Onboarding a new STR: a 30-day maintenance baseline
The first 30 days under a new management agreement is where the maintenance baseline gets set. Skip it and you guess about the property's actual condition every time something comes up. Here is what we catalog, photograph, and test.
The first 30 days under a new management agreement is where the maintenance baseline gets set. Skip it and you’re guessing about the property’s actual condition every time something comes up. Do it well and the next twelve months are an order of magnitude easier.
Here’s what the onboarding visit covers — same scope on every property regardless of size or price point.
Day one: full property catalog
Every appliance is photographed, model-and-serial recorded, and flagged for warranty status. Every smoke and CO detector is tested and the manufacture date noted. Every lock, keypad, and lockbox is verified. Every utility shutoff (water, gas, electrical mains) is located, photographed, and labeled.
Within the first week: condition baseline
We walk the property top to bottom. The walk produces a written report and a baseline photo set. Hardware tightness, plumbing visible-leak status, HVAC airflow, water heater age and condition, attic and crawl space accessibility, dryer vent baseline, hot tub condition (if applicable). The point of the photo set isn’t beauty; it’s evidence. We’re documenting what we inherited.
Two weeks in: customized schedule
Not every property runs on the same cadence. A high-turnover four-bedroom needs the dryer vent on a tighter loop than a low-turnover studio. A property with a hot tub needs the monthly chemistry check stacked at a different point than the rest of the monthly checklist. We build the schedule per property, anchored to the booking calendar, and confirm it with the PMC or owner before the first billable visit.
End of week four: first program visit
The first regular monthly visit lands at the 30-day mark. By that point, the property has a documented baseline, a customized schedule, and a record of every catalog item the program is going to check against. The visit report from month one reads cleanly against the onboarding baseline.
There’s no charge for the onboarding visit. That’s a deliberate choice — we’d rather absorb the time up front than build a program on top of an undocumented property.
The boring observation: most of the issues we catch in months two through twelve trace back to something we noted in the onboarding walk. The walk is most of the work.