If you've hosted your own Edinburgh home for a while, you already know most of this. What follows is the honest version: what's worth keeping, what's worth handing over, and how to tell the difference with real numbers.
Self-hosting in Edinburgh: an honest audit before you decide
Before you think about a manager, it's worth looking at how your hosting is really going. Ten questions, answered honestly, usually make the decision clearer.
- How many hours a week do you spend on messages, and at what times of day?
- When did you last change your nightly prices, and why?
- Were you full in August at a price you'd set in the spring?
- How many nights were empty last February, and did you try to fill them?
- Who covers when your cleaner is ill or on holiday?
- When does your licence expire, and do you know what renewal needs?
- Do you know your nights available and nights let for the year? (They decide council tax or business rates.)
- Are you collecting and returning the Visitor Levy correctly?
- When did you last have a proper holiday without answering a guest?
- Would your neighbours on the stair say the home is well run?
If most of your answers are calm and specific, you may be doing fine on your own, and the free tools further down this page will help you do it better. If several made you wince, that's useful too. It usually points to one or two parts of hosting that cost you the most, in time or in money.
A good next step either way is a free listing review. Send us your link and we'll email an honest view of your photos, title, price, calendar and reviews within one working day. No obligation, and you're welcome to use it to keep hosting yourself.
For the rules side of the audit, our licensing guide and the 140/70 rule for council tax or business rates are the two pages self-hosts most often tell us they wish they'd read sooner.
Keeping control under full management: who decides what
Most self-hosts who talk to us don't want to give up control. They want to give up the 11pm messages and the Saturday changeovers. That's a fair distinction, and it's how full management works with us.
We only offer full management, from listing to payout. That's deliberate, because the parts depend on each other: the person answering the guest needs to know the cleaner's timing, and the person pricing needs to know what guests are saying. The table above shows the split. Here's how it plays out on real days.
Five everyday moments, and who handles them
- A guest can't get the heating on at 10pm. We answer, talk them through it, and book an engineer if it needs one. You read about it in the statement, not on your phone.
- The boiler needs replacing. That's over the agreed amount, so we come to you with the quote first. Nothing big is spent without your say.
- You want the flat for a week in October. You block the dates in your owner login, and we let the home around them.
- A Fringe enquiry asks for three weeks in August. We price it against the rest of the month and answer the guest. You see the booking in your owner login.
- Your licence comes up for renewal. We track the date and handle the renewal. The licence stays in your name.
If you'd rather keep hosting yourself with less effort, that's a perfectly good answer too. Skip to the section on self-hosting better, below.
If you're not sure which way you lean, book a 15-minute call and talk it through with one of the co-founders, or read who we are first. You don't need to decide anything on the call.
Moving from self-hosting to managed: how the handover works
If you decide to hand over, here's what happens, in order. Most of it happens around your existing bookings rather than instead of them.
- Your free plan. Ask for a plan made for your home. It compares what the home earns now with what it could earn managed, after our fee, and comes back by 11am the next working day.
- A call and a visit. We talk through the plan, then see the home. We look at beds, storage, the stair, the heating and anything that will matter to guests.
- The agreement. A one-year agreement, with the fee tier and onboarding fee in writing.
- Your listing. If it's on your Airbnb account, we usually manage it as a co-host, so your reviews stay with the home. We'll confirm the best setup for your listing.
- The licence. It stays yours. The council needs to know about a new day-to-day manager; the notification fee is £137, and we prepare it with you.
- Onboarding. Photos, listing copy, pricing and setup. A noise sensor is included. The one-off fee is £400, £500 or £600 + VAT depending on the number of bedrooms.
- Go-live. Your plan gives you a date once we've visited.
Bookings you've already taken don't disappear. We agree with you how they're handled, so no guest is caught in the middle.
If you're moving from another manager rather than from self-hosting, switching manager covers that route. If your home isn't licensed yet, licensing in Edinburgh is the place to start.
Self-hosting costs Edinburgh owners forget to count
Self-hosts often compare a manager's fee with zero. That's rarely the real comparison, because self-hosting has its own costs, and some are easy to miss.
