Practical tool
Holiday Home Portfolio Review
Ten questions run against your own reporting. If more than three cannot be answered, the constraint is the commercial system rather than demand.
Free to use and free to copy. No email required, no download, no score.
What this helps you decide
Whether a short-stay portfolio is being run as one commercial system or as a set of separately managed units, and which layer to fix first.
What it cannot determine
It cannot benchmark you against the market. No occupancy, ADR, channel-mix or owner-return benchmark is published here, because a credible one requires a stated sample, a named market and a visible methodology. It also cannot value a portfolio or predict a return.
Evidence you will need
- Twelve months of booking and revenue data by unit
- Channel statements showing actual commission and payment costs
- Cleaning, operating and management costs per unit
- Current minimum-stay and pricing rules by unit and season
- The monthly owner reporting pack as it is produced today
The ten questions
- What is owner net return per unit, after all costs, for the last twelve months?
- Which segments — building, location, unit type, guest purpose — carry contribution, and which are carried?
- How many gap nights did the portfolio generate last quarter, and what were they worth at the prevailing rate?
- What is the blended channel cost, and how has it moved over twelve months?
- Which units convert best from listing view to booking, and what is different about their listings?
- What proportion of bookings are direct or repeat, and what does the direct channel actually cost to run?
- Which demand events in the next twelve months already have rate and minimum-stay rules attached?
- How long does the monthly owner reporting pack take to produce, and how much of it is manual?
- Which review themes recur across the portfolio rather than at one unit?
- If a core system disappeared tomorrow, what would stop working, and who owns the answer?
Reading the result
The count matters more than any individual answer, because the pattern of what is unanswerable identifies the layer that has not been built.
- 0–2 unanswerable — the commercial system exists. Work on the specific gaps.
- 3–5 unanswerable — per-unit habits have outgrown the reporting. Start at portfolio economics, not at technology.
- 6+ unanswerable — the portfolio is being administered rather than managed. The first project is measurement, and no pricing tool will substitute for it.
The order to fix in
Each layer constrains the next. Starting at layer four is the most common and most expensive sequencing error.
- 01 Portfolio economics — segmentation, contribution, owner net
- 02 Pricing and seasonality — rate structure, season and event calendars, length-of-stay rules
- 03 Distribution — channel mix, commission load, parity, direct path
- 04 Listing conversion — content, photography, accuracy, comparison position
- 05 Operations and reputation — handoffs, standards, review themes as data
- 06 Owner and reporting — owner proposition, reporting pack, retention
Next step
Run the ten questions against your last twelve months and count the unanswerable ones. Bring that count to the conversation rather than a request for a proposal — it is a better starting point than either side guessing.
If the answers point somewhere uncomfortable and you would rather not work through it alone, request a diagnostic. The tool is useful whether or not you do — how this is researched and published is set out in the Editorial Standard.