Hourly rate for cohost

[Ciera5]

Hello! I’m curious, what do you think is a good hourly rate to offer a cohost who is going to help manage 50 properties. I would assume this would be a lot of work depending on the volume of the bookings. This would include just visiting the airbnbs between guests and ensuring the place is ready and clean. No extra duties is being asked. Thanks! 

[Nanxing0]

I have cohosts solely for messaging and I would have to say it is virtually impossible to estimate the total number of hours of work a cohost spends on management. The issue is that replying to messages is a 24-hours a day work -- you simply can't limit it to any 8-hour window and tell the cohost not to respond outside his/her work hours. However although it's all-time, most of time during a day the co-host is not doing anything -- I would estimate a total of 3-4 hours worth of work my cohost spends on the 7 listings he's managing per day, but the whole-day standby is also bothersome.

Instead of an hourly rate, we pay our cohost on a commission base -- 20% of the income generated from the bookings. I think this has several benefits. First it gives the cohost incentive to think how to boost bookings and generate more revenue. Also since his/her income is connected to the revenue, he/she has the incentive to treat guests better. An hourly rate might drive some greedy cohost to floor/ceil your daily pricing to maximize/minimize the work he/she has to do, depending on how you evaluate his/her total hours of work. AFAIK most cohosts get paid on a commission base -- the percentage varies by a lot of factors but usually in the range between 10% and 30%.

[Ciera5]

@Nanxing0 Thank you soooo much for your response and this breakdown. Super helpful! My main concern is the host asked if I could help his property management company with visiting the properties and he asked for an hourly rate. Initially, I proposed a percentage but he said that wouldn’t work and he’d prefer to pay me hourly for my time but I wasn’t sure what amount to say. I appreciate your response. It was very helpful 🙂

[Nanxing0]

@Ciera5 If it's solely a property visit work, hourly rate definitely makes sense as it's essentially a fixed amount of time spent on each property per visit, just like the way a lot of hosts pay for cleaning.

I guess you can ask the person/company how they will document the number of hours you work for messaging to calculate payment. That should give you a better idea whether it makes sense.

[Ciera5]

Thank you! Great idea!