What best describes your situation?
Judge a midterm manager on distribution, not marketing. Eight questions to ask, including the ones where we would score badly.
Judge them on distribution, not on marketing. A midterm manager's only defensible advantage is access to institutional demand: insurance housing companies and corporate relocation companies. Everything else, furnishing, cleaning, listings, is available to anyone. Ask where the guest comes from, and keep asking until you get a specific answer.
Below are the eight questions we would ask if we were the owner. Some of them we answer well and some we do not, and we have marked which is which.
This is the question that separates managers. Press for percentages by channel. If the answer is a consumer platform, you are buying a short-term rental operation with a 30-night filter, which is a different risk profile from institutional placement.
For reference: roughly 80% of our bookings come from insurance placements via insurance housing companies, and about 10% from corporate relocation companies. We hold 40+ B2B partnerships on that basis.
A single strong quarter is not evidence. Ask for a multi-year figure and ask whether it covers the whole portfolio or the good part of it. Ours is 80% average core portfolio occupancy across multi-year periods.
A percentage-of-collected-rent fee means a vacant month bills you nothing. A flat monthly fee means the manager is paid whether or not they perform. Ours is 25% of collected rent, and we have a free termination if a home sits vacant 90 consecutive days.
The answer to this reveals more than any other. We accept roughly 20% of the properties we evaluate, and we decline on HOA lease terms, property type, and submarket saturation. A manager who says yes to everything has no buy box, which means they have no read on where demand actually is.
This cuts both ways and you want the honest version. Too little means they have no density advantage for proximity-driven placement. Too much means your home competes with theirs. Ask for the number inside five miles.
In our program you fund it and we specify it, because the specification is what our partners buy. It is your capital, spent before revenue, and it is the least reversible part of the decision. Any manager should be direct about this rather than leaving it vague until after you sign.
Ask what happens between guests and how fast damage is reported. We run a 400+ photo inspection after every checkout and classify damage within one to four days. The number matters less than whether they have a protocol at all: damage found months later is damage nobody can attribute.
Ask for the timeline, not the promise. Ours is 4 to 14 days after guest checkout depending on payment method.
| Do not compare | Compare instead |
|---|---|
| Management fee percentage | Projected annual net after fees and operating costs |
| Nightly or monthly rate | Rate multiplied by realistic occupancy |
| Number of homes managed | Number of homes managed within five miles of yours |
| Marketing reach | Named institutional channels and their share of bookings |
| Furnishing package price | Whether the specification matches what the demand channel buys |
As a principle: a fee is only expensive relative to what it replaces. A 25% fee that fills a home 80% of the year beats an 8% fee on a home nobody places.
Austin is a real midterm market and a smaller one than DFW or Houston. The demand mix here tilts differently: insurance displacement is present, but construction and closing delays carry more weight than they do elsewhere, because the metro is still adding housing quickly. Families between a sold home and an unfinished build need two to four months and will not sign a twelve-month lease.
The binding constraint in Austin tends to be supply rather than commute. HOA lease-term restrictions in newer master-planned communities disqualify homes here often, particularly north of the city. Check your covenants before furnishing.
We cover the northern suburbs specifically in midterm rentals in Cedar Park and Leander.
On question five, in Austin, we would not always give the answer an owner wants. Austin is our smallest footprint of the four metros we cover. In Collin County we can tell you exactly how many homes we hold within five miles of an address and what that means for saturation. Our Austin read is less dense than that.
Our published owner case studies are also DFW homes rather than Austin ones. The structural argument transfers. The specific occupancy figures should not be assumed to.
If you are talking to a manager whose entire portfolio is in Austin, they may have better local density than we do. That is a fair reason to choose them, and worth weighing against the fact that a metro-wide partner network is what insurance housing companies buy on.
It is higher than long-term management and lower than most full-service short-term operations. The fee covers the demand side as well as the operations, which is the part a long-term manager does not do.
Typically 30 to 40 days from installation, on our portfolio. Ask any manager for their own figure and for what happens if it takes longer.
Texas municipal short-term rental ordinances are generally written around stays under 30 nights, so a 30-night minimum sits outside them. Rules change, so confirm for a specific address. We cover the structure in midterm rentals and Texas occupancy taxes.
A twelve-month minimum rules out the model entirely. It is checkable in the covenants and it is the first thing to verify, before any furnishing capital is committed.
You can furnish and list a home. Reaching insurance housing companies is the hard part, because they buy through procurement and need metro coverage, insurance certificates, and placement response a single property cannot provide. We explain the channel in how a furnished midterm rental actually gets filled.
Texas Corporate Homes manages 150+ premium furnished single-family homes across Austin, DFW, Houston, and San Antonio. We have been operating since 2015 and managing properties for outside owners since 2019.
If you own a home in Austin, Cedar Park, Leander, or Round Rock, see the owner program or email leasing@staytch.com. If the honest answer is that another manager fits your address better, we will say so.
