figure with those costs netted out, built on conservative occupancy rather than the best month the property could theoretically have.

We will build you one before you commit to anything, using conservative occupancy. If the honest number is worse than a long-term tenancy would give you, we will say so. That conversation has happened, and we would rather have it at the walkthrough than a year in.

Portfolio size cuts both ways and neither answer is automatically right. A large portfolio brings pricing data, cover when someone is sick, and a team that has seen every problem before. A small one brings attention.

What you are actually trying to find out is the second number: how many properties the person responsible for yours is carrying. That is the figure that determines whether anyone notices your listing has slipped. A company that will give you the first number but not the second is worth another question.

We run a deliberately small managed portfolio in central Auckland, the city fringe, the lower North Shore and Piha, and we will tell you both numbers on the phone. That is partly capacity — same-day turnovers only work on tight routes — and partly that our reputation is the average of the properties we run. We have also run the housekeeping for one boutique operator’s portfolio continuously since 2018.

Every company will tell you guest communication is included. The question underneath it is what happens outside office hours, and specifically whether the person who replies can solve the problem or only acknowledge it. A guest locked out at 11pm does not need a reassuring message. They need someone who can reach a key.

Ask who that person is, where they are, and whether they can get into your property.

Guest messages are answered around the clock, every day of the year. Not a ticket queue and not an overseas call centre — a mobile number answered by someone in Auckland who holds the keys, the codes and the trade contacts, and who can be at the property. This is possible precisely because the managed portfolio is small, which is the same reason we turn properties down. It is worth asking any company how their after-hours cover scales with the number of properties they have taken on.

There are two models and managers rarely explain which one they use until you ask. Some work on your account: you keep the login, the listing and the review history, and the manager operates it on your behalf. Some list the property on their own account alongside the rest of their portfolio.

Neither is a trick, but they are not equivalent, and the reason matters more than the answer. A brand-new listing on a brand-new account starts at zero — no reviews, no host standing, no search ranking, no Instant Book eligibility. Platforms rank on account history as much as on the property, and a good house on a cold account can sit unbooked for months while an ordinary one on an established account fills.

We decide it property by property, and we decide it before you sign anything. The first thing we look at is what your property already has. A listing with a real booking history, good reviews and established ranking is an asset that took years to build, and moving it would throw that away. If that is what you have, we keep it — the listing, the account and the reviews stay yours, we operate on them, and nothing about that changes when you leave.

If the property is new to short-stay, or the listing has been dormant, or the review history is working against it, then starting on a cold account is the expensive option. In that case we put it on an established account instead — either ours or our sister company Urban Quarters, whose central Auckland portfolio outperforms the regional average on both occupancy and review scores. We have run its housekeeping since 2018, so we know those numbers from the inside.

We list across Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO and Bookabach either way. You will know which of the two we are recommending, and why, at the walkthrough — with the reasoning, not just the conclusion. It is not a policy we apply to everyone. It is the first real piece of work we do on your property.

Ask about the notice period, what happens to bookings already on the calendar, and — the one people forget — what happens to the review history. Lock-in terms are common and are usually explained as necessary for the company to invest in your property. Decide for yourself whether that is a reason or a symptom.

Month to month, no minimum term. Give us reasonable notice and stop. Forward bookings are honoured and handed over, and you keep the property’s photography, guest data, pricing history and performance figures whichever way it was set up.

After that it depends on the decision in question 6, and we would rather you understood both cases now than found out later. If we kept your listing — which is what we do wherever the property already has a history worth keeping — nothing changes. The account, the listing and every review were yours throughout and stay yours.

If we built you a new listing on our account, because the property had no history worth keeping, then the reviews it earned with us attach to that account and no platform lets us sign them over. That is a real cost, and it is the other side of the benefit: those reviews exist because the property started on an established account rather than a cold one. What we do about it is set the new listing up with you rather than leave you to it, move everything that can be moved, and where a platform permits a listing to transfer between accounts, transfer it.

What we will not do, in either case, is hold you to a term. A business that needs a lock-in period is telling you how it expects the relationship to go.

This one is unfair and worth asking anyway. Managing a short-stay property well involves telling the owner things they would rather not pay for: the linen is tired, the sofa photographs badly, the deferred repair is now in the reviews, the nightly rate is aspirational.

A manager who never raises any of it is not being easy to work with. They are protecting this month’s revenue at the cost of next year’s.

Once a year we walk the property with fresh eyes and tell you what is quietly costing you bookings and what it would take to fix. Some of it is expensive. We will also tell you when a peak rate is not achievable and should come down, which is a conversation that costs us money too — our fee is a percentage, so we have no reason to underprice for an easy life.

Not a testimonial on a website. A phone call with a real client, chosen by you from more than one name.

Yes. Ask at the walkthrough and we will arrange it. Our public record is also worth reading rather than taking our word for: 91% positive from 47 customer reviews on Trade Me, the earliest from October 2016.