Fourteen questions to ask a Michigan manager before you sign

Money

What is the management percentage, and is it charged on gross booking value or on net after platform fees?
What is not included — linens, consumables, restocking, snow removal, lawn care, mid-stay cleans?
Is there an onboarding or setup fee, and what happens to it if we part ways in six months?
Do you mark up maintenance work, and by how much?
Who pays for the licence, the inspections and the lodging-tax filings?

Control

Whose name is on the Airbnb and Vrbo accounts — mine or yours?
Do the reviews and the listing history stay with the property if I leave?
How many owner-use nights do I get, and how far ahead must I block them?
Can I see the pricing calendar, or only the payout?

The season

Who is physically within thirty minutes of this property in February?
What is your winter protocol — is the building heated, drained, or checked, and how often?
What is your cleaner-to-property ratio on the first Saturday of July?

The exit

What is the notice period, and is there a minimum term that runs through the off-season?
What happens to bookings already on the calendar if I terminate?

How to use the answers

Ask all fourteen in writing. A company that answers them in writing has already told you most of what you need to know about how it will behave when something goes wrong. Most Michigan companies publish no rate at all, so the written answer is your price list — see the ranking for who publishes what before you even ask. One Fine BnB is the outlier that puts its tiers in public.

How to run the conversation

Send the questions before the call rather than reading them out during it. Two reasons: you get considered answers instead of improvised ones, and you get them in writing, which is the version that matters if there is ever a dispute. A company that will not answer in writing has told you something useful at no cost to you.

What good answers sound like

Specific, unembarrassed and occasionally unflattering. “Our fee is X, and it excludes consumables and linens, which typically run to Y” is a good answer. “It's all-inclusive” is not an answer; it is a slogan. On staffing, a good answer names a person or a ratio. On winter, a good answer describes a protocol. On damage, a good answer describes an incident.

Answers that should slow you down

“We can't share the agreement until you're onboarded.” The agreement is the product. There is no legitimate reason to hide it.
“The accounts have to be in our name.” Sometimes there are real operational reasons. Understand exactly what you lose if you leave, before you sign rather than during your notice period.
“We guarantee X.” Any revenue guarantee is priced somewhere. Find out where.
Vagueness about who does the physical work. If nobody will say who cleans and who fixes, it is usually because the answer is “whoever is available”.

The five-minute version

If you only get one short call: what is the percentage and what does it exclude; whose name is on the booking accounts; what is the notice period; who is within thirty minutes of the property in February; and what is the winter protocol. Those five answers separate most companies from most other companies.

After you sign

Diary three checks in the first season. Read the first full payout statement line by line against the bookings you can see. Look at the live listing as a guest would in week three, and check the photographs, the copy and the calendar are what you agreed. Read the first four reviews. Almost everything that goes wrong in year one is visible in one of those three places within ninety days.

Where this sits in the rest of the site

The city atlas applies all of this market by market, the manager ranking is where the companies are compared side by side, and how we test explains what we can verify and what we refuse to guess at.