We run about 35 homes from Saugatuck, Michigan. The homes are in Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, California and Mexico. I have been inside a few of them. Most I have only seen in walkthrough photos, and that's by design.
Owners find that surprising, so this first post is about where the line sits between what we do and what stays yours. It's the first thing we go over on the call, and it's the thing people most often get wrong about co-hosting before they talk to us.
What a rental actually sends you
Strip a rental down to the messages and there are 2 people texting you. Guests, and your cleaner.
Guests message before the stay, during it (the hot tub is barely warm, and it's 9:40 pm) and after it. Your cleaner messages about the schedule and about the house (did the last guests leave the grill cover out). Between the 2 of them, that's nearly every message a rental produces. Add pricing, a daily chore, and you have the whole job.
None of it requires being near the house. All of it requires being awake.
What we do
From the day we start, both of those people reach us instead of you.
- Every guest message, answered in under 5 minutes on average, around the clock. Our AI assistant, built on Claude by Anthropic, does the first read from the guide we built for your home. A person on our team who hosts for a living decides anything that needs judgment: a refund, a complaint, a request outside your rules.
- Every turnover put on your cleaner's phone the day the booking lands, same-day turns flagged, and their questions about the house answered.
- Your rates run through revenue software and managed every day, never below a floor you set.
- A planning guide and a stay guide for your home, kept current, so most questions never get asked.
- A code for every guest if you have a smart lock, created before arrival and gone after checkout.
- Reviews written and replied to, every new booking checked against your rules within the hour, and a statement once a month.
Last year that came to 1,869 turnovers and 5,821 guest nights through this system, and not one of those turnovers needed an owner to text a cleaner.
What we don't do
We never come to the house. We don't hire your cleaner, find your photographer or find you a plumber. We don't hold your money; Airbnb pays you exactly the way it does today. We don't take over your listing; you add us as a co-host on your own account, and your reviews and history stay yours.
That isn't a limitation we apologize for. It's the design. The on-site part of hosting, which is cleaning, repairs and the occasional person who has to physically be there, is local by nature and gets done best by local people you chose. The phone part has no geography. Splitting the 2 is what lets us run a home in Baja and a home outside Boston the same way, with the same people reading the messages.
Not a call center. An expert on your home.
The question owners ask next is how we can answer a guest about a thermostat we've never touched. A call center can't. A call center reads a script, and the script doesn't know your house. What we do instead is become the expert on your home without being on site, and we only have to learn each thing about it once.
It starts before go-live: your listing, your set-up details, the walkthrough photos, your rules. From those we build the guide for your home, and that guide is what Claude reads from when a guest asks where the extra blankets are. Most of what guests ask is already in it the first week.
Then the house teaches us the rest. The first time a guest asks something we don't know, where the circuit breaker is, how the fireplace lights, which bin is recycling, we ask you. Once. The answer goes into what Claude knows about your home, and the next guest who asks gets it in under 5 minutes without anyone reaching out to you. Every question you answer is one you'll never be asked again.
So an owner's first months with us follow a pattern. A handful of questions from us in the first few weeks, each one a fact about your house that only you knew. Then quiet. By the third month we know the home better than anyone who hasn't stood in it should, and the guide is more accurate than the binder on the counter ever was, because it's corrected every time something changes.
We'll never message you to ask something we already know. That's the whole promise.
What stays yours
Three things, and we check for all 3 before go-live.
- A cleaner you trust. We schedule them and talk to them. We don't replace them. If they can't make a turnover, you hear from us right away, and finding the backup is still yours.
- A local contact. Someone who can get to the house when something needs hands. Most owners have someone closer than they think: a neighbor, the cleaner's partner, a friend 20 minutes away. When a guest reports no heat, they get the first text the moment it's judged urgent.
- The business itself. The permit, the taxes, the insurance policy and the listing are all in your name. The rental is yours. We're the people who know it as well as you do and answer for it, day and night.
Who it's for
One to 3 rentals on Airbnb or Vrbo. An entire home, booked for stays under 28 nights. A cleaner, and someone nearby. If you have 4 or more, we start with a call and plan the handoff home by home.
If what you actually want is someone to stock the house and let the plumber in, that's full-service management, and our sister company Sans Souci Hospitality does that around Saugatuck. VCoHost exists because owners outside Saugatuck kept asking for the phone part without the on-site part.
The honest test
If you lie awake because a guest might message, we fix that. If you lie awake because the furnace might die, we don't fix that, but the right person hears about it within minutes, and you hear about it before the next check-in rather than in a review.
Most owners who call us aren't unhappy with their home. They're tired of being the help desk for it. That part we can take, and the longer we run the house, the less of it there is.
You keep the home. We take the phone.
Questions about your own home? Write to [email protected], or read the other posts.