Marketing Agencies for Vacation Rental Management Companies

When a manager asks ChatGPT this question, the answers tend to name the same dozen firms. We checked each one on its own website, then sorted them by how they work, because the right shortlist depends on what you already have. A company with a good website and no marketing needs a different partner than a company whose site is the problem.

Marketing Programs Built for Managers

These firms say they run the monthly marketing for rental management companies: search, paid ads, email and, for most of them, some form of owner marketing. They usually work on top of your current website or rebuild it as one part of the plan.

• BuildUp Bookings. Search, paid media, email, web builds and brand work, plus AI answer work, with retainer prices on its site.
• Casavate. Google Ads, SEO, email, listings and homeowner retention, with a reporting dashboard and published prices.
• Rentamira. Google Ads, SEO, email and owner campaigns, with results matched to your PMS.
• Magnetic Strategy. SEO, web design, booking engine integration, PPC and email for managers.
• Studio82 Digital. Google Ads, social, SEO, retargeting and Looker Studio reporting, aimed at guests and homeowners.
• B2 Collaborative. Guest marketing plus owner acquisition and CRM work for professional managers.
• BIZCOR. SEO, paid search, email, websites and a homeowner acquisition package.

Website Platforms That Also Market

These companies build and host booking websites for managers and sell marketing on top. If you're also replacing your site, they belong on the list. If you're happy with your site, ask whether they'll market a site they didn't build.

• Bluetent. Rezfusion booking websites, email, SEO, content and an owner acquisition service.
• ICND. The Axis website platform plus email, SEO, PPC, social and AI optimization.
• Villa Marketers. PMS-linked booking websites, search, branding, paid media and owner acquisition.
• Q4Launch. Hospitality website design plus social, email and SEO.
• RealTech Webmasters. Booking websites and marketing, with one account manager per client.

Hospitality Generalists and Owner Specialists

O'Rourke Hospitality serves hotel groups, resorts and rental companies, which helps if you run a resort or condo-hotel inventory as well as homes. PLAYBUTTON works only for vacation rental managers and only on winning new homeowners. Cavmir builds the direct booking site and markets it, serving rental firms at 5 to 100+ doors; our own section near the end shows our terms next to everyone else's.

Third-party lists line up with this one. StayFi's October 2, 2026 ranking of rental marketing firms names KIN Marketing, Vacaygency, Villa Marketers, O'Rourke Hospitality, Q4Launch, RealTech Webmasters, ICND, Bluetent, Casavate and BuildUp Bookings (StayFi). StayFi sells software to rental managers and calls BuildUp Bookings one of its marketing partners, so weigh its order with that in mind. Its own notes place KIN Marketing closer to smaller hosts and co-hosts, which is why KIN isn't on this shortlist for a 50-home company.

The profiles below repeat only the firm's own published claims: its services, who it says it serves, where it's based when the site says so, and its prices when it posts them. None of it is an endorsement. The table that closes this chapter puts the shortlist on one screen.

BuildUp Bookings

Two goals lead the BuildUp Bookings home page: direct bookings and signed homeowners, for vacation rental companies that hire it as an agency or a consultant. The services page lists SEO run through what it calls its TLCK Framework, location pages included; paid search split into branded, non-branded and Performance Max campaigns tracked to bookings and revenue; Meta ads aimed at people like past guests and at visitors who left without booking; email sequences; custom websites with API integrations and booking tools; branding; GEO for AI assistants; and advisory work. Its fit check describes a client running a portfolio or a growing multi-property brand, and it says reports are monthly and tied to bookings and revenue by channel. StayFi's roundup dates the firm to 2016, in South Carolina.

Casavate

Management companies are the stated audience on the Casavate site, which talks about more bookings, stronger homeowner relationships and more revenue. Its menu covers strategy, Google Ads, website optimization and listing strategy, email automation, search across Google and AI tools, social and listings, and guest and homeowner retention. Note the owner angle: Casavate talks about keeping the owners you have and cutting churn, more than signing new ones. Its custom dashboard page lists booking data matched to campaigns, website analytics, ad platform metrics and keyword rankings, with data-source logos that include Streamline, Escapia, Guesty, Key Data Dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Ads and Search Console. The home page also says clients aren't tied to long contracts. StayFi gives its founding year as 2018, also in South Carolina.

Rentamira

Growing direct bookings and bringing in new homeowners are the two promises at the top of the Rentamira home page, which treats search, ads, conversion and email as a single system and says each result is squared with your PMS. The work comes in three groups. One wins homeowners through owner campaigns, positioning in your market and what it calls performance pages. One drives guest bookings through Google Ads, social media, and search across Google and AI answers. The third builds the plumbing: email lifecycle, conversion work, measurement and reporting. Its Google Ads target, in its own words an aim, is at least seven dollars of bookings for each dollar spent. Because it's an aim, so ask how bookings are counted and over what period. Its listed software partners are HomeRun, StayFi, Hosthub, Guesty, Lodgify, Hostaway and OwnerRez. The site posts no prices.

