Author:
Bea Generalo
Matt Juels and his wife ran Cellar Door Properties, a portfolio of 28 vacation rental homes spread across multiple states. There were two of them. Every guest message, every late-night problem, and every bad review landed with one of them.
The business was growing. The two people running it had nothing left to give.
Guest communication never stops in a portfolio that size. Check-in questions, requests, complaints, and emergencies arrive at all hours, from guests in different time zones and properties in different states.
When something went wrong, it went to Matt. He remembers the calls himself: a guest upset and yelling, and in one case, a microwave that had blown up. None of it could wait, so all of it came first.
Meanwhile, the work that protects a rental business over time kept slipping. Negative reviews sat unanswered, damage claims piled up, and the star ranking suffered.
Cellar Door didn’t lack demand or good properties. It lacked hours. With no one else to take guest relations, every issue, big or small, went through the two owners.
That setup has a ceiling. Firefighting pushes out everything else, including the review management and follow-up that would prevent the next fire. The busier the properties got, the less time there was to protect the portfolio’s reputation.
Matt and his wife handed guest relations to a dedicated Delegate team, along with damage claims and review management. Matt expected the handoff to take time. It didn’t.
“I remember upon starting… the first wow moment, you know, that I knew I had made a good choice. It was like the first week and really just seeing them interact and problem solve, and not only that, but, you know, go after negative guest reviews. I mean, I think within the first week they, you know, they raised our star ranking… I mean, they wiped the slate clean… I was shook. I mean, it was something where I was like, ‘Wow, I… This group is gonna come in and wipe this responsibility from my plate. What a godsend,’ you know?”
Watch the full testimonial here
The team took on the guest messages and the problems that came with them. The late-night calls Matt used to handle stopped reaching him. In his words, handing that off was “just a weight off my shoulders.”
With guest relations, damage claims, and reviews in the team’s hands, Matt and his wife could step out of daily firefighting. Their star ranking recovered, and they could put their attention back on growing their real estate business.
“Delegate has given me my sanity back, first and foremost… I’ve delegated, you know, the whole guest relations and everything to do with running… basically everything other than bookkeeping and, you know, revenue management has been delegated.”
Two people had been carrying 28 properties by themselves. With a team taking the day-to-day, they could run the business instead of just keeping up with it.
If your reviews are slipping because nobody has time to respond, start with the first day of each stay: the 24-hour window after check-in decides most bad reviews. And when guests do cause problems, a dedicated VA can handle damage claims and disputes so you don’t have to.
If every guest message still runs through you, these are the signs your STR business has outgrown your own bandwidth.
Book a discovery call to see what handing off guest relations could look like for your portfolio.
