Villa management in Bali

The choice of management company is usually made on a percentage and a website. Neither of those is the thing that decides what reaches your account.

How to read the numbers on this page. A figure with no marker is quoted from a primary source and linked at the foot of the page. ^reported means the company that charges it publishes no public rate card, so the range comes from trade reporting rather than from the charging party. ^modelled means it came out of the model set out on the methodology page, which you can disagree with line by line.

What you are actually buying

A villa management company does six jobs, and different companies include different subsets of them in the same headline rate:

1. Distribution. Getting the villa listed, photographed and priced across the platforms. The part hardest to do yourself from another country, and the part most directly connected to revenue.
2. Guest communication. Enquiries, bookings, the questions before arrival, the problems during. Time-zone work, and relentless.
3. Turnover. Check-in, check-out, housekeeping, laundry, consumables.
4. Maintenance. Pool chemistry, the garden, and whatever broke.
5. People. Recruiting, training and supervising the staff — which is not the same as paying them, and the difference is often a separate payroll.
6. Money and paperwork. Collecting, reconciling, reporting, remitting tax.

One published rate card puts one, two and six in a 10% plan and everything else outside it. Another puts all six in 20% except staff salaries, in writing. A third puts housekeeping, laundry and pool maintenance inside the same 20%. Those are three different products and they are advertised as two numbers. The full comparison, with the walk.

The five questions

Ask every company the same five and write down the answers. The spread between the answers is the real comparison:

1. What is the commission calculated on — gross booking value, or what is left after the platform? Every published rate card read for this build says gross. Get yours in the contract.
2. Are villa staff salaries inside the fee? If not, ask for the current monthly figure for a villa of your size, in writing.
3. Are third-party costs rebilled at cost or cost plus? Silence in a contract means cost plus.
4. Which platforms, at what commission on each? Booking.com and Agoda publish nothing publicly, but your manager can see your rate in their extranet in thirty seconds.
5. Can I see a specimen monthly statement? A company that cannot produce one does not produce them.

The full clause-level version is on reading a management contract.

The five areas

Area changes three things that matter and one that does not. It does not change the national tax rules. It does change which administration collects the accommodation tax, how long guests typically stay — which decides whether the one-month exclusion is a live question or a footnote — and what the local operating constraint is.

What this site will not do

There is no ranking on this page, no badge, no score and no shortlist, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. Management companies pay us a fixed amount for each enquiry, agreed before the enquiry exists. It does not change with what they charge you, with what your villa earns, or with whether you sign with anybody.

That arrangement is the reason this site can publish the fee arithmetic at all. A site paid on completion has a reason to move you toward a signature; we get the same either way, which means the most useful thing we can sell is a page that turns out to be right. The full disclosure is linked in the footer of every page on this site, including this one, and qa.py fails the build if it appears twice.

Common questions