We pride ourselves on managing every aspect of keeping your vacation rental booked and ready for guests and owners to enjoy. Our goal is to enable you to maximize revenue from your rental without having to do any of the work involved with managing it. That means we do everything from taking photos, writing descriptions, and marketing your vacation rental property to working with potential guests and making bookings as well as managing logistics like reservations, payments, check-in and check-out, housekeeping, property upkeep, and dispatching emergency maintenance. We also manage maintenance technicians for regular maintenance, improvements, and emergencies. We make sure home owners can sleep well at night knowing their property is being taken care of and generating the most revenue possible in the Northern MN vacation rental market.

National commission rates for property manager services average roughly 35% and range as low as 20% and as high as 60% depending on the type of home and market. The one static cost to doing business with North Star is the commission. Commission will depend on a number of factors such as size, # of bedrooms, location and etc. We provide full service management without cutting any corners and we may offer new owners, during limited time promotions, lower commissions for their first year of management. Try it for a year, let us prove our quality and service excellence to you and we're sure you'll continue, but if you decide not to, there are no strings attached.

We work with ALL property types and owners. While we do have services geared specifically to rental properties, many of our services overlap with the needs of owners who don’t live close by and would like the peace of mind knowing they have local support when it’s needed.

Cabin Watch is the name for our service for out-of-town cabin owners. It incorporates some of the services to we offer to our rental property owners and customizes them to the needs of owners who don’t want to rent, but do want the peace of mind that comes from having local support people available to help care for your property.

For rentals, yes. For Cabin Watch it is optional but recommended.

We have a limited number of available slots for lawn care. Inquire for details.

We do currently offer cleaning services to both our cabin watch and rental property clients. However, we do not currently offer stand alone cleaning services

Guests expect a fully-functioning home when they arrive complete with furniture, appliances, cookware, glasses, silverware, internet, TV, etc. as well as a standard supply of bed linens, bath and hand towels and typical consumables like light-bulbs and batteries. We will work with you to make sure that you have everything in place. We even have inventory forms to ensure you have the right quantity of each item. Internet connections are required at every home. Nicely decorated homes tend to command higher rentals and we always encourage owners to have a home that shows well. A good test of whether or not you need to have something in your rental is to put yourself in a guest's shoes... If you were staying somewhere for a week long period of time, what would you expect to have in that rental home... that is what we aim to provide to guests for their stay.

Owners can expect to receive their rental income monthly. All statements and funds are released by the 10th day of the following month. Expect to receive an owner statement and an automatic direct deposit to your bank account. You can also view an electronic version of your statement once it is posted in the owner area of the website. This statement and deposit will cover all guests that check-out during that month. If you have a guest crossing over one month to the next, the payment for that reservation falls in the month they check-out. Your statement will also include a breakdown of expenses and maintenance costs including any invoices from your preferred outside vendors.

No, we handle that for you. We collect the taxes, put them into our owner escrow account, and remit on your behalf. Each reservation has taxes added to the amount of the rental—so when you see a rental dollar amount, you can rest assured that we have collected and will remit tax on top of that—you do not need to send us extra money to pay taxes nor do you need to file with your lodging authority.

The guest will always call North Star. The guest will actually never know the name of an owner for privacy reasons (unless you prefer otherwise). We take the call and dispatch the appropriate maintenance technician or vendor. We pay the vendor and add the bill to your home owner statement, taking out of the revenue owed to you during the month—that way you don't have to worry about paying out-of-pocket for anything unless it happens to be a major repair. We do charge a small fee for these types of emergencies jobs, generally around $35, but sometimes more if we have to have someone on site for extended periods of time.

North Star provides guest servicing and management, as well as property management to owners, but we are not a maintenance company. We handle calls, reservation management, guest support, regular housekeeping scheduling and inspections, dispatch of qualified maintenance personnel, monitor internet up-time, indoor temperature when equipped, maintain electronic locks, etc.
During inspections we will restock light bulbs and even perform simple maintenance like changing remote control batteries or light bulbs for lamp fixtures or ceilings 8' or lower in height if spares are available on site. Our inspection process is very thorough and we attempt to address as much as possible to minimize costs to owners.

We look at nearby comparable rentals to gage pricing in the market. We also look at availability calendars to see how well others are booked at the pricing they have posted. We also rely on our own internal data from other comparable rentals we manage. Pricing is very specific to the size of the property, the exact location, and to the quality of the finishes. No pricing is ever set perfectly the first time—the key is to monitor and adjust pricing based on actual market demand. This is where we strive to excel —we monitor conversion rates of your rental at initial pricing and adjust up or down according to how well the rental is booking. It is an ongoing process that is always a top priority. The more money our owners make, the more we make—so we try and do everything we can to maximize the revenue.