How the ranking is built.

The Host Authority Report is an independent editorial assessment. We do not accept payment for placement, we do not run affiliate links to booking sites, and we do not give property managers advance notice of a change in rank. Our scoring model is published in full below and reviewed each issue.

The Scoring Factors

1. 35%
   Factor 01

   Guest Reviews & Sentiment

   Guest ratings and review counts from Airbnb host profiles and Google, Bayesian-adjusted (see below) so a 5.0 rating from a dozen reviews cannot outweigh a 4.9 from thousands. Vrbo has no verifiable operator-level aggregate and is excluded from this factor. Guest reviews measure the stay; owner reviews (below) measure the management relationship. They are scored separately.

2. 20%
   Factor 02

   Owner Reviews

   Google reviews written by property owners or management clients, identified by an explicit qualifying phrase in the reviewer's own words. Examples: "manage my home", "my property", "our rental", "as a homeowner", "they have managed our house", "my investment property", "owner statement", "onboarding my home". The inclusion rule is conservative by design: we include a review only when the text explicitly self-identifies the author as a homeowner or client. Ambiguous reviews and clearly guest stays are excluded. We store the verbatim text and the exact qualifying phrase, and we never paraphrase or infer. The metric is owner_review_count and owner_avg_rating per company, Bayesian-adjusted with prior weight m = 10 and C = the mean owner rating across companies in the same market. A company needs at least 3 included owner reviews to score this component. Below that threshold the component scores at the market average across companies with sufficient owner-review data, rather than at zero. The absence of an owner-authored review among sampled Google reviews is not evidence of a poor management relationship, only of insufficient data to measure it. The scan coverage (reviews scanned and total Google reviews available) is reported per company on the profile page so readers can judge the strength of that null.

3. 20%
   Factor 03

   Fee Transparency

   Scored on disclosure behavior only, from a verification crawl of each company's own website rerun every 30 days. Fee disclosure = 60% of this factor, contract terms = 20%, no-markup policy = 10%, and a service guarantee or itemized owner reporting = 10%. A published fee means a specific number on the company's website: a percentage (25%) or a dollar figure ($99). A claimed fee structure without the amount, language like 'one flat fee' or 'simple transparent pricing' with no number, does not qualify as fee disclosure and scores zero, the same as silence. We surface that third state on the company's profile as a distinct editorial signal. The CONTENT of a disclosed number never changes the score, a company stating a 40% fee scores identically to one stating 20%. We score the publication, not the price. Every claim is stored with a verbatim quote, the source page URL, and a check date. When our crawler cannot reach a company's website the factor scores at the market average across companies with verified disclosure data.

4. 15%
   Factor 04

   Host Status

   Airbnb Superhost and Vrbo Premier Host are the same weight class. Each contributes half of this factor. Superhost requires a validated Airbnb host profile URL and a scrape date on file. Premier Host requires a specific Vrbo listing URL where the badge was observed and an admin verification date.

5. 10%
   Factor 05

   Media & Publications

   Editorial coverage in tiered publications. National mentions weigh more than niche blogs, recency matters.

Guest reviews (35%), owner reviews (20%), website transparency (20%), host status (15%), and press (10%). Ratings are Bayesian adjusted so a 5.0 from a dozen reviews cannot outweigh a 4.9 from thousands, and review volume earns credit only up to 500 reviews, beyond which quality decides, not scale. Owner reviews are Google reviews whose authors identify themselves as management clients, quoted verbatim with a link to the original. Website transparency is scored on disclosure behavior only, from a verification crawl rerun every 30 days. We record what each company publishes on its own site with the exact quote and source URL, never that the practice is followed in the field. A published fee means a published number. Components we cannot yet verify for a company score at the market average, neither helping nor hurting, so a rank above average must be earned through verified data.

Who the Ranking Compares

The ranking compares property managers an owner elsewhere can actually hire. Companies that manage rentals exclusively within a single resort, community, or development they are affiliated with, and do not accept outside owner clients, are classified as community-exclusive and excluded from every ranked list (statewide and per city). They remain in the directory under Community & Resort Operatorswith all verified data intact, but they cannot be ranked against open-market managers because an owner outside the community has no route to hire them. Scope is verified from the company's own website: whether all offered inventory is inside a single named community and whether the site publishes an owner-acquisition path for outside homes.

