Best Property Manager Awards 2026

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second annual top property manager awards. Gonna give folks just a few minutes to get in the room. My name is Luke DaMommio. Some of you may recognize me from last year with longer hair, same tuxedo.

But we've got people climbing in the room right now.

Jamie Lane, also pictured here, I think he'll be joining us here on video shortly. Jamie, if you don't know, lives in Atlanta. I live in Denver, at AirDNA HQ. And so Jamie joined us online last year and it was great. And he's gonna join us again. So I will give Jamie just a second to get in here.

Oh my goodness, Jamie Lane in the flesh.

Can you believe it? Yeah. So I decided this was important enough. I should fly out to Denver and do it with you in person. So so excited to be here and that we can do it together.

You did forget your tuxedo.

There's only so much you can do at a six am flight out to Denver.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. But we're so glad to have Jamie Lane here in person for the Top Property Manager Awards this year. We are so excited.

This is the second time we've done these awards. They, I think were a huge hit last year. And we're super excited to do it again this year. Yeah.

Alright, we're gonna give folks maybe just a couple more seconds. And you know what, we'll let them get in. While we do, I'm gonna just go over a little bit about what we're gonna talk about today. So first off, we're gonna talk about the market rankings. We ranked all of the markets in the US, the top five property managers, but we're gonna just take a sneak peek at three of them here on the call today. Then we've got the six categories of the awards that folks may may remember from last year, most amazing, cleanest, we'll go through those in a few.

How hard it is to be a top property manager, in the United States, number three here and then of course, the big award, the national top ten and the top property manager in the United States coming soon.

Okay. So first off, market rankings and I'm gonna pass it over to mister Jamie Lane here.

Yeah. So our market rankings are where we rank the top property managers in each of our three hundred and seventeen markets that we divide up the United States into, it was close. So eighty two percent of our market rankings were one. Our top property manager in each market was one within point five of a star.

So zero point five. So these were really close. Some of them sixteen percent were one within five tenths or five hundredths of a star. So close in terms of these rankings.

Most of the market winners were smaller operators. So twenty to twenty nine listings were in forty two percent of the winners.

We did see some of the larger operators get to the winners, so fifty plus was almost twenty five percent.

This year, we did consider property managers with less than twenty listings, but only and only if there weren't at least five property managers in that market with more than twenty. We wanted this to be really highlight the larger operators within a market nationally that are able to scale while still getting high scores. And we we have a whole award dedicated to this, right?

Like it's so hard to scale up and keep hiring. It's not easy to do it at five properties or ten or, you know, even fifteen listings either. But as you're getting into that twenty plus, fifty plus, hundred plus scaling those stars are it's incredibly difficult. Very difficult.

But we did want to give sort of more options in some of these smaller markets.

So we did that.

And then these rankings are going to be live at the end of the show. So you can go on AirDNA and see who is the winner in each of these markets.

We are gonna highlight now three markets and what the winners are so you can get a gist of what these rankings look like. So we're gonna start with Santa Rosa, Rosemary Beach, Florida. Yay. Coastal Retreats getting it as number one. Sixty nine listings in that market, over three thousand seven hundred reviews earning a four point nine eight. That is truly incredible.

And can we look at just how close this is?

The number five on those list is a four point nine five, number one is a four point nine eight, that is incredibly tight.

Yep. And remember this name, Stay at 30A, getting third place in Santa Rosa/Rosemary Beach at a four point nine six in a hundred and twenty nine listings. Yeah.

Alright, Phoenix, Arizona. So we've got Phoenix stays here at number one right there with twenty listings. Phoenix, Scottsdale, a huge short term rental market.

You know, one that I've frequented quite a few times. PHX Stays, congratulations.

And you know, can't wait to see how you grow out there in Phoenix.

And showing how close some of these were four point nine six at number two, Stay With Style Scottsdale. So this is one of those ones where it was and we had to go out to four decimals to figure out the winners. Yeah. And just for a methodology, we did look at all your reviews across both Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking dot com, doing a weighted listing or review average to get to the score and taking it out, yeah, to to four decimal places in some instances to figure out who the winner is.

Gatlinburg, not too far from Jamie Lane. Atlanta. No. Just about three hours away. So Heaven's Cabins coming in at number one, fifty two listings four point nine eight, Overnight Outfitters in a number two of four point nine seven, and then My Smoky Rentals at number three. See again how close this was. Really strong, very competitive market up there in the Smokies.

Alright.

So the six categories that we are going to go over today. If we go ahead and click forwards, we've got the most amazing, top budget, cleanest, fastest growing, most improved and guest loved and OTA badged. We will explain a little bit about each of these before, we go into the individual rankings. You'll notice I think five out of six of these are one to one from last year, the same award. This guest love and OTA badge is a little bit different. So we'll hit on that here in a minute.

