Across our own three buildings and six rooms, operating costs ran 27.9% of revenue over the twelve months from August 2025 to July 2026: cleaning 17.5%, consumables 4.2%, electricity 2.6%, repairs 1.1%, accommodation tax 1.1%, gas 1.0% and insurance 0.4% (measured 21 August 2026, published with the method at operating data).
That 27.9% is not a figure to carry onto another property as it stands. Rent and the management fee are deliberately outside it, and water is missing from the source workbook. This article covers what is inside the seven published lines, why the excluded lines are excluded, and the order in which to rebuild the ratio for a property of your own.
What share of revenue do operating costs take?
In our own results, the seven lines below come to 27.9% of revenue. Each line is shown with the thing that actually moves it.
| Line | Share of revenue | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning | 17.5% | Number of changeovers |
| Consumables | 4.2% | Changeovers and guest count |
| Electricity | 2.6% | Season and occupied nights |
| Repairs | 1.1% | Condition and age of the building |
| Accommodation tax | 1.1% | The municipality's regime and the nightly rate |
| Gas | 1.0% | Season and occupied nights |
| Insurance | 0.4% | What the policy covers |
| Total (excluding rent, management fee and water) | 27.9% | The seven lines above |
Is the total the first thing to read here?
No: the ratio between the first line and all the others is. Cleaning alone is 17.5%, while the remaining six lines together come to 10.4%. Cleaning is 62.7% of the whole published total.
So managing operating costs is, in practice, close to managing a single line. Run it the other way and the point is the same: the bottom four lines (repairs 1.1%, accommodation tax 1.1%, gas 1.0%, insurance 0.4%) add up to 3.6%, which does not even reach consumables at 4.2% on its own.
What is not in the 27.9%?
Four things: rent, the management fee, water, and booking platform commission. An owner costing their own property has to add those four back by hand.
| Line not included | Why it is out | What it becomes for an owner |
|---|---|---|
| Rent | We lease the buildings we run, so this line describes our position and not an owner's | Zero if the property is owned outright, replaced by mortgage payments and property tax |
| Management fee | Our own rooms are run by us, so no management fee exists to record | A share of revenue if the property is managed for you (ours starts at 20%, with the exact rate set after a viewing) |
| Water | Billed two-monthly in the source workbook and so falling outside this window | Has to be added, which means 27.9% is an understatement rather than a full figure |
| Platform commission | This is a count of operating cost, and commission belongs to the sales channel rather than to operations | Depends on the channel mix; ranges are in reading the monthly P/L |
Why leave rent and the management fee out?
Because for an owner costing their own property, those two lines are either double counted or absent altogether, and both mistakes are large enough to make the whole ratio useless.
We lease the buildings we operate. Our books therefore carry a rent line, but they carry it because we are the tenant. An owner handing over a property they already hold has either no rent line at all or a mortgage payment, which behaves differently. Leaving rent inside the ratio would export a leasehold assumption onto a freehold property.
The management fee is the same problem in reverse. Our own rooms pay nobody a fee, so the line does not exist for us, while for an owner it is one of the largest lines on the page. Publishing a total without naming that exclusion would make us look cheap for a reason that has nothing to do with our costs. What each fee model leaves an owner is set out in what management costs.
For the same reason, 27.9% does not mean that 72.1% is left. Getting to what is left means subtracting platform commission, the management fee, water and the owner's own fixed costs, in that order. The full subtraction is in reading the monthly P/L.
Which line is worth attacking?
In money terms, only cleaning. Taking 10% off cleaning moves 1.75 points of revenue; deleting the insurance line entirely moves 0.4 points. For the same amount of effort the cleaning move is more than four times the size.
Cleaning is also the one line that charges you somewhere else when you cut it. Guests judge cleanliness within about ten minutes of arrival, a fall there shows up in reviews, and a fall in reviews shows up in the rate you can hold. Saving 1.75 points on the cost side and losing several on the revenue side is an ordinary outcome (how cleaning runs, what moves a rating). Cut the design of the turnover, its route, its materials and its frequency, rather than the price paid for it.
Accommodation tax is not a target at all. It is collected from the guest and passed to the municipality, and it ran 1.1% of revenue for us. Whether such a tax exists and at what rate varies between municipalities, so confirm it with the city or ward office covering the property rather than assuming ours applies.
Insurance is not a target either. The line is small because it is not a running cost: it is the line that pays on the worst day (insurance at a rental).
Is cleaning driven by nights or by changeovers?
By changeovers. A one-night booking and a five-night booking leave almost the same work behind them once the guest has gone.
We run at 83.6% occupancy with an average stay of 3.3 nights, which is about seven changeovers per room per month (30 x 0.836 / 3.3, our own figures as of August 2026). Cleaning at 17.5% and consumables at 4.2% add up to 21.7%, the part of the bill that moves with that count, and 21.7 is 77.8% of the 27.9% total.
So two properties at identical occupancy carry different cost ratios if their average stays differ, and comparing on occupancy alone hides it (how to read an occupancy figure). The realistic way to move the ratio down is therefore not haggling over a per-clean price but lengthening the average booking, through the minimum stay and the cleaning fee set together.
How should an owner build the ratio for their own property?
Not by starting from our 27.9%. Build it in four layers from zero, because borrowing somebody else's ratio means borrowing the assumptions inside their largest line as well.
- Changeover-linked lines first: cleaning and consumables. Derive the monthly changeover count from the average stay and occupancy you expect, then multiply by the real cost of one turnover. This is the biggest line, so its accuracy is the accuracy of the whole estimate
- Occupancy-linked lines: electricity, gas, water. In a heating climate these spike in winter, so place them month by month rather than as an annual average (winter in snow country)
- Property-fixed lines: insurance and repairs. Small in money, but the character of the repairs line changes with the age of the building; on an older building, plan it as incidents rather than as an average
- Then add the outside lines: platform commission, management fee, accommodation tax, and the owner's own fixed costs (mortgage or rent, property tax)
What should an owner check in a manager's cost reporting?
Not the total, but the granularity of the lines and whether the exclusions are named. Without both, a report cannot be used to predict next month.
| Question to ask | Why it changes the number |
|---|---|
| How many separate lines does the report carry? | Collapsed into one 'operations' line, a rise in the cleaning price is invisible on the page |
| Which lines are excluded from the total? | Choose what to exclude and any total can be made to look low |
| Is cleaning billed at cost or at a flat rate? | If flat, the question becomes where the difference from actual cost ends up |
| Who buys consumables, and at whose price are they billed? | How the pass-through is handled changes the invoice for identical goods |
| Do you report the price per changeover and the count per month? | Given a unit price and a count, an owner can calculate next month without asking |
What we will and will not promise
We do not say that 27.9% will reappear on somebody else's property. That ratio is a composite of building age, layout, capacity, city and the rate charged, recorded by our own six rooms over twelve months. A cost ratio cannot honestly be promised for a property we have not yet seen.
What we do commit to is the form of the reporting: costs broken into named lines, exclusions stated in the same place as the total, and cleaning reported as a price per changeover with the month's count beside it rather than as a percentage. With those three, an owner can compute next month themselves, and a report you can compute from is the only kind that supports a decision.
Ask us to look at your property's cost structure