The ranking also compares property managers only. Booking platforms that list homes operated by others, and hybrid companies that both manage some homes and distribute homes operated by partners on the same site without publicly distinguishing which is which, are shown in the directory but not ranked, because their listing counts and reviews cannot be attributed to their own management operation. Each company carries a listing model classification: manager (default; only manages the homes it lists), platform_hybrid (manages some, distributes others), or platform_only (pure booking platform). Hybrids qualify for ranking only when the managed portfolio can be verifiably separated from the platform listings with evidence.

Hardened Short-Term Rental Evidence

To rank as a short-term or mixed operator, a company needs verifiable evidence that it actually offers bookable nightly vacation-rental inventory. Evidence comes in three classes, each stored with a URL and a check date:

• Airbnb. A validated Airbnb host profile URL for the company itself. Inherently verified.
• Vrbo. A specific Vrbo listing URL where the Premier Host badge was observed, admin-verified with a date. Inherently verified.
• Website. A URL on the company's own site that displays bookable nightly inventory: a listings grid with nightly pricing, a "Book Now" or "Check Availability" widget, or per-night rates, with a verbatim quote from that page stored on the record. A homepage URL that merely markets STR services without inventory is not enough. A page describing STR management services that routes bookings to a separate affiliated site is not enough. The evidence must live on the same domain that owners are asked to hire.

Companies whose only website evidence is a marketing homepage without an inventory quote are moved to the unranked directory until real evidence is captured. Mixed classification requires the same evidence standard as short-term.

Minimum Verified Data Floor

Bayesian shrinkage stabilizes small samples, but even a stabilized score is not meaningful when the underlying data barely exists. A company appears in ranked lists only when it has at least one verified review source with meaningful volume: a verified Airbnb host profile, or a name-matched Google Places profile with at least 25 reviews. Companies below this floor keep their profiles, verified fields, transparency claims, and everything else intact, but display as Unranked, gathering verified data with the checked date. This prevents brand-new records from taking top ranks through market-average imputation before their data actually exists.

Luxury Index (Segment Only)

The Luxury Index is displayed on every company profile and used to rank the Luxury Certified segment. It does not feed the general composite. Three parts, each stamped with the observation date:

1. Median bedrooms across a company's captured listings.
2. Share of listings that are 3BR or larger, from bedrooms observed in the market scan.
3. Rate position = the company's median observed nightly rate divided by the market median observed nightly rate for the same city scan.

We label prices as observed nightly rate with the observation date. We never call it ADR because we do not measure occupancy or true realized bookings, only the price we could observe on the day of the scan. Companies without any scan coverage show Luxury Index pending listing data.

Data Sources

• Airbnb data is read directly from the property manager's public host profile page (rating, review count, Superhost badge, active listing count). We never scrape city-search or single-listing pages; a stored URL that fails validation is discarded.
• Brand-wide Airbnb host profiles. A few nationally-branded operators (InvitedHome, Vacasa and similar) publish one Airbnb host profile that pools listings and reviews across multiple states. When we seed one of these URLs, the profile is flagged stats are brand-wide, and its rating and review count are labeled "Airbnb stats cover this brand's national portfolio" everywhere they appear.
• Checked, no verified Airbnb presence. When we manually search for a company's Airbnb host profile and confirm none can be attributed to them, we record the check date and show "No verified Airbnb presence" instead of a generic pending pill.
• Google ratings and review counts come from the Google Places API, matched to the manager's business record by website domain wherever possible.
• Vrbo Premier Host status is manually verified from a specific listing in the manager's inventory, because Vrbo does not publish portfolio-level review aggregates and listings cannot be enumerated to compute one. Reviews and ratings for Vrbo are not tracked.
• Fee, markup and contract disclosures are extracted from each property manager's public website with a structured AI pass and reviewed by a human editor before publication.
• Every profile carries a Sources footnote linking to the specific pages used.