Yep. So starting with most amazing. So here we went through all of your reviews and actually analyzing the text of those reviews. And what we're gonna highlight here is the property managers that saw the highest share of those reviews mentioning the word amazing.

Yeah. I'd be curious to know if anyone like last year like saw this award and was like, I'm gonna be DMing my customers like put amazing please.

I'm trying to win this AirDNA award this year. I hope they're not trying to game the awards like that.

If we hear of that, you will be disqualified.

That's right. Clearly in the bylaws.

Yeah. So let's get through it. So number five is Beer Tracks Vacation Cabins at nineteen percent of their reviews. Number four, The Cohost Company at nineteen point two percent. Number three, The Maimon Group. Love those guys. Twenty one percent.

The Anneta Group at twenty one point one percent.

And number one, we have Timber Tops at twenty one point six percent. The most amazing property manager for twenty twenty six is Timber Tops.

Congratulations, Timber Tops. Alright, the top budget. This one I think is really, really interesting.

So this is we're only looking at the budget tier listings for these property managers.

All of these rankings, you have to have more than one hundred listings to qualify, but this is then looking at the subset that is budget. So they're the bottom twenty percentile in terms of ADRs in these markets. So these are the property managers that are doing really well with low rate properties. It's really easy or easier to get top ratings with luxury properties. And these are the ones doing best with some of the lowest price ones.

I think we talked about this right at the beginning where it's like the higher you scale, the more properties you have, the harder it is to get those top reviews. But then when you're combining that with also budget tier listings, this is a really impressive group of folks. Yep. So number five, coming in at a four point seven seven, Avada.

At number four, Martha Murray Vacation Rentals at four point seven eight.

Number three, Feliz Stays SA at four point eight.

Number two, Venturebnb at four point eight two. And number one, the best budget property manager for twenty twenty six. It is Fairly. So the yeah, Breon, former Vacasa founder, his new venture Fairly coming in at number one.

Wow. Incredible. Very impressive. Congratulations, Fairly.

We're off to the cleanest.

This one I think is my favorite award. I'm a little bit of a clean freak, not crazy, but I clean up. I'm a little bit of a clean freak at home. And this is the highest review weighted Airbnb cleanliness score with listings with more than four reviews. So if you are if you are a guest that's watching this award show right now, and you wanna go stay at a property that's gonna be clean, these are the top five in the US.

Yep. And what's really interesting is this is and there's some overlap with our national winner.

But most of these are not getting top awards, but are just unbelievably good at making sure their properties are sparkling clean for their guests. So let's get into it.

Number five, we actually had a tie with Velvet Ditch Villas and HostWise at four point nine five four.

At number three, Be Still Getaways at four point nine six one. This is fun. Believe it or not, we're gonna talk more decimal points later.

Number two, The Styer Group four point nine six nine.

And at number one, Two Casita Santa Fe Vacation Rentals. A photo finish has noted here from from fifth to first is zero point zero one eight. And Two Casitas is now a two time winner of the, Cleanest, Property Manager winning last year and now this year. Congratulations Two Casitas.

And if you want to dig into how Two Casitas is doing it, I did host them on the STR Data Lab, our podcast, where we dug into how they consistently deliver cleanliness across all their vacation rentals in Santa Fe.

So this one, fastest growing. So this is, I think, one of the most interesting ratings that we do because most property managers I talked to really wanna be able to grow their inventory. And what this does is it measures not only who is fastest growing in the country, but they actually had to increase their rating over last year compared to this year. So it's not just growing, it's being able to increase your rating, your guest review scores while growing.

I gotta say while we talk about these things, it's one, incredibly impressive if you land on any of these lists. And two, if you don't land on any of these lists, that is not something to feel any type of way about because this is insanely difficult to land in the top in the entire country on any of these lists.

So looking at fastest growing. So again, you had to have more than a hundred listings in both last year and this year. So it is looking at only large property managers and their ability to continue to grow. Number five, we have Host And Home growing sixty seven percent year over year.

At number four, we have Home Team Vacation Rentals growing seventy percent year over year.

Number three, Compass Vacation Properties coming in at seventy two percent growth year over year.

And at number two, Stonybrook Cabins at seventy five point five.

And number one, this was a big surprise to me.

I did not think they could do it.

Those Bach Bros Properties. So Bach Bros was our 2025 best property manager. They got the national award last year. And what do you know? Winning an award has led to exponential growth in their property management business.

Ninety four percent growth. Congratulations to Max and Joe for winning that award. Absolutely. Congratulations, guys.