Magnetic Strategy

Phoenix is home base for Magnetic Strategy, which pitches itself to rental managers as a done-for-you digital shop whose stated goals are to grow direct bookings and cut OTA reliance. Its home page lists SEO, web design, a booking engine integration that updates properties from your PMS, email, pay-per-click campaigns targeted by geography, organic social, copywriting, blogging and property descriptions. It also says its methods help managers close more homeowner leads and grow their portfolios, and its marketing page offers dashboards set up to show the KPIs you care about in a format you can read. Prices aren't on the site; contact runs through a form or a booked call.

Studio82 Digital

With a mailing address in Grand Junction, Colorado, Studio82 Digital says it markets rental brands to two audiences at once: guests who want to book and homeowners who want to list. Its services include SEO and content, paid search with Google Ads campaigns built for direct bookings, organic and paid social, retargeting with automated messages, email and analytics. The analytics page says reports live in Looker Studio, stay open to you whenever you want them, and come with a monthly recap and suggested changes, tracking conversion rates, transactions and revenue by channel. You won't find prices posted.

B2 Collaborative

Now found at b2collab.com, B2 Collaborative splits its work for professional managers three ways (guests, owners and the CRM) and puts its time in the field at nearly ten years. The guest marketing side covers digital marketing, Google Ads, email, social media with an approval dashboard, SEO, creative and account management with KPI reporting. The owner side covers sales automation, setting up or moving and then running your CRM whichever lead system you use, automated email sequences, reminders for follow-up tasks, and sales pieces such as flyers and postcards. Of the firms here, it says the most about the sales work that starts after an owner raises a hand. Pricing isn't posted.

BIZCOR

Based in Chandler, Arizona, BIZCOR cites more than ten years in rental marketing and lists SEO, paid search management, email for repeat guests, web development, wholesale websites and homeowner acquisition on its home page. Its homeowner acquisition page describes landing pages with a lead form, online scheduling through Calendly, testimonials, the team and properties with annual revenue. The package comes bundled with what BIZCOR calls SEO Lite, which includes three pages of new content a month, and it adds paid search setup with conversion tracking and remarketing plus an owner brochure it calls an Owner's Guide. A Google Partner badge sits in its footer. There's no price list; the next step it offers is a free consultation.

Bluetent

Carbondale, Colorado is home to Blue Tent Marketing, LLC, the company behind Bluetent, which sells Rezfusion booking websites to rental companies large and small. Its home page also lists email marketing designed for professional managers, digital marketing covering SEO, answer engine optimization and content, and a channel management product called Boost!. Its owner acquisition page describes a property management page written for owners, direct mail such as postcards and brochures, branded items from vehicle wraps to apparel, and email campaigns that inform existing homeowners. StayFi lists its founding year as 2002. The pages we read show no prices.

ICND

InterCoastal Net Designs, known as ICND, works from Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., traces its work in rentals and real estate to 1999, and counts more than 450 rental company clients worldwide. Its site pairs the Axis website platform with PPC, SEO, email, social and AI optimization services. On the PPC page, ICND says it sorts your keyword phrases into campaigns, takes care of the whole PPC account, suggests budget and seasonal spend changes, and sends a monthly report of the work done. Its project listings mention Track, Guesty, Streamline, VRM and Escapia. Pricing is by quote.

Villa Marketers

The firm lists a Saint Cloud, Florida address, dates its start to 2005, and takes on single owners, small rental brands and managers. Its menu runs from branding and search, AI visibility included, to booking websites wired into your PMS, paid and content marketing, and owner acquisition. The owner acquisition page describes destination keyword research and local SEO, owner landing pages on your own domain, content for owners weighing their options, Google Ads aimed at owners in specific destinations, and automated follow-up that keeps you in front of owners while they take weeks to decide. It also says to count qualified inquiries, conversations and signed agreements as separate stages, which is the right way to count owner leads with any agency. It says it holds official partner status with OwnerRez, for integration, and with Hostfully. Prices aren't published.

Q4Launch

Charleston, South Carolina is where Q4Launch is based, and it serves rentals, hotels, lodges, inns and B&Bs. Its home page describes website design it calls Future Proof, with a 30-day timeline to launch a new site, plus digital marketing across social media, email and SEO, a six-step process that includes tracking results, and a Five Star Review App. A Google Partner logo appears on the page. No prices appear.

