Owner Relations Virtual Assistant: Short-Term Rentals (US Hours)

OWNER RELATIONS VIRTUAL ASSISTANT: SHORT-TERM RENTALS (US HOURS)

Please read this whole post before applying. There are instructions at the bottom, and how you follow them is the first thing we look at.

ABOUT US

We run short-term rental and vacation rental hosting for owners across the US, end to end and hands off. An owner hands us a home. We furnish it, stock it, photograph it, permit it, connect it to Airbnb and Vrbo and the other channels, and then we host it: nightly rates, guests, cleaning, maintenance, and the monthly numbers back to the owner.

Seventeen owners, twenty signed homes, eleven of them taking guests today. Every single one came to us by referral from another owner or from one of our vendors. Nobody found us in an advertisement. Most days in this seat are an inbox, a monthly owner report, a CRM, one spreadsheet of owners and dates, and a follow-up list.

We automate everything software can do. What software cannot do is notice that an owner has now asked twice where last month's report is, or notice that a signed agreement came back with one signature on it when the home is held by two people and we have an email address for only one of them.

We are growing, and our written plan is 150 homes by the end of 2027. This seat exists because the owner relationship is the one thing in this company that has never had a person whose whole job it is.

WHAT THIS ROLE REALLY IS

One person, one subject: the owner. Every case below is real. Names are out and a few details are changed, for a reason we explain further down. The shapes are all real.

An owner wrote in on a Tuesday asking where last month's report was. It was the second time he had asked. The report was already drafted. Nobody sent it. That is the whole reason this seat exists, and once you have seen it you will see it everywhere.

OWNERS WE ALREADY HAVE.

- Eleven monthly reports are owed across the book right now. One month has ten of them written and sitting on disk, one has eight, one has a preparation file and nothing else, and one has no folder at all. Every one of those is a number an owner is waiting on, and most of the work was already done.
- Twenty signed homes. Thirteen of those rows have no effective date on them. The effective date is what d ---------- when a term changes and when a renewal conversation is due, so right now nobody can answer "when does this one come up" without opening a PDF and reading it.
- Six agreements are executed with something wrong on them: a missing exhibit, a page nobody initialled, an owner name that is not the entity that holds title. All six belong to owners who are happy with us. That is exactly what makes them easy to leave alone for another month.
- An agreement came back signed by one person when the home is held by two, both of them have to sign, and nobody had an email address for the second one. Nobody had asked. You get the entity that holds title by asking the owner, in writing, and you never infer it from the way somebody signs an email.
- A reimbursement went out to an owner with the word "reimbursement" as the whole description line. He asked what it was for. Nobody could answer that question from the invoice itself.
- An owner writes at nine in the morning Pacific about something small. If a real answer arrives that morning, it was never a problem. If it arrives Thursday, it has quietly become a conversation about whether anybody here is paying attention.

OWNERS WE DO NOT HAVE YET.

- A warm lead went quiet for nine weeks. Not a no. Just quiet, because nobody had a clock on it.
- Every owner we have came from another owner or from a vendor, and we have never once asked an owner to refer us on purpose. There is a referral programme in this job description that does not exist yet, and you are the person who builds it.
- Two of our markets are open for a first email and the rest are not. Knowing which is which, every time, and never guessing, is part of the seat rather than a detail of it.

The honest description of this role: it is writing, chasing, and keeping a promise on a schedule. It is quiet work. It is a report that goes out on the day it said it would, a first reply the same day it arrived, and a third follow-up that goes out warm.

The person who is great at it is the person who genuinely does not mind the seventeenth email of the day, who would rather write "I do not have that number yet, here is how I am getting it, you will hear from me Thursday" than guess at it, and who can chase the same busy person three times without either giving up or going stiff about it.

This is not task-list work. Nobody is going to send you a list each morning telling you which owner to write to. You run a monthly cycle and a touch clock that you can read yourself, so you already know what is due.

If writing the same warm, specific note to the same seventeen people every month reads as dull to you, we would genuinely rather you skip this one. If it reads as the most obvious unclaimed job in this company, keep going.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

THE MONTHLY REPORT CYCLE. Eleven owners are owed a report right now. That is the number that goes to zero first, and it is how we will know in month two whether this hire worked.

