Hey everyone, I'm Christian. My background is cyber operations and AI, and for the past year I've been building an AI-native backbone that runs the back office of short-term rental management: revenue management, guest messaging, cleaning coordination, QC, owner reporting, dashboards. This isn't a software demo. The system currently serves around 100 properties, and the unit economics have us on track to run management profitably at an 8 percent fee with roughly a 60 percent contribution margin.

That last sentence is why I'm posting. If those numbers hold, I don't think they stay unique to me for long. My honest belief is that over the next several years, AI is going to do to management fees what it does to every labor-heavy service: someone in your market will eventually offer owners 10 to 12 percent and still make money, and the operators charging 22 to 25 percent with big back-office payroll are going to feel it first.

The model I'm weighing is not to go compete in every market myself. It's to work with established local hosts and managers who are already good at the local side, meaning their brand, their owner relationships, their cleaners and vendors and boots on the ground, and put the remote back office on the system. Either operated for them or with their existing team trained on it. The idea is that an operator who has zero AI expertise shouldn't have to lose to fee compression just because they can't build this stuff themselves.

Before I go further I'd rather get punched in the face by people who actually run portfolios than validate myself in a vacuum. So, brutal answers to any of these:

1. 1)Do you buy the fee compression thesis at all? If you're charging 20 percent plus today, do you see it holding for five more years?
2. 2)If you could hand off part of your back office tomorrow, what goes first? And what would you never let an outside party touch?
3. 3)How would you want something like this priced: percentage of booking revenue, percentage of your management fee, or flat per
4. listing? Which structure would make you walk?
5. 4)What's the dealbreaker? Data access, loss of control, quality of guest comms, something else?
6. 5)Has anyone here used a white-label back office or remote ops provider? How did it actually go?

Not selling anything and deliberately not naming anything. I'm at the stage where honest criticism is worth more than interest. If the consensus is "fees aren't compressing" or "I'd never trust an outside back office," that's exactly what I need to hear.