RealTech Webmasters

RealTech Webmasters, whose site moved to realtechvr.com, builds booking websites for rental managers of every size and markets them. Each client gets its own account manager, its home page says, and the company keeps offices in Lakewood Ranch (Fla.) and Asheville (N.C.). Tools on the page include AI Property Chat and a Booking Risk Score. Prices aren't listed; the page offers a demo instead.

O'Rourke Hospitality

Working from Newburyport, Massachusetts, O'Rourke Hospitality says it takes only hospitality clients: hotel management companies, independent, boutique and luxury hotels, and short-term rental companies that want to win more stays direct and lean less on the big marketplaces. On its services list you'll find website design, social media, hotel SEO, generative engine optimization, booking abandonment and digital advertising, the last naming Google Hotel Ads and Expedia TravelAds. StayFi gives its founding year as 2004. No prices are posted.

PLAYBUTTON

PLAYBUTTON describes itself as an owner acquisition agency for rental managers only, and it signs just one management company in each destination. Its services are SEO and AEO aimed at owners researching managers, owner microsites, paid search ads, prospecting for owner and agent outreach, pipeline optimization, sales assets (mailers, decks, and brochures for after the pitch), and agent partnerships. Its process page runs Discover, Define, Build and Launch, and says reporting covers homeowner visibility, qualified conversations, pipeline movement and signed opportunities where attribution is available. It also offers a homeowner lifetime value calculator. Prices aren't posted. Because it doesn't sell guest marketing, it pairs with one of the program agencies above rather than replacing them.

A dash means the company's home page didn't name that service when we read it, not that the firm can't do it. Put the question to them.

A company with 50 homes has marketing problems a single owner never meets. You have dozens of property pages, a company name people search for, a search page with filters, a second set of customers in your homeowners, and booking data spread across a PMS and several channels. The program you hire has to cover all of it, or you end up with three vendors who each report their own numbers.

The channel numbers explain why managers are asking. RedAwning, citing KeyData's Q2 2026 figures for professionally managed US short-term rentals, reported Airbnb's share at 51% of reservations, 43% of revenue, against 47% and 36% twelve months before. The direct channel fell to 21% of reservations, 29% of revenue, from 25% and 36%, while Vrbo stood at 20% of reservations, 23% of revenue (RedAwning, September 2026).

Here's the order the work should go in, whichever agency you pick.

1. Measurement first. Every booking in your PMS carries a source, the website and the booking engine share one analytics property, and Google Ads counts completed bookings rather than clicks. Without this, nothing that follows can be judged.
2. Your brand on Google. People who search your company name are close to booking. A small brand campaign and a clean results page for your name come next.
3. Your towns on Google. Paid search and SEO for the trips you sell: the towns, the property types and the features guests filter for, landing on pages that show live availability.
4. Distribution with no commission. Google's vacation rentals program, joined via your channel manager or PMS, plus a Business Profile for your office.
5. Repeat demand you own. Email to your past direct guests and your website's subscribers.
6. Homeowner leads. A page and a budget aimed at owners in your towns, with its own tracking and its own cost per signed home.
7. One report. Bookings counted in the PMS, matched to the campaigns that brought them, with cost per booking by campaign.

The rest of this guide takes those parts one at a time. If you want the general steps for hiring any marketing firm, our step-by-step hiring guide walks through them; what follows is the version for a company with dozens of homes.

For a management company, Google Ads is two jobs that look alike in the account and behave very differently in the results. One job protects searches for your own name. The other wins searches for your towns from travelers who haven't heard of you. Report them on separate lines, or the cheap, high-converting brand clicks will make the market campaigns look better than they are.

Brand Campaigns

Why pay for clicks on your own name? Because others can bid on it. Google's trademark policy says it won't restrict the use of trademarks as keywords. Ad text is treated differently: a trademark owner can file a complaint, and Google may then restrict ads that use the trademark in their text, for example ads from a direct competitor (Google Ads trademark policy). So another manager, an online travel agency or a reseller can show up when someone types your company name, even if they can't put it in the headline.

The auction insights report shows who's there. It compares you with other advertisers in the same auctions, with their impression share, the overlap rate (how often their ad showed when yours did) and outranking share (how often your ad ranked above theirs) (Google Ads Help). Ask the agency to pull it for your brand terms in the first month and again every quarter. If nobody else bids on your name, a brand campaign can stay small.

Market Campaigns

Market campaigns go after searches for the trips you sell: a town plus vacation rentals, beach houses, cabins or condos, and the features people filter for, such as pet-friendly, hot tub, oceanfront or sleeps 12. With 50 homes you can match those searches to real inventory. Point each ad group at a page built for that search, such as a search page filtered to that town or a collection of the homes that allow dogs, with rates and open dates pulled live from the PMS.