Now, most improved. This is a really fun analysis that we did of looking at which property managers, again, more than a hundred listings, saw the largest year over year improvement in their overall rating. So you're gonna see a lot of these property managers are coming in at lower overall ratings than what we see in some of the other rankings, but these are ones that have really made massive improvements. Maybe they were sitting below even being considered last year and have now moved up considerably.

So, yeah, it's most improved. It's it's not the best, but they're moving the right direction. Absolutely. So number five, we got Great Western Lodging at an increase of zero point zero three in terms of their overall score.

And at number four, Destination Big Bear at point zero four three nine.

Number three, we got Oregon Beach Vacations at a zero point four four five.

Staying on the West Coast.

At number two, Wonder Vacation Homes at point zero four nine five.

And with the biggest increase in twenty twenty six, we have Silver Sands Vacation Rentals, by Vtrips. Congratulations.

So this last badge category is a new one for this year, and it's the guest loved and OTA badged. So with Airbnb and Vrbo both rolling out guest favorites and loved by guest badges, what we wanted to do was flag the property managers that had the highest overall share of their listings earning one of these badges from Airbnb and Vrbo. So Airbnb and Vrbo are doing the hard work of coming up with how to badge these listings Yep. And analyzing them, and it goes into cancellation rates and percent of reviews that you're getting, and really how much positive momentum there are in the OTAs and we wanted to highlight them.

So number five, South Key Management Co at eighty four point five percent of their listings have one of these two badges.

I would have thought that was number one. Poolside Vacation Rentals at eighty four point nine percent.

Number three, Two Casita Santa Fe Vacation Rentals shows that cleaning matters at eighty five point nine.

And number two, HostWise at eighty nine point one.

Great urban operator. Love those guys. Yeah. And then number one, Kirkland's Smoky Mountain Cabins at ninety two point four percent of their listings. I also saw that they won a Skift Ideas award today. Oh, congratulations. Congratulations to them too on that.

But truly incredible, only seven percent of their listings don't have a badge. That's unbelievable.

Is real strong consistency across all their listings.

Absolutely.

So now I wanna go through a little bit around what the best looks like. So what we've done is we've done analysis of all the properties that are all the hosts that were out there, and wanted to give you a sense of what it takes to be the best. So we started with everyone. There was nine hundred and sixty thousand hosts that we looked at over the past year.

Two hundred and twenty thousand of them had more than two listings. Seventeen thousand of them had more than ten listings. Seven thousand one hundred and sixty eight had more than twenty. Just nine hundred and twenty property managers in the US have more than a hundred listings.

And then what we're gonna highlight now is the national top one hundred and then go through the top ten. So the top one hundred is the zero point one percent of hosts around the country. And what we know is that as you scale, it gets harder and harder and harder to get strong ratings.

And so the average rating for an individual host I'm an individual host, I have one property. So average there is a four point eight five.

Proud to say I've got a four point nine four of You're over indexing.

Over indexing. Well, sad to say is I am not beating out some of the top property managers that have more than one hundred. So as hard as this is at one property, these property managers are still crushing me in terms of their average review rating. So when we get up over one hundred, I mean, hundred to two hundred and fifty listings as a four point seven on average, compared to a four point eight. So and it does and this is a straight line down as you scale, and it gets harder and harder to maintain high ratings from guests.

Doesn't look like it ever gets easier.

It never gets And then I'm looking at some of these badges and the difference between our top one hundred and the rest.

So eighty nine percent of listings are with the super host within our national top one hundred versus just thirty one percent, thirty two percent for those outside. Guest favorites, it's about forty one percent that in our top one hundred versus twelve percent that are outside of the top one hundred. And the meeting review rating, so four point eight eight to be in our top one hundred on average versus four point seven one for the rest.

Now we're here. And now we're here to talk about the national top ten. But before we do, need to take a little moment to talk about AirDNA Adapt. Jordan, if you're watching the product manager on Adapt, this slide is for you. I know you love this animation.

AirDNA Adapt, if you've been following along with AirDNA over the past few months, we launched the waitlist, we launched the private beta, we launched the public beta. And then very soon, we are going to be launching AirDNA Adapt broadly to everyone, brand new dynamic pricing, revenue management system in the ecosystem. And so a quick little video to give you a taste of AirDNA Adapt.

Pricing your property needs a reboot. Enter AirDNA Adapt, the easy to use pricing tool built on the most trusted data in the industry.

Pick a strategy based on how you want to get booked and Adapt builds your pricing in seconds.

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And an AI that knows your listing, market, and what to do next.

