Vacation rentals get talked about in revenue. '¥500,000 a month' sounds good; what lands in the owner's account is that line minus a long subtraction. This article walks the subtraction.
We run our own apartments and send managed owners a report with exactly this structure every month. The numbers below are rounded hypotheticals for teaching proportions; real figures move with the property and the season. Take home the structure, not the example.
The structure
From that last line the owner's fixed costs still come out: rent or mortgage, insurance, property tax, and the recovery of the setup investment. Even just carrying the ratio (variable costs eat 50 to 60 percent of revenue) makes any candidate property's arithmetic realistic.
| Line | Example month | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Gross booking revenue | ¥500,000 | 100% |
| Platform fees | −¥75,000 | 10–18% |
| Cleaning and linen, at cost | −¥60,000 | 8–15% |
| Utilities and internet | −¥25,000 | 3–7% (double in a Sapporo winter) |
| Consumables, small repairs | −¥10,000 | 1–3% |
| Accommodation tax | −¥10,000 | city- and rate-dependent |
| Management (at 20% of revenue) | −¥100,000 | 15–25% |
| Owner's gross take | ¥220,000 | 40–50% is the healthy band |
The four classic leaks
- Cleaning economics: when guests' cleaning fees run below actual turnover costs, a string of one-night two-guest stays loses money per booking. Minimum stays and the cleaning fee are P/L settings, not details
- Averaged-away seasonality: a '40% average' property may really be 80% in winter and 20% in spring. Whether you can carry fixed costs through the trough decides survival. The two-peak curve in the Sapporo article is this point
- Static pricing: at identical occupancy, capturing demand-day rates moves monthly revenue 20–30%. A full-but-unprofitable property is usually a cheaply-filled one
- Small accumulating leaks: unlimited amenities, unmetered utilities, unrevisited insurance. Individually invisible, jointly a tenth of the take
The four numbers worth watching monthly
Revenue, occupancy, ADR, and the take. The most explanatory is ADR: high occupancy on a low rate means underselling; low occupancy on a high rate means over-reaching; both low means the listing and photos. Our monthly reports carry these four plus every cost line and the month's reviews, because, as the fees article says, an operation that will not show you numbers is telling you something.
Ask for a read on your property's numbers