Two habits keep these campaigns from leaking money. First, read the search terms report, which lists the searches that triggered your ads, and add the irrelevant ones as negative keywords (Google Ads Help). In this business that usually means job seekers, long-term renters, home buyers and people looking for cleaning work. Second, set budgets around your booking windows rather than your stay dates, since many guests reserve well ahead of arrival.

Remarketing and Owner Campaigns

Remarketing shows ads to people who visited your website and left, ideally with the homes or dates they looked at. Owner campaigns are a different product. They target owners searching for management in your towns and send them to an owner page, never to the guest search page. Keep them in their own campaigns, with their own conversion action and their own budget, so a burst of owner spend never gets mixed into your cost per guest booking.

Several agencies here name this split. BuildUp Bookings lists branded, non-branded and Performance Max campaigns, Villa Marketers lists Google Ads aimed at owners in specific destinations, and Magnetic Strategy describes paid campaigns targeted by geography. For more detail on building the guest side, our walkthrough of paid ads for rentals goes campaign by campaign.

SEO for one cabin is a handful of pages. SEO for 50 homes is a site architecture problem: property pages, search and filter pages, collection pages, town and area pages, and an owner section, all competing for crawl time and for the same handful of searches. The agency you hire should show you a plan for each page type before it writes a word.

Property Pages

Each home page should carry what a guest needs to decide: sleeping arrangements, a plain description of the house and what's around it, distances to the beach, lift or town, house rules, fees, reviews and live availability. Write it in your own words rather than pasting the listing text from Airbnb or Vrbo, so the page you own offers something the listings don't. If your PMS pushes the same description everywhere, ask the agency to write a site-only version for each home.

Search and Filter Pages

Booking sites with filters can create thousands of near-identical URLs, one for each mix of dates, bedrooms and features. Google's documentation on faceted navigation warns that crawlers will typically reach a very large number of these URLs, and that time spent on useless ones leaves less time for new, useful pages. It recommends using robots.txt to disallow crawling of filter URLs, or putting filters in URL fragments, and says canonical tags and nofollow are generally less effective over the long term (Google Search Central). Ask the agency which filter pages it plans to keep indexable, such as one page per town or per feature, and how it'll block the rest.

Collection, Town and Owner Pages

Collection pages (pet-friendly homes, homes with pools, homes that sleep 12 or more) work when they match real inventory and say something useful about it. Town pages work when each one says things you couldn't say about the next town over. The risk is a stack of near-copies. Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, and give as an example "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page." The same policies describe scaled content abuse as pages generated at volume to game rankings instead of helping people (Google spam policies). That matters most for owner pages, where it's tempting to clone a management page for every town in the county.

Your Google Business Profile

Google's eligibility rules exclude homes offered for rent or sale, vacation homes included, while staffed sales or leasing offices can be verified. A business also has to meet its customers in person during the hours it lists (Google Business Profile Help). For a manager, that means a profile for each staffed office, not one per home. Google's general guidelines also say there should be only one profile per business, and that service-area businesses should hide their address (Google guidelines). An agency that offers to create a profile for each rental house is offering something Google's rules don't allow.

Structured Data and AI Answers

Google has a vacation rental structured data type that can show listing details such as photos, rating and location in results. Its instructions are written for sites that already have a Google technical account manager assigned, plus Hotel Center access; only eligible sites get it, and each listing needs eight or more photos (Google Search Central). For most managers the nearer win is the free program in the next chapter. On AI answers, several firms here sell work aimed at ChatGPT and Google's AI features, under labels like GEO, AEO and AI visibility. Ask what each will change on your pages and how it'll test which answers name you. Our full SEO guide for rentals goes page by page if you want the detail.

This is the line item most proposals for managers leave out, and it costs nothing to join. In its Hotel Center help, Google's starter guide for managers says becoming a partner "is free, with no advertising spend required" and that "Referrals are free." Each listing links to the manager's own brand and landing page (Google Hotel Center Help).

The same guide sets the route by size. Companies with 500 or more properties can integrate directly if they assign a technical contact who can supply price and availability feeds. For managers with fewer than 500, Google says "we strongly recommend connecting your professionally managed inventory via an approved connectivity provider." You also need a suitable direct booking website. Individual homeowners, peer-to-peer rentals, individual rooms and partial homes aren't eligible. Integration typically takes 8 to 12 weeks after Google receives the property list, and Google says some partners have gone live in as little as 4 weeks.

So for a 50-home company, the questions are practical. Does your PMS or channel manager act as a connectivity provider? Does your booking engine take the guest from Google to a checkout on your brand? Who on your side or the agency's side will send the property list, check the listings once they're live and track the bookings they bring? Put those answers in the proposal with a date. Because the clicks are free, bookings from this source pull your cost per booking down, so make sure the report gives them their own line rather than folding them into organic search.

