Vacasa, TurnkeyVR or, Evolv Vacation Rentals?
Dave MeyerPro Member
Head of Real Estate Investing at BiggerPockets · Seattle, WA · Member since 2015 · 224 posts · 826 votesI am closing on a property in Colorado mountain town in a few weeks. I plan to rent it full-time as a short term rental and am interviewing property management companies. Has anyone worked with Vacasa or TurnkeyVR? They're the big national brands, but I am also talking to a few local companies as well. Vacasa is the biggest PM in the country, and charges a whopping 35% which seems insane, but they claim to invest a lot of the money back into marketing, CPC ads, etc. I am skeptical of the value there. TurnkeyVR seems to offer similar services but for 18%, which is much more reasonable. Curious if anyone has had experience with these companies that they could share. thanks!
@Dave Meyer I have seven vacation rentals in the Springs and was also quoted something like that at first. I went with Evolve and to be honest they did a great job for a while that is. Soo good news bad news. Good news, they will list on Homeaway and Airbnb AND will pay the fee for listing on HA.VRBO which is like 500$. They will also have a professional photographer come out and do photos. I already had this done before but they did it again. They charge 10% but then you will need a boots on the ground person in case... whatever happens happens right? So, not sure where you are but you know, toilets, guest can't access , restocking etc. They did a pretty great job of keeping me booked for the high season but could in no way hold the amount of bookings I was doing off season. Also, they do NOT read the reviews and you will not get alerted to them unless they are bad. An example is a 4 star review that had a line in it that said that they were concerned about the carpet tack strip coming up. It went unchecked and of course the next guest had kids who then got a scrape from the tack strip. The difference in the amount of bookings was I was holding 20 days in the Fall and Winter- they did 8 maybe 10. My solution is, well, I took them all back and am now self managing from Vancouver, Washington. As long as you have a team and systems built, you are FINE!! It maybe takes me 15 minutes a day to managed them, The fact is that I know the area super well and I think people really appreciate an owner manager sometimes. Also, just a side bar but I can just feel it coming now.... "I can't scale if I self manage." I hear you but..... it literally is 15 minutes and only because I have 7. Honestly for me it was a no brainer way to save ourselves 20-25k a year.
35 wow, i see 30 over here by disney world, probably because of so much competition. Will be following this thread.
@Dave Meyer I have seven vacation rentals in the Springs and was also quoted something like that at first. I went with Evolve and to be honest they did a great job for a while that is. Soo good news bad news. Good news, they will list on Homeaway and Airbnb AND will pay the fee for listing on HA.VRBO which is like 500$. They will also have a professional photographer come out and do photos. I already had this done before but they did it again. They charge 10% but then you will need a boots on the ground person in case... whatever happens happens right? So, not sure where you are but you know, toilets, guest can't access , restocking etc. They did a pretty great job of keeping me booked for the high season but could in no way hold the amount of bookings I was doing off season. Also, they do NOT read the reviews and you will not get alerted to them unless they are bad. An example is a 4 star review that had a line in it that said that they were concerned about the carpet tack strip coming up. It went unchecked and of course the next guest had kids who then got a scrape from the tack strip. The difference in the amount of bookings was I was holding 20 days in the Fall and Winter- they did 8 maybe 10. My solution is, well, I took them all back and am now self managing from Vancouver, Washington. As long as you have a team and systems built, you are FINE!! It maybe takes me 15 minutes a day to managed them, The fact is that I know the area super well and I think people really appreciate an owner manager sometimes. Also, just a side bar but I can just feel it coming now.... "I can't scale if I self manage." I hear you but..... it literally is 15 minutes and only because I have 7. Honestly for me it was a no brainer way to save ourselves 20-25k a year.
Good to know thanks @Paige Kelsey
Hey @Dave Meyer, I have been using Evolve for 4 years now in a hybrid remote management capacity for my properties in Lake Tahoe...meaning, Evolve does what they do which is booking, listing on the major sites, payments and all pre-stay communication for 13% (10% for their service and 3% for payment fees) and I remotely manage the rest of it myself using various automations and systems. Now, keep in mind my rental is only 2 hour drive but as long as you have local resources on speed dial and solid housekeeping staff you should be fine not needing full service PM similar to what @Paige Kelsey also mentioned.
35% is absurd, especially on an investment model that already has a 50% or higher Op Ex Ratio usually going with it. 18% is not bad but I would be cautious as to exactly what level of service you are going to get there. You may still be stuck having to manually check all your reviews, following up with housekeeping and more and in the end could have saved it all doing it yourself for little time. With my current hybrid model with Evolve I spend literally 3 minutes per reservation on a standard booking, obviously if there are issues with checkin or something with the house then I have to address that and takes time but I have everyone on speed dial that I need to quickly resolve those issues.
If you have any specific questions with Evolve feel free to reach out, I'm neither promoting or demoting Evolve here as every VR and investor situation is different so it always depends on several things if they are good fit or not.
Best of luck and congrats on the new property!