- Your time. Messages, check-ins, cleaner rotas, restocking, repairs and reviews. Even a few hours a week adds up over a year.
- Under-pricing on the best nights. Fringe, Hogmanay and rugby weekends priced like ordinary weeks. This is usually the biggest single gap.
- Empty nights in the quiet months. February doesn't fill itself, and a home that's empty doesn't earn.
- The Visitor Levy. 5% on the accommodation for the first five nights, for stays in the City of Edinburgh from 24 July 2026. It needs collecting and returning properly. See the Visitor Levy for hosts.
- Licence renewal. A missed date can mean a gap in hosting. Licence renewal explains the timeline.
- Council tax or business rates. A second home that doesn't reach 70 let nights stays on council tax, and from 1 January 2027 Edinburgh's premium on second homes rises to 300%. Read our post on the council tax premium.
- Tax. The furnished holiday let rules ended in April 2025. Short-let tax after April 2025 is a plain overview.
None of these mean you should hand over. They mean the fair comparison is between your real net result now and a realistic net result managed. That's what the plan works out, so you're not comparing a fee with nothing.
Self-hosting better: free tools if you're keeping it yourself
Plenty of owners host well on their own, and we're happy to help them do it. If you're keeping it, these are the things we'd focus on first.
Messages
Write your messages once and reuse them: booking confirmation, pre-arrival, check-in, mid-stay, check-out and the review request. Our free Guest Message & House Manual Kit has twelve to copy, plus a house manual and house rules. Good arrival messages answer the Wi-Fi, heating and bins questions before they're asked.
Pricing
Open your calendar a year ahead, price each night on its own, and look again at the big dates every few weeks. Tools, tips and tricks for self-hosts covers the pricing and messaging tools worth paying for, and which ones aren't.
The stair
Give neighbours a number to call, set the guest limit to match the licence, and use a noise monitor. Short-letting a tenement flat has more on this.
For a broader checklist, what every Edinburgh host should know is our most-read guide. Everything on the guides page is free, and you're welcome to come back to us any time.
Management fees for self-hosts: what you'd actually pay and keep
If you're weighing up management, the fee is the first number to get right, and it's easy to get wrong.
Our fee is a percentage of net booking revenue: what guests paid, after platform fees, cleaning and the Visitor Levy. For one to four homes it's 15% + VAT, which is 18% of net booking revenue once VAT is added. So on every £1,000 of net booking revenue, the fee including VAT is £180, not £150.
| Homes with us | Fee | Including VAT |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | 15% + VAT | 18% |
| 5 to 9 | 13.5% + VAT | 16.2% |
| 10 to 19 | 12% + VAT | 14.4% |
| 20 or more | Tailored | Tailored |
New owners who sign a one-year agreement by 31 December 2026 pay 10% + VAT for their first four months, on every tier. There's also a one-off onboarding fee: £400 + VAT for a studio, one or two bedrooms, £500 + VAT for three or four, and £600 + VAT for five or six. Homes with seven bedrooms or more are quoted individually.
A worked example, using simple numbers. If guests pay £20,000 in a year for your home, and platform fees, cleaning and the Visitor Levy come to £5,000, net booking revenue is £15,000. At 15% + VAT, the fee is £2,700 including VAT, not £2,250. The first four months at 10% + VAT, for owners who sign by 31 December 2026, bring that down. These figures are illustrations, not a forecast for your home.
For some homes management clearly pays; for others it's close; for a few it doesn't. Your plan works from figures that fit your home and your area, not our best months.
You can check the sums yourself on our pricing page or with the earnings calculator,, and see what homes like yours list for on the Airbnb management page. Then, if it looks worth a conversation, tell us about your property. See what your home could earn, and decide from there.
Thinking about the paperwork? Read mortgage and insurance for short lets and home letting vs secondary letting.
Book a 15-minute call with one of the co-founders, or get a free plan for your home: what it could earn, the licence route and every cost.