Owners are your second set of customers, and they shop differently from guests. A guest books in an evening. An owner compares managers over weeks, reads your site, checks your reviews, asks a neighbor and wants a call. So owner marketing needs its own page, its own budget line, its own tracking stages and its own cost measure. Keep it in the same program as your guest marketing, because the same site, the same brand searches and the same reviews feed both.

The Pieces

• An owner page on your domain. What you do, what you charge or how you price, the homes you manage, owner reviews, the towns you cover and a clear way to ask for an estimate.
• A revenue estimate request. Owners want a number. If the page or the follow-up shows one, build it from your own homes' results with dates, and keep the math you'd walk an owner through on a call.
• Search traffic from owners. SEO and Google Ads for management searches in your towns, sent to the owner page.
• Follow-up. Leads go straight into your CRM with a named person to call, a response time and a nurture sequence for owners who aren't ready.
• Sales material. A short owner guide or deck and a leave-behind for the walk-through. BIZCOR, PLAYBUTTON and B2 Collaborative all list sales assets of this kind.

Tracking Owners to a Signature

A form fill isn't the result you want. Count each stage: inquiry, qualified (the home is in your area, can be rented legally and fits your program), call held, proposal sent and agreement signed. Villa Marketers describes nearly the same stages on its owner acquisition page, and PLAYBUTTON says its reporting covers qualified conversations, pipeline movement and signed opportunities.

Then feed the outcome back to the ad platform. Google describes enhanced conversions for leads as a way to measure offline leads using first-party data already in your CRM, hashed before it's sent, without changes to the CRM or website (Google Ads Help). Set up that way, Google Ads can learn from owners who signed rather than from everyone who filled in a form.

Owner Ads on Meta

Meta requires US advertisers, and advertisers targeting the US, who run housing ads to declare a special ad category (Meta advertising standards). Meta's developer documentation lists what that changes: age stays at 18 to 65+, you can't choose a gender, zip code targeting and location exclusions aren't supported, and lookalike audiences aren't available (Meta for Developers). The Meta pages we read don't say whether an ad asking owners to hire a manager counts as housing, so ask each agency how it classifies owner ads and why, and keep the reply on file.

Specialist or Generalist

If owner growth is your main goal and you want an agency that won't work for a competitor in your destination, PLAYBUTTON's one-manager-per-destination model is built for that. If you want owner work inside a single program, Rentamira, Villa Marketers, B2 Collaborative, BIZCOR, Bluetent, Magnetic Strategy and Studio82 Digital all describe owner marketing next to their guest work. For the owner side in depth, from estimates to direct mail, see our separate guide on winning new homes.

If you ask a marketing partner for one thing, make it a monthly report that starts from your PMS. Analytics and ad platforms count what they can see, and they count it their own way. Your PMS counts reservations that paid. When the two disagree, the PMS wins, and a good agency reconciles the difference before it sends the report.

Make the Tracking Work First

Many booking engines run their checkout on a different domain from your main site. Google Analytics explains that without cross-domain measurement, GA4 creates new cookies and IDs on each domain, so one guest moving from your site to the checkout is counted as two users in two sessions. Cross-domain measurement passes the same IDs from one domain to the next through a URL parameter, so the visit stays whole (Google Analytics Help). If that isn't set up, the ad platforms lose sight of the booking, and the campaigns that worked look like they didn't.

Beyond that: tag every link the agency controls with campaign parameters, give each source a matching code in the PMS where it allows one, and send completed bookings to Google Ads as the conversion that matters. Ask to see a test booking travel the whole path before any new budget goes live.

What the Agencies Here Say About Reporting

Rentamira says each result is squared with your PMS. Casavate's dashboard pulls booking data next to ad and analytics data from sources that include Streamline, Escapia and Guesty. Studio82 Digital builds Looker Studio reports with a monthly recap. BuildUp Bookings says it reports bookings and dollars by channel. ICND sends a monthly report of the PPC work done. Ask each one for a sample report from a manager client with the names removed, and check it against the outline below.

Marketing report: (month and year)

Bookings, counted in the PMS
- Direct bookings and direct revenue this month, compared with this month a year ago
- Direct share of bookings and of revenue, rolling 12 months
- Direct bookings by source: brand search ads, market search ads, organic search,
  Google vacation rentals, email, social, referral, unknown

Spend and cost
- Agency fee, ad spend by campaign
- Cost per direct booking by campaign, and for the program as a whole

Search
- Search Console clicks and impressions for property, search and town pages
- Pages gaining and losing clicks, with the reason if known

Owners
- Owner inquiries, qualified, calls held, proposals sent, agreements signed
- Cost per qualified owner lead and per signed home

Next month
- Three changes the agency will make, and why
- What the agency needs from us, and by when

One rule for reading it: a booking that shows up in analytics but not in the PMS isn't a booking. Ask the agency to list reservation numbers for the bookings it credits to paid campaigns, at least for the first three months, so you can spot-check them.