- Draft every monthly owner report from the export our founder pulls, using the report chain we already have. You are not building the numbers from nothing. You are producing the report, and producing it on the day it is due.
- One cycle, one calendar. Every owner, every month, the same week, whether it was a good month or a bad one. A report that only turns up after a strong month is not reporting.
- The month with the disappointing number is the one you send first, with the plain-English sentence about what happened sitting next to it.
- Read the export before you send anything. If a number on the report disagrees with something the owner has already been told, you hold the send and you flag it. Every time.
- The archive. One folder per owner per month, where the next person can find it without you.

THE OWNER INBOX. Same-day first reply, in our voice, to every owner who writes in.

- A real first reply, the same day, not an acknowledgement that promises a reply later.
- "I do not know yet, here is how I am finding out, and here is when you will hear from me" is a complete and correct first reply. It is never the wrong answer and nobody here will ever be annoyed to receive it.
- Route the rest and then track it. Guest matters to guest operations, house and vendor matters to our onboarding lane, anything that moves money to our founder. Routing is not the same as forwarding. You still own the answer getting back to the owner.
- Nothing sits overnight. An owner email with no reply in it by the end of your shift is an escalation you raise yourself.

OWNER ONBOARDING, FROM SIGNATURE TO DAY THIRTY. Continuity is the point of this seat. The person who onboards an owner is the person that owner emails in month four, and that is deliberate rather than convenient.

- The call after signature. Our founder runs the first five of these with you on them. After that you run it yourself for an Oregon, Arizona or California home.
- Owner Pack 1 and Owner Pack 2, chased all the way to complete. Complete means complete, not "mostly back".
- The exact legal entity that holds title, confirmed by asking the owner in writing and recorded where the agreement register can see it. Never inferred from a signature block, an email signature or a county website.
- One proactive update a week while the home is being built out. Including, and especially, the week when nothing moved. "Nothing moved this week, here is why, here is what is next" is the update that buys you the next four.
- The note that says the home is live.
- The day-30 conversation. One call, thirty days in, with one real question in it: is this what you expected. You write down what they say in their own words, and you send it to us unsoftened.

THE PAPER. Nobody has owned this and it shows.

- The agreement register. Every home, one row, current, and true.
- The effective date on all twenty rows. Thirteen are blank today and you will fill them from the documents, not from memory.
- The renewal calendar built off those dates, so that a date nobody has looked at in a year does not arrive as a surprise the week it lands.
- The six defective agreements, chased to properly executed. You assemble the correction, you check every field, you chase the owner warmly and repeatedly. Somebody else presses send on the envelope.

THE MONEY RECORD, AND ONLY THE RECORD.

- Draft the reimbursement and third-party invoices, one per owner per month, in our accounting system. Every line names what it was, why it happened, which vendor and what date.
- A line that says only "reimbursement" is not a line. It comes back to you.
- Chase what is owed, warmly and repeatedly. The good version of this is closer to a thank-you than to a demand, and we will show you what that sounds like.
- You never move any of it. See the money wall below.

THE PIPELINE.

- The leads table, current, with a real next step and a real date on every warm row.
- A 14-day touch clock on every warm lead. Nine weeks of silence is not a no. It is a missing clock.
- Anything inbound gets a reply inside one business day.
- The owner referral programme: build it, write it, run it, and actually ask. Every owner we have arrived by referral and we have never asked for one on purpose.
- The same ask to our cleaners and vendors, who see more homes in a week than we do in a month.

LIST BUILDING, AND FIRST EMAILS ONLY WHERE THEY ARE OPEN.

- Build and enrich the list now. That half of the work is open everywhere and there is plenty of it.
- A first email goes out only in Eugene, Oregon and Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and only once the written determination for that market is physically back in our hands. Not expected back. Back.
- Never any cold contact, in any channel, email included, to an owner in Texas, Washington or Nevada. That is not a preference and it is explained in the walls below.

HELPING BUILD THE SYSTEM. We have a written playbook for most of our seats and almost nothing written for this one. You will write it, in your own words, out of the work you actually did: the report cycle, the onboarding sequence, the scripts, the chase cadence. As we add homes this becomes more than one seat, and the person who runs it well is the person who trains the next one.

WHAT YOU WILL NOT DO, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION IN THIS POST

Six walls here and a seventh in its own section below. Three of them are our house rules. Three of them are the law where our owners live, and we will tell you which. None of them bends for a deadline, for a nice owner, or for a deal that is about to close.

THE PRICE WALL: YOU CARRY THE RELATIONSHIP, YOU NEVER CARRY THE NUMBER.

No price, no fee, no percentage and no term ever leaves you, to anybody, at any stage. Not a number you worked out, and not a number that is already published on our own website.

