Changing company without losing the asset

Most of the cost of changing management company is incurred in the two weeks before anybody is told.

How to read the numbers on this page. A figure with no marker is quoted from a primary source and linked at the foot of the page. ^reported means the company that charges it publishes no public rate card, so the range comes from trade reporting rather than from the charging party. ^modelled means it came out of the model set out on the methodology page, which you can disagree with line by line.

Step 1: read three clauses before you do anything else

Notice: how long, and when it may be served. Tail: what commission survives termination and for how long. Ownership: whose account the listing sits on, who owns the photographs, and what happens to guest data. Those three decide what this is going to cost and they are decided already — you are reading, not negotiating. What each of them says and why.

Step 2: collect, quietly

Everything below is something you are entitled to and something that becomes harder to get the moment a relationship is ending. Ask for it as routine, in the ordinary course, before any conversation about leaving:

• The last twelve monthly statements, with gross booking value per reservation.
• A copy of the forward calendar, with guest names, dates, amounts and deposits held.
• The supplier list: who cleans, who does the pool, who the villa's electrician is.
• Staff details — names, roles, length of service, current pay, who employs them.
• Original photography files, at full resolution.
• Tax filing receipts for the accommodation tax and the final income tax on rent.
• Platform account details: which listings exist, on whose account, with what identifiers.

The staff line is the one owners forget and the one that causes the most damage. A villa loses five years of institutional knowledge in a week if the housekeeper who knows which pump trips in the rain leaves with the outgoing company.

Step 3: work out what the move is worth

Before moving, price the thing you are moving away from properly. Most owners changing company are chasing a headline percentage, and the model says that is usually the smaller half of the opportunity: on USD 6,000 of monthly gross, two points off the commission is worth about USD 108 a month, while moving services from rebilled-with-markup to rebilled-at-cost is worth more. If the second is available from your current company for the price of a conversation, the move may not be the cheapest way to get what you want. The full fee walk.

Step 4: line up the replacement before you serve notice

Not signed — lined up. You want the incoming company to have seen the calendar and the statements and to have told you what they would do differently, in writing, before the outgoing company knows anything. An owner who serves notice first spends the notice period choosing under time pressure, which is how people end up with the company that answered fastest rather than the one that answered best.

Step 5: the handover document

Write it, do not wait to be given one. It needs to say, for each item, who does what by when:

The first thirty days with the new company

The handover is not finished when the keys move. Three things go wrong in the first month, all of them quietly, and all of them are easier to catch now than in the third monthly statement.

• The calendar does not fully transfer. A booking made on the old company's account does not automatically appear on the new one's system, and the ones that slip are usually the furthest out — the November booking made in March. Reconcile the forward calendar line by line against your own copy in week one, not from memory.
• Suppliers keep invoicing the old company. The pool technician who has come every Tuesday for four years does not know anything changed. Either the invoice goes somewhere nobody is paying it from, or it gets paid twice. Ask the new company for a supplier reconciliation at the end of month one.
• The first statement is not comparable. It will cover a partial month, carry handover costs, and probably include something the old company billed late. Do not read a trend into it, and do not let anyone else read one into it either. Month three is the first statement worth comparing with anything.

One thing worth doing on purpose in that first month: ask the new company for the numbers they were given at handover, in writing, alongside what they found. Where those two disagree is the most honest picture you will ever get of how the last arrangement was actually running, and it has a short shelf life — after a quarter, the new company owns the numbers and has no reason to distinguish them.

The thing you cannot get back

Reviews. They belong to the listing, the listing belongs to the account, and no platform transfers reviews between accounts. A villa with four years of reviews that restarts on a new account is a new villa as far as the ranking is concerned, and it will take a season to recover.

If your listing is on your manager's account, this is the real price of leaving and it should be weighed honestly against whatever you are unhappy about. If it is on an account in your name, this paragraph costs you nothing — which is the entire argument for the clause at signing.

Common questions