Whether the program pays comes down to one figure: cost per direct booking. Add the agency fee and the ad spend for a month, then divide by the direct bookings you can trace to the marketing that month. Compare the result with what the same booking would have cost you through an online travel agency.

Airbnb's help page on fees gives the comparison point. Under the single-fee setup, the usual host share is 15.5% of each payout, others usually 14% to 16%, and that setup is compulsory for anyone connected through property management software. Where the older split model still applies, hosts give up 3% while guests are charged somewhere from 14.1% to 16.5% on top (Airbnb service fees). On a $2,000 stay, 15.5% is $310.

Using the sample inputs, a $3,000 fee and $3,000 in guest ads come to $6,000 a month. At 25 traced bookings that's $240 per booking, or 12% of a $2,000 stay, against the $310 an OTA would take. Three cautions before you celebrate a number like that.

• Brand searches. Some people who search your company name would have found you anyway. Read market campaigns on their own line, where the cost per booking shows more plainly what the ads add.
• Moved or new. A direct stay that Airbnb would have booked anyway saves the fee. A stay on dates that would have stayed vacant is worth the whole booking. The report should try to tell the two apart, at least by season.
• Your own costs. Direct stays come with card fees, the booking engine's charges and guest service the OTA would otherwise handle. Our direct booking savings calculator takes those into account.

Two firms on this list put retainer ranges on their websites. The rest quote after a call. Here's what the pages showed on November 13, 2026; confirm against the live page before budgeting, since these numbers move.

Read on the BuildUp Bookings price page, the Casavate price page, and our own pricing and plan pages.

How the Fees Are Built

• Flat monthly retainer. The most common model here. Ask what the fee buys each month in quantities: campaigns managed, pages written, emails sent, reports and calls.
• Share of ad spend. Some firms take a cut of your ad budget as their fee, often with a floor. It's simple, but it rises as you spend more, so ask where it stops making sense for your budget.
• Setup fee. Account rebuilds, tracking and landing pages are often billed once at the start. Get the deliverables listed.
• Fractional CMO. Both BuildUp Bookings and Casavate sell a senior marketing lead by the month at a higher price. It suits companies that want strategy and team management rather than only campaigns.
• Revenue share or per-booking fees. If anyone proposes one, define the revenue, the baseline and the cap in writing, or you'll pay a share of bookings you'd have had anyway.

Ad budgets are paid on top of every fee in the table. They should be charged by Google and Meta to your company's card, in accounts your company owns.

Here's the math to run before you sign, using a made-up company. Swap in your own numbers from the PMS and your owner contracts.

The company manages 50 homes in two beach towns and takes $2.5 million of gross bookings a year. The average stay brings in $2,000, so that's 1,250 bookings, of which 18%, or 225, come direct today. Its management agreements give the company 25% of rental revenue, which works out to $12,500 a year per home. It gets three agency proposals and the middle one looks like this.

Now work out what has to happen for $84,100 to pay for itself. There are three sources of value, and each has its own break-even point if it carried the whole cost alone:

• Bookings moved from OTAs to direct. Each one avoids about $310 in host fees (15.5% of $2,000). Covering the cost this way alone would take 272 moved bookings, more than doubling today's direct volume. Fee savings alone rarely carry a full program.
• Net-new bookings. A stay on dates that would have stayed vacant brings the company its 25% share, or $500 on a $2,000 stay. Covering the cost this way alone would take 169 new bookings.
• New homes. Each signed home brings $12,500 a year in management fees. Covering the cost this way alone would take 7 new homes for a full year.

A realistic plan mixes the three. Say the year ends with 60 bookings moved from OTAs ($18,600 in fees avoided), 40 net-new bookings ($20,000 to the company) and 4 new homes signed ($50,000 a year in fees once they're running). That's $88,600 against $84,100, and the four homes keep paying in year two without new owner spend. Who pays the OTA fee under your owner contracts changes who keeps the $18,600, so check your agreements before you count it.

Use the example in the proposal stage. Ask each agency where it expects those bookings and homes to come from, which campaigns, which pages and which months, and how it'll show you each one in the report. An agency that answers in campaigns and dates is giving you a plan. One that answers in percentages of growth isn't.

Give two or three agencies an identical brief and question list, ask for written answers, and line the replies up next to each other. The brief saves the first call from being a fact-finding session.