Bayesian Rating Adjustment

Raw averages are misleading at low sample sizes: a 5.0 from 15 reviews is not stronger evidence than a 4.9 from 2,438. Every rating that feeds the composite is smoothed toward the market mean using a standard Bayesian shrinkage estimator.

adjusted = (v / (v + m)) · R + (m / (v + m)) · C

R is the raw rating, v is the review count for that source, m = 50 is the prior weight in reviews, and C is the volume-weighted mean rating across every active manager on that source. Managers with a large book of reviews are barely moved; managers with a small sample are pulled toward the market average until they earn enough evidence to stand on their own. Raw ratings and counts are still displayed publicly – only the composite score uses the adjusted value.

Review volume is credited to the composite as statistical confidence, not as scale. The credit follows a saturation curve, min(1, ln(n + 1) / ln(501)), reaching full credit at 500 reviews and staying flat beyond. Additional volume past that point does not add score. The reason is straightforward: a high-volume 4.80 contains proportionally more poor stays in absolute terms than a smaller portfolio at the same average, and the Bayesian-adjusted rating, not the size of the book, is the quality measure.

Ranking Honesty

Companies whose total verified review count across sources is under 100, or that lack a verified Airbnb host profile, are labeled Provisional next to their rank with a limited verified data note. They are not excluded. The label warns the reader that the underlying sample is thin.

Auto-Approval and Time in Business

A discovery-queue candidate is auto-promoted to a ranked property manager only after enrichment has run and every one of five gates passes: it is classified as a short-term rental or mixed operator with an evidence URL, a validated Airbnb host profile URL is stored, its Firecrawl scrape succeeded, the scraped host name matches the candidate name at 0.85 or higher similarity (case-folded, punctuation and legal suffixes stripped), the profile shows more than 20 listings, and the profile shows two or more years hosting. Years hosting is the verifiable proxy we use for time in business, read directly from the public Airbnb host header. Candidates that clear the classification and URL gates but fall short on listing count or years hosting stay pending for editor review.

Luxury Certification

A binary certification, displayed as a badge and a filtered view. It does not change the composite score. A company is Luxury Certified only when all three criteria pass, each stored with an evidence URL and a verification date:

1. Verified host status. Airbnb Superhost read from the scraped host profile, or admin-verified Vrbo Premier Host with an evidence URL on a specific listing.
2. Bayesian-adjusted rating of 4.80 or higher on a source with at least 100 raw reviews.
3. Operates published home qualification or minimum property standards– concrete acceptance requirements (minimum bedrooms, home value, mandatory design or amenity standards). Marketing language does not qualify. The criterion passes on either evidence class, each stored with verbatim quote and URL:
   • Standards published on their website – requirements quoted verbatim from the company's own site, with the page URL.
   • Standards documented by independent sources – at least two independent third-party publications each documenting a specific acceptance requirement, verbatim quote and URL stored for each.
   The badge detail on the profile displays which evidence class certified the company.

Certification is re-evaluated whenever the underlying data refreshes. Any company that meets all three criteria is certified automatically. There is no application and no fee.

Corrections

City Tabs

The statewide tab is the full ranked list. A city tab shows only companies with a verified market row for that city, a stored evidence URL tying the company to that market. No verified row, not on the tab. Headquarters is a displayed signal, not a filter; a company whose headquarters matches the tab city carries a Locally Headquartered badge, but companies headquartered elsewhere still appear when their markets served include the tab city.

Within a city tab the composite is recomputed with a city-local Bayesian mean C: each company's rating is smoothed toward the average across the peer set in that market, not the statewide average, so a company can hold different ranks in different cities. A ranked list requires at least three verified entries. Markets with one or two verified companies list them without rank numbers; markets with none show the discovery status and a note that no verified companies have been identified yet.

Corrections

Property managers who spot an inaccuracy, whether a mis-scraped fee or an outdated policy, may write to the editors with public evidence. Verified corrections are applied within one publication cycle. We do not remove low scores; we correct wrong ones.