- You never quote a price, a fee or a percentage to a prospect or to an owner. Not even the published one. The reason is not secrecy. It is that a number in your email is a term you just offered, and terms are our founder's to offer.
- You never negotiate any term, ever. "Just asking what might be possible" is negotiating.
- You never sign anything and you never press send on an agreement envelope. You assemble it, you check every field in it, you hand it over.
- You never arm the payments field on an agreement. On our gateway, arming that field is a live charge. Nobody in this seat goes near it.
- What you say instead is scripted, you will have it in writing on day one, and we will practise it with you on the call before we ever hire you. It is warm and it is short: that is a conversation for our founder, and here is how fast I can get you onto his calendar.

THE ADVICE WALL: YOU TALK ABOUT THE HOME THEY HAVE, NEVER THE ONE THEY MIGHT BUY. THIS ONE IS THE LAW, NOT OUR HOUSE STYLE.

Thirteen of our twenty homes are in Oregon and we also host in California. In both of those states certain conversations are reserved by statute for people who hold a state credential, and the test is the conversation itself. Not your job title, not whether you charged for it, and not whether you meant it as a favour.

So: you never discuss what an owner's home is worth, what they should pay for the next one, whether now is a good time to buy or to sell, what a home down the street sold for, or what a purchase would return. Not as an opinion. Not as a favour. Not off the record. Not when they ask you directly and warmly, which is exactly how it will happen.

Here is the honest part, because you should know it before you apply. This is the single most natural thing in the world for a good relations person to do. An owner you have looked after for four months will ask what you think of a place they are considering, and they will ask because they trust you, and saying nothing will feel cold. It is not cold. The right answer is warm, immediate, and identical every time: that is a conversation for our founder, let me get you onto his calendar this week. Then you tell us it happened. We will drill this with you in the interview, out loud, because a wall you have never said out loud is not a wall.

- You never give an opinion on what any home is worth, what it should sell for, or what it would return as a purchase.
- You never describe us as anything other than what we are, which is a hosting company that runs short-term rentals for the people who own them.

THE CHANNEL WALL: THE FIRST TOUCH IS ALWAYS AN EMAIL, AND ONLY WHERE WE HAVE OPENED THE MARKET. ALSO THE LAW.

- You never make a cold voice call. Not one. Not ever. Not "just to check the email arrived."
- You never send a cold text message.
- You never make any cold contact at all, email included, to an owner in Texas, Washington or Nevada.
- First emails go out only in the two markets named above, and only once that market's written determination is back.
- Anybody who says stop is done, in every channel, permanently, and you add them to the suppression list the same hour they say it.

THE MONEY WALL: YOU OWN THE RECORD, YOU NEVER OWN THE MOVEMENT.

Nothing you do debits a bank, releases a wire, pays a card or charges an owner. Not once, not in an emergency, not on a deadline.

- You never fire a charge. Every single payment is approved personally by our founder, on that specific charge, every time. There is no batch approval and there is no standing permission.
- You never move money out of any bank, gateway or merchant account. You compute what is owed and you evidence it. He releases it.
- You never add, edit or verify a payee, a bank detail or a set of wire instructions. Nobody in this seat does. That is the wall against invoice fraud, and urgency is the exact pretext it exists to defeat.
- You never create or send a payment link.
- You have no banking and no payment gateway access, on purpose. If you ever find that you somehow can reach one, you do not act, you report it.

THE CONSENT WALL: NOBODY IS RECORDED UNTIL THE SENTENCE HAS BEEN SPOKEN. ALSO THE LAW.

Our owners live in states where every person on a call has to agree to it being recorded, not just one of them.

- You read the one-line disclosure at the top of every owner call, before anything else, every single time, including on a call you did not schedule and a call that was returned to you.
- No automatic transcription on an owner call unless that line has been read on that call.
- If somebody says no, the recording stops and the conversation carries on. Notes are always fine.

This is one of the few things in this seat where a single mistake carries a price, and the price is per call. We would rather you lose a recording than take one you were not given.

THE CERTIFICATION WALL: YOU HOLD THE PROMISE, YOU NEVER CERTIFY THE HOUSE.

You are remote, and you will not be standing in these homes. A whole category of work is therefore structurally not yours, and we would rather you know that today than work it out in month two and feel set up to fail.