Company: (name), managing (number) homes in (towns)
PMS and booking engine: (for example Guesty, Hostaway, Streamline, Track)
Website: (address), built on (platform), checkout on (our domain or the PMS domain)

Last 12 months, from the PMS:
- Revenue and booking counts per channel, plus the direct share of each
- Homes signed and homes lost, and where new owners came from

Current marketing:
- Monthly ad spend by platform, and any agency or freelancer fees
- Who owns the Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console and Business Profile accounts

Goals for the next 12 months:
- Direct share target, homes to add, and a first-year budget ceiling including ad spend

Access we can grant after signing: Google Ads manager link, GA4, Search Console,
read-only PMS access

Fit
1. Which management companies with 20 to 100 homes do you work with now? Can we click through their sites and see their ads?
2. Is any other manager in our towns a client of yours? What keeps our keywords, owner campaigns and data separate from theirs?
3. Who runs our Google Ads account week to week, and how many other accounts does that person handle?

Google Ads
4. Will the account be in our company's name and billed to our card, with you linked as a manager?
5. How will you split brand, market, feature, remarketing and owner campaigns, and will each have its own line in the report?
6. How is your fee set: flat, a share of ad spend, or both? Is there any markup on media?

SEO and Google
7. How will you make each of our property pages different from the listing text on the OTAs?
8. How will you keep our search and filter pages from creating thousands of crawlable near-copies?
9. Will you set up or check our Google vacation rentals connection through our PMS or a connectivity provider?

Owners
10. What counts as a qualified owner lead, and who decides?
11. Will owner leads land in our CRM, and will you send signed homes back to Google Ads as conversions?
12. What revenue figures will you show owners, and where will each one come from?

Tracking and reporting
13. How will you reconcile the bookings you credit to campaigns with reservations in our PMS?
14. Is cross-domain tracking in place between our site and the checkout?
15. Can we see a monthly report from a manager client with the names removed?

Terms
16. What minimum term do you require, how much notice ends it, and what leaves with us?
17. Which two current manager clients can we call?

Score the answers with the scorecard further down. Watch for two kinds of non-answer: a ranking or a fixed ad return stated as certain, and "we'll set everything up under our account to keep it simple."

A management company has more to lose in a marketing contract than a single owner does: ad history across dozens of campaigns, years of analytics, an owner pipeline in a CRM, and a brand name in a crowded auction. Read the contract for the points below, and have a lawyer read it before signing. Nothing here is legal advice.

Terms to Write In

• Accounts. Google Ads, Meta ads, Google Analytics, Search Console, the Business Profile, the domain and the CRM are registered to your company. The agency is linked as a manager or user, and its access ends when the contract does.
• Data. Owner leads, call recordings, email lists and campaign data stay in systems you own. If the agency uses its own tools, the contract says you get an export on request and at the end.
• PMS access. Read-only where the PMS allows it. A marketing partner rarely needs to change rates, owner statements or channel connections.
• Conflicts. The agency names, on paper, any other manager it serves in your towns. If there is one, the contract says how keywords, owner campaigns and data are kept separate, or you negotiate an exclusivity clause.
• Fees and spend. The fee basis, what it covers each month, and any markup on media. Ad spend is billed by the platforms to your card.
• Approvals. Nothing reaches owners or guests under your company's name until you approve it, especially revenue figures and claims about your results.
• Exit. The minimum term and the notice to end it, plus a handover deadline in days for files, creative, landing pages, tracking settings and a list of each account the agency used.
• Review points. A 90-day review against the baseline and the break-even targets from the worked example, with the right to change scope.

Red Flags

Promised rankings or returns. A stated aim is fine when it comes with a method of measuring it. A promise of page one or a fixed return on ad spend isn't something any agency controls.

Agency-owned accounts. When the agency owns the Google Ads account, leaving can mean losing years of conversion history. Fix it before you sign.

Cloned town pages. Dozens of near-identical rental or management pages, one per town, are the pattern Google's doorway policy describes.

Business Profiles for each home. Google's rules exclude rental homes. Profiles belong to staffed offices.

Steering platform guests away. Airbnb's pricing and payment transparency rules forbid listing pages or messages that link guests away from Airbnb, and forbid discounts for booking elsewhere. Among its responses, Airbnb lists warnings and the suspension or removal of listings and accounts (Airbnb's policy page). With 50 listings on Airbnb, that risk outweighs any gain. Direct bookings should start with people who found your company on Google, on social media or on your own site.

A revenue share with no baseline. Without a defined baseline you pay a share of bookings that were coming anyway.

