If you own a short-term rental or vacation rental property management company anywhere from Clearwater to the Space Coast, the honest answer to “what’s it worth” is: it depends heavily on your size, and most owners are looking at the wrong number when they estimate it.

I pulled sold-comp data across nearly 600 closed property management transactions to see how pricing actually plays out in this space, and the pattern is clear enough to build a real expectation around — not a guess pulled from a rule of thumb someone heard at a conference.

The two numbers buyers actually use

Every vacation rental management company gets priced off one of two metrics, and which one applies to you depends almost entirely on your revenue.

• Revenue multiple — a rough multiple of your top-line gross booking revenue or management fee revenue
• SDE multiple — a multiple of your Seller’s Discretionary Earnings, meaning the real cash flow to an owner-operator once every add-back is accounted for

Below roughly $150,000 in revenue, deals in this data priced close to a 1.0x revenue multiple, because there usually isn’t enough clean, documented cash flow yet to anchor a multiple on earnings. Above that size, buyers shift to pricing off SDE, and the multiple actually gets stronger as the business grows.

What the sold data shows by size

What actually moves your multiple

Inside any given size bracket, I still see real spread between the bottom and top quartile — roughly 1.5x to 2.3x on SDE across the dataset as a whole. The businesses landing at the top of that range typically share a few traits: owner involvement that a manager could realistically absorb, documented and clean financials with defensible add-backs, low customer concentration across property owners, and management agreements that transfer cleanly to a new owner rather than being personally tied to the seller’s relationships.

That last point is worth sitting with if you’re a few years out from selling. If your homeowner relationships live in your head and your cell phone rather than in a CRM and a signed, assignable management agreement, that’s the single biggest thing suppressing your multiple — and it’s fixable well before you list.

Frequently asked questions

Do vacation rental management companies sell for more than long-term rental property management companies?

Not inherently. Multiples are driven by cash flow quality, owner dependency, and contract transferability, not the rental type. Vacation rental operators sometimes carry richer margins due to higher management fee percentages, which can support a stronger SDE multiple at the same revenue size.

How is seller’s discretionary earnings calculated for a property management company?

Start with net income, add back the owner’s salary and benefits, then add back interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and any documented one-time or personal expenses run through the business. The result is the total cash benefit available to a single owner-operator.

What financing structure is typical for these deals?

Across the broader sold-comp set, roughly three out of four deals closed with the buyer paying essentially full price at closing, with the remaining quarter involving some form of seller note or earnout — usually because deal size, buyer financing constraints, or transition risk called for it.