- You never certify that a home is clean, safe, furnished, repaired or ready. You collect the evidence. Somebody standing inside it makes the call.
- You never name anybody, including yourself, as a city's required local contact. That is a representation about a person who can physically reach a home, and it is our founder's to make.
- You never publish a listing.
- You never tell an owner that a date is confirmed unless our onboarding lane has confirmed it to you in writing. Passing on a date you were told verbally is how an owner ends up planning around a day that was never real.

Read all of this as the thing that makes the seat possible, rather than as distrust. You are going to be the person seventeen owners write to first, and that only works if the walls are real. An owner can ask you anything at all, and you can be completely warm about every bit of it, precisely because the three or four answers that could actually hurt them are never yours to give. No owner will ever be able to say that the person looking after them offered a term, quoted a number or gave them advice they were not allowed to give. That is what makes your same-day reply and your monthly report worth something. We built it this way on purpose, we will not ask you to bend it for a deal, and we think it is one of the best parts of the offer.

A WORD ABOUT CONFIDENTIALITY

You will see what every owner pays and what every owner earns. Our owners came to us by referral, which means they know each other, and at some point one of them is going to ask you what another one is on. Sometimes it will be the friend who referred them, asked kindly, in the middle of a genuinely nice conversation. The answer is the same every time and it is a warm no: that one is theirs and not mine to share, and yours is just as protected. You also never disclose what we pay a vendor, what a service costs us, or what we make on a home. If that is not a line you can hold comfortably with somebody you like, please do not apply. It is written into the agreement and we take it seriously.

The same applies in the other direction. You never shape a number, a date or a document so that it reads better than it is. Not a report, not an invoice, not a status update. And no owner, vendor, referral or invoice that benefits you or anybody connected to you. Either one is immediate cause, even if the underlying thing was perfectly fine.

MUST-HAVES

We are not going to ask for "excellent communication skills" here, because everybody writes that about themselves and it predicts nothing. Here is what actually predicts success in this seat.

- 2+ years owning a named set of client or owner relationships in writing. Account management, client success, customer success, executive assistance to a founder, hospitality or guest relations. Something where the same people came back to you month after month and you were the one they wrote to.
- You write warm English that sounds like a person wrote it. Not stiff, not corporate, and please not "do not hesitate to reach out". We will read your writing three times before we ever speak to you, and the first read is your application form.
- A same-day first reply is already a habit for you, not an aspiration. Tell us about the inbox you kept that way and roughly how many people were in it.
- You can say "I do not know yet." This is the hardest item on this list. A warm, helpful person under a little pressure invents a date to keep the conversation pleasant, and you will be asked for numbers and dates you do not have. If you have ever written "I do not have that yet, here is how I am getting it, you will hear from me Thursday" to somebody senior, and then actually hit Thursday, that is the sentence we are hiring.
- Honest. You never report a status you did not verify, and you never invent a number, a date, an entity name, a confirmation or a reason. This is the single most important item on this list and it is a hard gate at every stage of our process, including after you are hired.
- You deliver bad news first and early. A late report, a date that is not going to hold, a month that came in soft. Bad news early is the single most valuable thing you will ever send us.
- You can hold a line and stay warm at the same time. The two failure modes are going cold and giving in, and this seat does neither. Somebody is going to ask you for a number you are not allowed to give, and they are going to ask nicely.
- You chase the same busy person three times without going cold and without handing it back up the chain. The third follow-up is the job. The first two are easy.
- You can keep a schedule that repeats forever. Every owner, every month, the same week. The seventeenth report of the month gets the same attention as the first.
- You are careful on paper. Legal entity names, effective dates, which of two owners has to sign, the spelling of somebody's name. Those details are the whole difference between a document that is real and one that is defective, and six of ours are defective right now.
- Working spreadsheet competence. Filters, sorting, a lookup, opening a CSV export without breaking it, noticing when a row is missing. You do not need to be a modeller and you do not need to code.
- Confidentiality you can hold with somebody friendly. See the section above. It is not the stranger who tests this.
- Clear, professional written English. You will write to US owners about money, dates and their homes, and somebody will read what you wrote six months later to work out what was agreed.
- Stable power and internet, plus a backup for outages.
- Able to work the fixed shift below. Please read the hours section carefully before you apply.