Grade each agency on what it put in writing, the proposal and the draft contract, rather than on how the sales call felt. Weight goes to what's costly to undo once you've signed: account ownership, reporting from the PMS, fee clarity, targets stated without promises, and OTA rules.

To see how the weights play out, picture two proposals. The cheaper one would run Google Ads from the agency's own account and reports clicks and sessions only. The pricier one puts every account in the company's name and reports bookings from the PMS by campaign. Two of the three-point lines go against the cheaper proposal, and it trails before price enters the picture.

Since we've told you to put these questions to everyone, our own answers follow, drawn from our property manager program page and our price pages as they stood in mid-November 2026.

• What we do. Marketing only. We design and build your booking site, then market it through SEO, citations in AI answers, ad campaigns on Google and Meta, digital PR, content, email and social. We don't run homes, set nightly rates, handle cleaners or talk to your guests, and we don't replace your PMS or channel manager.
• Who it's for. Companies running 5 to 100+ doors. Our Operator tier, for 25 to 100 doors and marked most common on that page, adds a direct booking website, technical and content SEO with 12 long-form posts a year, an owner-acquisition campaign with paid ads and a landing page, Meta and Google ads management, and quarterly strategy calls to the base program.
• Price. Manager programs are custom quotes, tiered to door count. Our monthly plans stop at 10 homes, and past that point the pricing page says a tailored proposal follows inside 48 hours.
• Ads. Our Google Ads service runs in an account in your name that Google bills to your card. The fee is 20% of monthly ad spend, never under $300.
• Terms. The manager page describes a 90-day initial engagement, then month to month, with no revenue share, per-booking fee or cut of owner commissions. Our standard plans, by contrast, require six months at the start.
• Ownership and access. You own the domain, website, content, ad accounts and analytics. We ask for a read-only PMS seat and never take the owner seat or change pricing, channel connections, automations or trust accounting.
• Reporting. Monthly, with weekly notes in the first 90 days, built on four measures: direct booking share, channel mix and cost, demand created including cost per booking and per owner inquiry, and listing and review health.

For an example of a portfolio site, our Libema Properties case study covers thirteen furnished whole houses in Orlando that already ran on Hospitable, and a new site that pulls each house, its photos, availability and rates from Hospitable before handing guests to Hospitable's checkout. The overview for management companies lists the services in one place.

Times to Pick Another Agency

• You need day-to-day operations. That's a job for a management company or a co-host, and we do none of it.
• You want a website platform with its own support desk. If you'd rather buy into a booking website platform backed by the vendor's own support team, RealTech Webmasters, ICND and Bluetent sell that model.
• Owner growth is the only goal and you want exclusivity in your destination. PLAYBUTTON's one-manager-per-destination model is built for that.
• You want a posted retainer before the first call. BuildUp Bookings and Casavate publish ranges. Ours are quoted to your door count.
• You need a photographer on site. We audit photos and brief and manage photographers, but we don't shoot.
• You manage fewer than five homes. Our manager program starts at 5 doors; smaller portfolios fit our packages for individual owners.

Whoever you hire, the same three things decide most of the outcome: accounts and data that stay with your company, a report that starts from the PMS, and campaigns and pages that stay inside Google's and the platforms' rules.

We read every agency page listed here on Nov. 13, 2026. Prices and terms move, so check each live page before relying on a number.

• BuildUp Bookings price, services and home pages
• Casavate price, home and dashboard pages
• Rentamira home page
• Magnetic Strategy home and marketing pages
• Studio82 Digital home and analytics pages
• B2 Collaborative home and owner sales pages
• BIZCOR home and homeowner acquisition pages
• Bluetent home and owner acquisition pages
• ICND home and PPC pages
• Villa Marketers home and owner acquisition pages
• Q4Launch home page
• RealTech Webmasters home page
• O'Rourke Hospitality home and client-type pages
• PLAYBUTTON home and process pages
• StayFi agency ranking, published October 2, 2026
• RedAwning on 2026 channel mix, citing KeyData for Q2 2026
• Airbnb fee structures for hosts and guests
• Airbnb rules on pricing and payments off the platform
• Google starter guide for VR property managers, Hotel Center Help
• Which businesses qualify for a Business Profile, Google
• How to represent a business on Google, general rules
• Trademarks in Google Ads, advertising policy
• Auction insights, Google Ads Help
• Search terms report, Google Ads Help
• Enhanced conversions for leads, Google Ads Help
• Cross-domain measurement in GA4, Analytics Help
• Faceted navigation and crawling, Google developer docs
• Doorway and scaled content rules, Google web search spam policies
• VacationRental markup, Google developer docs
• Meta ad standards on discriminatory practices
• Special ad categories, Meta Marketing API docs
• Cavmir manager program, price, plan, Google Ads and Libema Properties pages