I looked into Vacasa and decided it wasn't worth it. The area sales guy gave me a quick market snapshot of what he excitedly dtermined would net me 800 dollars a month after their fee. So I pointed out that we had taxes and insurance at 500 per month, then we would need to pay for electric and gas, so if 800 per month was it then we would be operating at a loss every month.
Even the official market eval done by the corporate office came in with a margin of profit that wasn't going to cut it. We don't even have a mortgage on the place because it has been in the family forever. I think you have to be pretty high end to make a 35 percent fee work.
If you can find a rock star housekeeper/caretaker in the area (certainly easier said than done), and pay them well, they can take care of all of the cleaning / boots on the ground issues for you.
And it really doesn't take that much time - with one property at least - for the owner to handle the Airbnb/HomeAway booking inquiries, communicate with guests, and keep on top of reviews.
The customer experience that you provide and the reviews that you generate are everything in the VR business, and in my opinion are too important to outsource to VR vendors, who are focused on getting as many property owners onboard as possible, and not necessarily in delighting your guests.
I suppose that one could hire a VA to handle the interpersonal communication, but I haven't heard of anyone doing this.
I have a Rockstar house cleaner that does it for free, and I get to sleep with her. My carpenter, maintenance guy rents from me and I give him a big discount on rent for his work. I do other repairs and maintenance. Biggest expense is utilities, 25-40 percent of monthly rent.
Hi @Aja Leafe-Hall, I wouldn't say I have any more bookings then I would without Evolve AND if I was publishing on all their partner sites. I don't feel they do anything out of the ordinary from a marketing perspective for my properties, however they do provide excellent copy, images and setup on all those sights so one could argue you get more bookings because of those nuances to their service.
For me the 13% is worth it based on how much it would cost me to pay for the individual platforms, pay for photography (they pay for that) and write my own copy that would be high enough standards. Then add in the value of my actual time that I save not dealing with really anything until after the guest checks in makes it still worth it for me and my particular situation.
If you have boots on the ground and a housekeeper you can trust you shouldn't have any issues feeling comfortable remote managing the property.
Hope that helps a little. :)
@Dave Meyer, congratulations on the purchase of your new vacation rental property! Where in CO is it located? My husband & I have a condo in Dillon (Summit County), our first STR. We love the area!
Regarding Evolve, they are huge and do a pretty good job overall, from reports that I've seen. I don't use them personally.
One thing you should understand if you decide to use them is that THEY own your VRBO/Homeaway/Airbnb listings, you do not. If you should ever decide to leave their service you'll have to start from scratch building your own new listings on VRBO/Homeaway/Airbnb and you'll lose all of your reviews unless VRBO/Homeaway agrees to transfer them to your new listing. (I'm not sure that they will.) I doubt Airbnb will transfer any reviews since reviews on Airbnb belong to the Owner Profile, not the property listing.
My service (VRAssist) is a marketing & booking service similar to Evolve, but my clients own their listings in their own VRBO/Homeaway/Airbnb accounts.
Best wishes!
@Dave Meyer I live in CO with STR's in AZ. I would recommend looking for an investor owner on Airbnb/VRBO in your specific area of Colorado (unless it's super remote). I have formed some relationships with a few of them in AZ and they can be a really great resource and could do a better job for you as they will know your specific market and have local on the ground resources.
Best,
Mike
Dave, congratulations on your purchase. I worked for Vacasa for over 2 years in multiple departments and am very familiar with not only the company, but the VR space in general. I don't want to type out a novel here, but would be happy to share my thoughts. Shoot me a PM if you're interested.
@Paige Kelsey. I have been managing vacation rentals remotely myself and am trying to transition to a management company. Have tried a couple (Evolve, V-trips) and am trying out TurnKey but so far none of them have been great. What do you use software wise or for channel management? The two I am still self managing I just advertise on Airbnb and Vrbo and keep them about 95% booked with excellent returns but the backend work kills me (they are in Maui). Definitely takes me more than 15 minutes a day. My other pain point is having to constantly check my phone to make sure I am responding fast to stay up high in results and also having to have my phone on all night in case of emergencies. We were considering buying some things in Colorado Springs ourselves but haven't done so yet.
@Jami Van Den Bogaert Yup, I feel you for sure. We went to Singapore and my phone was on during the night. I do a couple of things that makes it super easy though. I do all reservations that I load onto my google calendar so as soon as we get a booking my cleaning crew and our boots on the ground person knows about it immediately. You dont need fancy software when you can make it up in google calendar and it all works great! I also have a boots on the ground person instead of a management company. Bottom line the taking of the bookings can all be done via your phone and takes seconds literally. Once I get a booking I give them my boots on the ground contact info to the guest and I am basically out of the loop from there on out. The reasons for that are simple, it really gives guests a more right there contact to ie refill propane tanks or respond about an early check in or a late check out. As for the boots on the ground I get a local super host off of airbnb and pay them 100$ a property to be a boots on the ground for me. Basically this is a little extra cash for them without much work. I chose hosts as they would know what is expected and obviously would know how to treat guests since they themselves had been super hosts. We are now on year 2 of this and it is AMAZING. She will walk through houses and change light bulbs check for things to be restocked etc- then, I just buy everything off of Amazon and ship it direct which has included side table lamps, mattresses and even a box spring. PS Colorado is amazing for many reasons but one of the biggest is the low property tax. Super easy to carry a home when your property tax for one property is 400$ a year and for another it is 700$ a year.