NICE-TO-HAVES

- Short-term rental, vacation rental or hotel guest relations background.
- Host-side exposure to Airbnb or Vrbo. You have been inside the host account, not just a guest in the app.
- A CRM you actually ran rather than one you were given a login to. HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday, Zoho, or a spreadsheet you built yourself and kept current.
- You have written a recurring client report that somebody outside your company actually read.
- Hostaway, Guesty, Lodgify or a similar hosting platform.
- Bookkeeping exposure, QuickBooks or Xero or similar, even read-only.
- You have drafted invoices that somebody else sent.
- DocuSign or another e-signature tool, from the administrator's side rather than the signer's.
- You have run a referral or a win-back campaign and can tell us what it returned.
- Google Sheets formula curiosity, or a little Apps Script. Not required. Rewarded.

HOURS AND TIMEZONE

This is a fixed US business-hours shift and it is an overnight shift in Manila. Please read the conversion below carefully.

- The shift is 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM US Pacific, Monday through Friday. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. You are online and responsive for the whole of it.
- In the Philippines that is 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM, starting the following day. It is a full graveyard shift. Pacific is fifteen hours behind Manila in US daylight time, so an 8:00 AM Pacific start is 11:00 PM in Manila and a 4:00 PM Pacific finish is 7:00 AM in Manila. We are stating that plainly so that nobody works out the arithmetic after they have accepted.
- The shift moves by one hour in Manila terms when the US changes to and from daylight saving time. The Pacific hours stay 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
- Why this window and not a later one. Our owners are in the US and most of them are on Pacific or Mountain time. An owner who writes at nine in the morning has to hear from a real person that same morning, and that promise is the entire seat. A later shift means every owner waits a day, which is the exact problem we are hiring to fix.
- Some deadlines in this job are actual dates. The monthly report cycle lands on the same days every month and it does not move because the month got busy.
- No weekends. No overnight emergencies outside your shift. A guest problem at two in the morning is not yours. We have a team for that.

Be honest with yourself about the overnight window before you apply. If 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM does not fit your life, please do not apply, and there is no hard feeling in that at all. It is the one thing we cannot flex, because the overlap is the job.

If you are somewhere other than the Philippines, do the conversion yourself and tell us on the form what 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific is where you are. We do read that answer.

COMPENSATION

- $1,100 per month, for the arrangement above.
- The rate steps up to $1,250 per month on a written trigger, and here is the trigger: three consecutive monthly report cycles delivered on time, and twenty homes taking guests on the book. Both, not either. When both are true the rate moves and you will not have to ask for it.
- We would rather publish the trigger than describe an increase we have not committed to. Until it is met the rate is $1,100 and you can plan on that number.
- Merit review at 90 days after conversion and then annually, which is a separate conversation from the trigger above.
- You are eligible for a December year-end bonus at our discretion, and for flexible, coordinated time off. You supply your own computer, internet and workspace, which is normal for an independent contractor engagement and is written into the agreement you will sign. We treat our people well and the good ones grow with us.
- Paid trial first. Before any ongoing offer there is a short paid project, a couple of hours of real work, and we pay you for it.
- The first four weeks are an Initial Evaluation Term at the same rate, so both sides get a real look before anybody commits.

HOW WE HIRE

We use a multi-step process and it is deliberately demanding. Every stage is something you do on your own time, and we do not schedule a single call until you have already shown us how you work. In order: a short application form, a 2-minute video with a short spoken task in it, a written exercise, a personality assessment, then an interview and a paid trial. Budget roughly two to three hours of your own time across all of it before the paid trial, which we pay for. The personality assessment is a tiebreaker, not a gate, and nobody is rejected on it alone.

The written exercise is the stage that d ---------- this seat. It is a real owner situation with the names taken out. You will be asked to write what you would actually send, and then to say what you would not send, and why. There is no trick, but there is a wrong answer that most people give, and it is the confident one.

We are also going to listen to you. Part of the video is reading a short update out loud to an owner, in your own words. We are not scoring your accent and we are not scoring your camera. We are listening for whether an owner who has never met you would put the phone down feeling looked after, and whether you can deliver an unwelcome fact without either flinching or flattering.

We move fast, and you set the pace. There is no application window and no waiting for a batch. Each stage unlocks the moment you finish the one before it, and every deadline is measured from when the email reaches you, not from a date on our calendar. Somebody who moves promptly can go from applying to a paid trial in a couple of weeks.

Deadlines are real at every stage. If you miss one, you are out. Please do not ask for an extension.

HOW TO APPLY

Fill out the form linked at the very bottom of this post.

Applications sent any other way will not be reviewed. Please do not message us on this platform, do not email us, and do not send a resume in a reply. Only form submissions are looked at. We know that is strict. It is the first filter and it is working as intended.

Read the form carefully. One of the questions is there to check that you read this post.

Apply here: ----------