What an Airbnb co-host does, and how to find one in Nairobi

Most owners who come to us do not arrive with the word "co-host". They arrive with a sentence: I have an apartment on Airbnb, I cannot keep doing this, is there someone who can run it for me. Co-host is the term for that someone, and it is worth understanding properly, because the difference between a co-host and a management company that takes over your listing is the difference between keeping two years of reviews and starting again from zero.

What is a co-host on Airbnb?

A co-host is a person or company you add to your own listing, with permissions you control, who runs the day to day of it. The listing stays on your account. The reviews accrue to you. The payout still lands in the bank account you nominated. What changes is who answers the messages, who meets the guest, who schedules the cleaner and who deals with the shower that stops working on a Sunday.

Plenty of Nairobi owners reach for a different word for the same person and search for an Airbnb agent instead, which turns up a stranger set of results and a market full of people who want to become one rather than be hired as one.

That is the structural point and it is the one most owners miss. There are two quite different arrangements sold under similar language:

• Co-hosting. Your listing, your account, your review history. Someone else operates it on your behalf.
• Full letting to an operator. The unit is listed on the operator account. They hold the listing, the reviews and often the guest payments. You receive a monthly figure from them.

Both can be run honestly and both are common in Nairobi. But only one of them leaves you with a transferable asset at the end of it. If you spend two years building a 4.9 rating and ninety reviews, and all of that sits on somebody else account, then your negotiating position on the fee is weaker every year rather than stronger, and the day you leave you are a brand new listing again.

Ask whose account the listing sits on. It is a one sentence question and it decides whether the review history you spend two years building is yours or theirs.

What does an Airbnb co-host do?

In practice the job is a rota, not a task list. A long let manager deals with a handful of events a year. Short let work generates several a week, and most of them are time sensitive.

• Listing setup and copy, photography coordination, and keeping the calendar synced if the unit sits on more than one platform
• Pricing, revisited continuously rather than set once at launch
• Guest enquiries and booking approvals, including the vetting decision on a request that does not look right
• Check in and check out, which in Nairobi frequently means a late arrival off a delayed flight and a guest who cannot work the gate
• Cleaning and laundry scheduled around back to back stays, plus the contingency when a cleaner does not turn up
• Consumables, linen replacement and inventory tracking
• Maintenance, including the repairs that have to happen while a guest is still in the unit
• Reviews, damage claims, and the occasional guest who has to be asked to leave
• Monthly reporting: what came in, what went out, what you are owed

A co-host who does the first two and none of the rest is a pricing consultant with a generous job title. Establish which of the list above is actually included before you agree a percentage, because the range of things people mean by co-hosting is enormous.

How does a co-host get paid on Airbnb?

There are three arrangements you will encounter, and they have genuinely different consequences if the relationship ends badly.

1. A co-host payout split set inside Airbnb. Airbnb lets the host allocate a co-host a percentage of each reservation, or a fixed amount per booking, and pays it to them directly. The attraction is that nothing is owed between you: each payout is split at source, so there is no invoice, no arrears and no argument about what was collected.
2. An invoice against a monthly statement. The full payout reaches you and the co-host bills their percentage afterwards against a statement of the month. This is how most management companies operate, including us, because it also has to account for direct bookings and for costs the platform knows nothing about.
3. The operator collects and remits to you. Guest money lands with them and they send you the balance. This is the arrangement to look at hardest. Ask what happens to money held on your behalf if the company fails, and what happens to a booking already paid for a stay that falls after your notice period ends.

None of these is inherently wrong. The first is the cleanest for a single unit with all bookings on one platform. The second is unavoidable once there are direct bookings, cleaning costs and repairs in the picture, which is to say once the operation is real.

How to find a co-host for your Airbnb in Nairobi

Airbnb runs its own co-host directory, the Co-Host Network, and it is the thing most people are looking for when they search for "find a co-host". It does not operate in Kenya. At the time of writing it covers thirteen countries, none of them African, so a Nairobi owner who enters their address gets nothing back. Worth knowing before you spend an evening looking for a feature that is not there. The realistic sources here are word of mouth in your own building, the management companies that advertise short let work, and asking whoever cleans for you already who else they clean for. Those routes, and how to vet what they turn up, are set out in where to find an Airbnb co-host in Nairobi.

Whichever route you take, the filtering questions are the same, and they are mostly about capacity rather than enthusiasm:

1. Whose account does the listing sit on? Covered above, and worth asking first because the answer changes everything else.
2. How many units does one coordinator handle? Attention is arithmetic. Past a certain ratio your unit gets whatever is left over at the end of the day.
3. Who answers a guest at eleven at night, and who covers when that person is asleep or on leave? One person with a phone is not a rota, however committed they are.
4. What can you spend without asking me? There should be a number, and a higher number above which you approve in writing.
5. What is the notice period? Short let work is monthly work and the commitment should be monthly too. Long lock ins in this business are a red flag rather than a sign of seriousness.
6. Can I see my own calendar and pricing? If you cannot see your occupancy you cannot tell whether the fee is earning anything.

On price, full short let management in Nairobi generally runs between 15 and 25 percent of revenue, and the spread reflects real differences in what is included. We set out the arithmetic, and what the percentage is charged on, in how much Airbnb managers charge in Kenya.

How to remove a co-host from Airbnb

Worth knowing before you need it. Where the arrangement is a genuine co-hosting one, removal is an administrative act in your listing settings: you withdraw the permissions and any payout split, and the listing, the calendar and the review history remain yours. The practical work is the handover, which means recovering keys and access codes, redirecting the cleaner and confirming who is honouring bookings already taken for dates after the change.

Where the unit was listed on somebody else account, removal is not administrative at all. You are closing one listing and opening another, and the reviews do not travel. This is the cost of the arrangement, and it is not visible on the day you sign up. It becomes visible on the day you want to leave, which is exactly when you have the least leverage.

When a co-host is not worth it

Self managing is genuinely right for some owners and it would be dishonest of us to pretend otherwise. It works if you live in Nairobi, have one unit, can answer a phone at unsociable hours and have a cleaner you trust completely. In that situation the fee is a real saving, and the honest advice is to keep doing it.

It stops working when you are abroad and cannot meet a guest, when you pass roughly two units, when your job does not tolerate interruption, or when you notice you have started to resent the guests. That last one is the reliable signal and it shows up in the reviews within a month.

How Goldstay co-hosts

We act as co-host on units in Westlands, Kilimani, Riverside, Kileleshwa and the surrounding areas. The listing stays in your name and the reviews stay with you, which we do on purpose: it keeps the pressure on us to earn the renewal rather than to rely on holding your asset. Our fee is 20 percent of revenue. Expenses above USD 50 come with a receipt, anything above USD 250 is approved by you first, notice is 30 days with no exit fee, and the records come with you when you go.

Related reading: what happens when you hand a Nairobi Airbnb over, how to choose an Airbnb management company and what Nairobi occupancy actually looks like.