@Paige Kelsey Hmm I hadn't thought about seeking out another host and I didn't know you could autoload things on google calendar. Great ideas! Do you pay the host $100 per month or $100 per reservation? Still need something besides excel though to handle the money side of things (I have to do transient taxes every month to Hawaii). We haven't bitten the bullet yet in Colorado Springs because the vacation rental market is so new and varied there I find it hard to figure out what your rents will actually be and hard to find an agent who knows much about it. Without a mortgage and self managing we are netting about 40k per year on each 1 br condo on Maui we could sell for probably about $335,000. Haven't found anything with returns like that looking all over the country but I wan't to invest in Colorado Springs because I want to move there in the next couple of years. Plus it's way easier to check up on something a few times a year when it's a 10 hour drive away vs a 16 hour day of flying and 5 hour time difference.
I believe evolve also charges the guests 20%
@Jami. $335,000 bringing $40k isn't that great. Is that gross or net?
I have $135,000 bringing $65k and $280,000 bringing $120,000 gross...
Wow! Those are amazing gross amounts @Ken Latchers
I’d love to get those numbers! What city are your 2 houses in?
@Dave Meyer I'm not going to bash any of these large companies you mentioned because that would be unprofessional, lol. I own and manage in Florida, so I feel I can share my opinion without it sounding like a sales pitch because you are in a different market. SO... I'm a fan of SMALL and LOCAL. Yes, a large national company may have some fancy advertising and huge fees, but... I charge between 15% and 20% of gross income. Most smaller STR managers sit in that range as well. I inspect the units personally, the guests call me with questions, I pick up the phone at any time, my name is all over the reviews they leaves, etc.... So if an owner has an issue (water heater breaks, etc) they know who they are dealing with, I know local contractors, etc and no one ever gets put on hold to listen to elevator music or asked to press 30 automated phone selections to get to a live person. In the end the return and the occupancy rates are what you care about. I would suggest you (without telling you to discard larger companies) to look into some hands-on smaller management options that are LOCAL.
@Jami Van Den Bogaert if you'd actually sell your condos in Maui for that price, I'd love to chat with you further. I'm looking to pick up more vacation rentals and also have some buyers looking. Great cash flow if you mentioned $40k net!!
Wow! Those are amazing gross amounts @Ken Latchers
I’d love to get those numbers! What city are your 2 houses in?
Ok, @Ken Latchers
I’ll look for low cost housing in the top 500 tourist area
That sounds like the way to go thanks!
Smokies or Hawaii sounds great until you see $400,000 properties you may be ae to afford and you are 800 miles away.
There is always a place near population centers that people go for the weekend... State/natl parks or forests, farmstays, mountains, great lakes, skiing, historic sites, the shore, etc. It may not be Yellowstone, but if it gets visitors in the 100,000s, it has promise. There are small towns that may have nice houses for under $150-200,000 in some of these.
We are vacation rental managers looking to expand nationally so out of curiosity, we listed one of the properties I own with Evolve to see what our experience would be. I like to be guinea pig using our own properties to test things out.
The "10%" was really enticing to some investors in my circle so I wanted to test it out myself. Plus, if I could save myself some employee expense by having them take the booking part, why wouldn't I partner up?! Here's what I discovered:
*I only got 2 bookings in about 4 months and this property is located by Disney in peak season. Prior to going that route, we booked our property a lot more frequently
*Every booking was discounted. I never got a full price booking and was constantly asked to drop my price rather than have them up their marketing game.
*Price seems to be their only way of enticing guests rather than offering other specials such as buy 2 nights get 1 free.
*The 10% commission was taken off of the full booking rate and not the discounted booking rate so I ate the discount.
*10% is taken from the nightly rate AND the cleaning fee so make sure it's high enough or else you will lose money
*There is a transaction fee of 3% or 5% depending on if the guest is from the US or international
*They list on the same booking sites we were listing on TripAdvisor, VRBO, Airbnb and maybe a couple more
*My property was on their website but buried in all the listings so it was hard to find
*There wasn't any active marketing of my property besides the listings and our property wasn't featured at any time
*Any time we needed help, it would take several days to get a response.
*Any changes we wanted to make could take up to a week
*The booking part is the easy part.
So bottom line, when we compared the payouts on our bookings to what we would calculate using the 25% we charged, the difference was only about 6%ish and we handled so much more including 24/7/365 support, active marketing on social media of individual properties, filing state and room tax, guest issues, reviews, consulting on furnishings, maximizing remodeling dollars, etc. Smaller companies can do so much more for you and guests really love having personalized interaction and a number to call.
