Services
Everything your rental needs. Nothing it doesn't.
Four disciplines: design, pricing, hospitality, operations, run by one accountable team, thirty minutes from your front door. Here's exactly what that means.
01
Design that pays for itself
The listing photo is the entire sales pitch. Guests scroll past hundreds of homes; they stop for the ones that look like somewhere they want to be. So we design for the camera first and the guest second, and it turns out those are the same thing.
A design plan, not a shopping trip
Every home gets a room-by-room plan: layout, palette, lighting, and the two or three moments guests actually photograph and post. You approve the budget before we spend a dollar.
Sourced, received, installed
We order, track, assemble, and style everything. Durable, washable, replaceable: beautiful pieces that survive a season of sandy feet and get cheaper to own every year.
Built to review well
Blackout shades where they matter. A coffee setup worth mentioning. Hooks where guests actually need hooks. Five-star reviews are written about details, and details are a design decision.
02
Pricing that moves daily
A rate you set in January is wrong by Tulip Time. Demand on the lakeshore moves with festivals, weather, school calendars, and how far out the booking window is, so our rates move too. Every single day.
Daily repricing against real comps
We track comparable homes in your specific market, your town, your bedroom count, your amenity set, and adjust nightly rates against live demand, not a regional average.
Local events, priced in
Tulip Time, Coast Guard Festival, harbor-town holiday weekends, the first hot Saturday of June. We know the calendar because we live here, and the rates reflect it before the rush, not after.
Gaps get worked, not ignored
Orphan nights, minimum-stay rules, lead-time discounts, last-minute fills. An empty Tuesday is a pricing problem, and pricing problems have solutions.
03
Hospitality, not ticketing
Guests don't remember the thread count. They remember that someone answered. Every message gets a fast, human reply, at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m., and every booking is screened before it's confirmed.
A person, in minutes
No ticket numbers, no offshore queue. Our team answers guest messages around the clock, and fast answers convert lookers into bookings and bookings into five stars.
Screening on the front end
The best damage claim is the one that never happens. We vet every guest, set clear house rules, and decline bookings that don't fit the home. Problems don't get booked in the first place.
Hosted, not just housed
Local guidebooks, mid-stay check-ins, a welcome that feels considered. Guests treat well-run homes better, and they come back, and they tell their friends.
04
Ownership without the operations
This is the part nobody puts on Instagram: cleaning, linens, restocking, maintenance, inspections, claims, taxes. It's also the part that makes or breaks a rental. We run it like a hotel back-of-house, so you never have to think about it.
Turnovers to a hotel standard
Vetted, trained cleaning teams working from a documented checklist, with photo-verified inspections after every stay. Linens are professionally laundered, not run through your washing machine.
Maintenance before it's a review
Preventative checks on a schedule, a local network for the urgent stuff, and small fixes handled before a guest ever notices. You approve anything above a set threshold.
The paperwork, handled
Damage documentation and claim support, permit and license renewals, and lodging-tax guidance (Airbnb collects and remits Michigan's 6% use tax on platform bookings), plus a plain-English monthly report: what came in, what went out, and why.
The honest comparison
Three ways to run a rental.
Self-managing works if you want a second job. A traditional management company works if you don't mind handing the keys to someone else's account. Open Water is not a property management company. We're a co-host. Here's how the three actually compare. The first half of the table is about how well your home runs. The second half is about who owns the listing, the reviews, and the money, and that's where most owners get surprised.
| Self-managed | Big-box manager | Open Water | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How it runs | |||
| Responsiveness | Whenever you can get to it | A ticket queue, often offshore | A person, in minutes, 24/7 |
| Pricing strategy | Set it and forget it | Algorithm-only, region-wide | Daily, against local comps + events |
| Design input | Your own taste and budget | A checklist and a preferred vendor | A full design plan, sourced and installed |
| Local presence | You, if you live nearby | A market manager covering three counties | Thirty minutes away, tops |
| Fee transparency | Free, but it costs you weekends | Low headline fee, markups underneath | One percentage. No markups. Ever. |
| Owner access | Total. It's all on you | A portal and a quarterly call | A portal, a monthly report, and our cell numbers |
| Who owns what | |||
| Whose account the listing lives on | Yours | Theirs | Yours |
| Where guest payouts go | Platform, straight to you | Through them, then to you | Platform, straight to you |
| Who holds your money | You do | They do | Nobody. We never touch it |
| What you keep if you leave | Everything. It's yours | Start over: new listing, zero reviews | Everything. It never left |
When we're not the right fit
A full-service management company is genuinely the better choice for some owners. If you want zero involvement whatsoever, no platform account in your name, no visibility into the calendar, someone else's name on everything, a traditional manager is built for that and we aren't. Co-hosting means you stay the account holder. For most owners that's the upside; for a few it's a hassle they don't want. We'd rather tell you that on the first call than the third month.
The fee
One number. No fine print.
We charge 20% of net booking revenue, taken as a co-host split through the platform. That's the whole model. Airbnb pays you directly and pays us separately, so we never hold or disburse your money.
No markup on cleaning or maintenance. You pay what our vendors charge, and you see the invoices. No onboarding fee, no photography fee, no "technology fee," no charge for owner stays.
And because the fee is a percentage of what your home earns, we only make money when you do. Our incentives point the same direction as yours: more great stays, at better rates, with fewer headaches.
Ready when you are.
Tell us about your place and we'll come back with a real revenue projection, not a brochure.
Book your free 20-minute call