Per-unit pricing means each tool in your stack charges a monthly amount for every property you manage, so the bill grows each time you sign a new owner. The catch is that a manager rarely rents one tool: the same new property raises the property management system, the channel manager, the messaging tool and everything else at once.
That is not unfair in itself, and for a small portfolio rented tools are often the sensible choice. The point is to know what one more property really costs you in software before you agree a management fee with its owner.
The lines that are billed per unit
Go through your card statement and invoices and list every tool alongside how it charges. In a vacation rental business the per-unit lines are commonly some mix of these:
- The property management system, which holds reservations, calendars and owner records
- The channel manager, if it is separate, which pushes rates and availability to the listing sites
- Guest messaging and automated check-in instructions
- Cleaning and turnover scheduling
- Dynamic pricing, which may be charged as a share of booking revenue instead of per unit
- The owner portal or owner statement add-on
- Smart lock or noise monitoring subscriptions tied to each property
Note beside each one whether it charges per unit, per user, per booking or as a share of revenue, and whether there is a minimum or a tier that jumps at a certain size. Tiers matter, because crossing a band can reprice the units you already had.
Totalling the stack per unit and per year
Add the per-unit lines together to get one figure: what a single property costs you in software per month. Then multiply by your units and by twelve.
Suppose, purely as an illustration, that six tools add up to 60 dollars per property per month and you manage 40 properties. That is 2,400 a month, or 28,800 a year, and taking on ten more properties adds 7,200 a year before you have earned anything from them. Replace every figure with your own. Our software bill calculator, a free calculator, does this sum on the numbers you type and shows the yearly and three-year totals.
Then put the per-unit figure next to the monthly management income from your smallest property. That comparison tells you more than the headline total does.
What to ask before you add properties
- Does the per-unit price fall at higher volumes, and is that written into your agreement or only shown on a pricing page that can change?
- Are inactive, seasonal or onboarding properties charged while they have no bookings?
- What happens to the price at renewal, and how much notice do you get?
- Can you export reservations, guest records and owner ledgers in a usable format if you leave?
- Which tools duplicate each other? A property management system may already include messaging or task scheduling that you pay for separately.
The channel connection is the part you keep
The listing channels and online travel agencies are where the bookings come from, and the connection to them is a network, not just a feature. Whatever else you change, you keep the channel connection and the payment processor. Those are not the pieces to rebuild.
What sits around them is different. Calendars, task scheduling, owner statements, message templates and reporting are ordinary software doing jobs you can describe on a page. That is where owning can make sense once per-unit fees have grown with the portfolio. Our guide to renting versus owning business software covers when it does and when it does not, including the risk of switching and who maintains the result.
At Hiro we rebuild only the parts a manager really uses, around the channel connection, for one flat monthly price that does not change when you add properties. The page on software for vacation rental managers sets out what is commonly rented and what can be rebuilt. We quote after we have seen the bill, so the first step is the same either way: total the stack.