The before
Pamela’s cabin had been on the market with a local Asheville manager for three years. Service was friendly. The math wasn’t. The contract was a two-year auto-renewing agreement with a 28% management fee, a $300/month “platform” charge, and a 30% cleaning markup that the guest paid but Pamela never saw broken out.
“It felt like a small-town country club — nice people, but they assumed I wouldn’t ask.”
The switch
Pamela found us in month 20 of her two-year contract. We waited out the renewal window with her and handled the transition the day her old agreement expired. She was live under Keytostay management on day one.
What changed
- Pricing: We rebuilt the comp set from scratch, set new minimum-night rules around peak fall foliage and Biltmore events, and started dynamic pricing supervised weekly.
- Listing: New photos, rewritten copy emphasizing the cabin’s specific differentiators (mountain views, fire pit, secluded but 12 minutes to downtown).
- Operations: Same cleaner Pamela liked — we kept the vendor relationship. No need to fix what worked.
The numbers
Year-over-year, with the same property and no capex:
- Gross bookings: +41%
- Occupancy: 64% (vs 58% prior)
- ADR: $248 (vs $213 prior)
- Owner net: +$18,200 annually after our 10% (vs prior PM’s all-in 31%)
Why she stayed
“Month-to-month, but it never crosses my mind to leave. They could lock me in for five years and the deal would be identical. That’s not a coincidence.”
The cabin is on our direct-book site now too — about 18% of Pamela’s bookings come through our own funnel, bypassing platform fees entirely.