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Alright. So I would assume most of the property managers on this call, are are using a dynamic pricing tool. Airdna Adapt is going to change the game. We've been talking to thousands, of customers over the past, six to eight months, about their pricing. And the new Adapt has unlimited custom comp sets. It's got an AI chatbot that you can talk to. What is your favorite thing about AirDNA Adapt?

It's how the your AI assistant actually takes action on your behalf. So if I wanna change the price on Labor Day, I can just say, let's drop rates by twenty percent and it goes and does it. If I want to change minimum stays across all my properties on a certain day, it's one sort of prompt and it goes out and does it all. And then getting the power of AirDNA's dataset into a pricing tool. So it does give you the full picture of what's happening in the market and then prices your unit into that market.

Yeah, no, it's fantastic. We're so excited. As we talked to folks who are having trouble with their current pricing tool, we heard a few things. We heard that people are not diehards to their current pricing tool, like people are often having a lot of friction. They can be it can be really complicated. It can be difficult to use. They cannot trust the data.

The, comps are limited. What it ultimately came down to when I was in these a lot of these qualitative interviews was people telling me like, I feel like I'm in a therapy session.

And the therapy session was the the impetus for our commercial, which will launch next week. And we're gonna give you all here a little thirty second sneak peek at AirDNA adapts launch commercial.

And then get into the final rankings.

I suck at running a vacation rental. Today, I changed my rate seven times.

Seven times.

I see.

My neighbor, Cheryl, is booked.

Why aren't I?

I'm noticing a pattern.

Shaky on your pricing strategy? Meet AirDNA Adapt, the first intelligent pricing tool trained on the industry's most trusted data. AirDNA Adapt, try it for free.

Alright, so you can try AirDNA Adapt for free, thirty day free trial, you get a ton of value in that free trial. So absolutely no risk to just go give it a swing. And then you'll also have access to the founder's offer of ten dollars a month, which will be going away very soon. So you must start your free trial by August thirty first.

If you want to get access to that founder's offer of ten dollars a month, We're going to hop into the national top ten. So we didn't have time to go over property manager tool. But if you're here last year, we talked about it. If you want to grow your listings, if you want to prove your performance to owners, the property manager tool, there's there's no better tool out there.

It's twenty five percent off for new customers valid until September thirtieth. You can email Sarah Dupree here and get access to that.

So let's get to it. Let's do it. The ten best reviewed property managers in the United States, coming in at again, we've got four decimal points here. Number ten, the Styer Group four point nine three seven zero.

Coming in at number nine, Compass Vacation Properties. Congrats four point nine eight three.

At number eight, HostWise four point nine three nine three.

And number seven, poolside Vacation Rentals, four point nine four zero eight.

Congratulations.

Number six, Abode Luxury Rentals, four point nine four two five.

At number five, Velvet Ditch Villas at four point nine four seven three.

At number four, last year's number one, incredible performance this year still. Bach Bros properties at four point nine four seven four.

Number three, Epicbnb. This is awesome. A four point nine four nine four. Congratulations.

At number two, you told us to look out for them again. Stay on 30A at four point nine five seven five. And Jamie Lane, give us the top property manager in the United States for two thousand twenty six.

For two thousand twenty six, the number one property manager is HeavenlyRes LLC at a four point nine six two six.

Congrats, guys, on being AirDNA's two thousand twenty six best property manager in the US.

Congratulations. That's truly unbelievable. I mean, these scores, right, are truly unbelievable to to have more than a hundred listings to be at this high of ratings. Guests, again, if there's any guests in the audience, I think these are the places that you wanna stay when you're on vacation, if you wanna have a good time.

Right, and really, and what was so surprising to me is there is almost no geographic concentration. So we've got West Coast, we've got Florida, we have urban operators, we've got Texas, we've got the Northeast. So we have such a wide variety of property managers, both geographically and in the types of listings that they're managing. So there is no right way to do this.

There's no one way to make sure you're getting the best properties. And there's ways to do it in every market. There's ways to do it at every level of listings under management. And for me, when I try to do better at my job, like I like to look at who's the best and these are truly the best out there.

And I would highly suggest I'm looking at what they're doing.

We are going to be interviewing a few of these property managers on the podcast over the next few weeks. So you get a sense of how they're able to do what they're doing.

And it's great case studies on what it takes to be able to scale to this level and still deliver a top tier guest experience.

Absolutely. Last thing here, folks, airDNA.co/adapt. Go check it out. Like we said, try it for free, Connect some listings, see your performance, see what the base rates say, try out the strategy controls. We hope you have a really good experience with Adapt. And that is it for the twenty twenty six Top Property Managers. I think we'll see you next year and maybe we'll get Jamie Lane in person again.

Maybe in a tuxedo too.

Yeah, step it up each year. All right, everyone. Thank you so much.

Thank you.