If the booking-site accounts for your property are in your name, with the management company working as a co-host or through delegated access, the listing, its reviews and its bookings stay with you on the day the company changes. This is decided before the contract is signed; changing it later is slow and sometimes not possible at all.
We run our own rooms in Tokyo and Sapporo and manage owners' properties alongside them. Every figure here is our own: three buildings and six rooms, measured on 1 October 2026 over the twelve months from October 2025 to September 2026, with the method published at operating data.
Why does the account name need deciding before signing?
Because reviews and ratings accumulate on a listing inside an account, not on the property. Our six rooms hold 398 reviews at an average of 4.9, and that record is what lets a listing hold its price (how ratings work). Which account they build up in is settled before the first booking arrives.
The account holder is the person or company that registered the account with the platform and is treated as its owner. There are three arrangements, and the difference shows on the day the management company changes.
There are reasons a listing ends up in the manager's account. Sometimes the company pays for the photography and builds the listing up front, and keeps the listing on its side in return. That is a legitimate trade, but it has a price that never appears in the fee column: on the day you leave, the reviews and the listing have to be built again from nothing. Add that to the fee before comparing offers, and ask how long the company expects a new listing to take to recover, because that is time you would be paying for.
| Arrangement | Reviews and rating | When the manager changes |
|---|---|---|
| Owner's account, manager as co-host or with delegated access | Stay in the owner's account | Access is removed; listing and bookings stay in place |
| Manager's account | Stay in the manager's account | The listing comes down; the next one starts with no reviews |
| Owner's account, owner self-manages | Stay in the owner's account | Nothing changes; there is no manager |
With two booking sites, how many times is the name decided?
Once per site. Each platform has its own account, so putting one in your name does nothing for the other: if the second account is the manager's, its reviews stay with the manager.
Over our twelve months, 438 of 489 bookings (89.6%) came through Airbnb and 50 (10.2%) through Booking.com (where bookings come from). The smaller channel is the one that gets set up in a hurry, and it is the one where nobody checks whose name it went into. Ask for the account holder and the manager's access to be written into the contract site by site.
Who keeps badges such as Superhost?
Badges and rating programmes are each platform's own rules; some attach to an account, some to a listing, and the criteria change, so we will not state them as fact here. What matters to an owner is narrower than the badge itself: whether whatever the badge rewards, the review history, the response record, the cancellation record, is built up in an account you will still hold. There are two places to check.
The first is the platform's help pages: whether a given badge belongs to the account or the listing, and whose record a co-host's work counts towards. The second is the management company: ask which account the current badge sits on and what they expect to happen to it when you part ways. If no clear answer comes back, the safe assumption is that the badge does not leave with you.
Is the payout account decided by the account name?
No. The listing's account holder and the account that receives payouts are separate lines in the contract. Either the payout lands in your bank account and the fee and costs are invoiced afterwards, or it lands in the manager's account and the remainder is transferred to you after the fee and costs (from booking to bank account).
Either way, the receiving account is visible in each platform's payout settings. A listing can be in the owner's name while the payout settings still point at the company's bank account, so look at that screen on the day you sign.
What should be checked before signing?
Six things, for each platform. All of them can be confirmed in the contract or in the platform's settings, and none should rest on a verbal assurance.
The one most often missed is the contact details. An account can be in the owner's name while the login verification codes go to the management company's email address or phone, and then, once the two part ways, the owner may be unable to sign in to their own account. The simplest test is to log in yourself, from your own device, on the day you sign. For an owner living abroad this matters twice over, since sorting out a locked account from another time zone is slow.
- Account holder: who registered the account
- Access: is the manager a co-host, on delegated access, or using shared login details, and what can they change
- Payout: whose name is on the bank account in the payout settings
- Contact details: whose email address and phone number receive the login verification codes
- Removal: the steps for removing the manager's access on the last day, and who carries them out
- Photos and copy: whether you can keep using them afterwards (reading a management contract)
What if the listing already sits in the manager's account?
Start by asking the company and the platform whether the listing can be moved to your account. That depends on the platform's rules and on the company, so we will not say it can or cannot. Where it cannot, a new listing is built in your name, and the order for switching without coming off sale is in switching management companies.
On the switch date the calendar is never empty. Our bookings arrive a median 42 days before the guest, so roughly half of the next six weeks is already booked inside the old account on that day. The least contentious approach is to let those bookings run their course in the old account and sell the new listing from the first free night.
Which arrangement do we use?
The listing account and its reviews are in the owner's name, and we operate as a co-host or with delegated access. The payout route is settled per property after a viewing and written into the contract, and the fee is 20% of revenue plus actual costs for cleaning and supplies. When we take over from another manager, existing bookings are carried over as they are.
When a contract with us ends, we remove our own access, and the listing, its reviews and the bookings already on the calendar stay in the owner's account; there is nothing to rebuild. The same applies to Booking.com and to any other site the property is listed on, account by account.
Every figure above is our own record, not a level we offer for anyone else's property.
Ask about your property