Why I Started STR Select

I own a short-term rental in Glen Rose, Texas. I built STR Select because I went looking for an answer to one simple question: what does a property manager actually charge.

Texas charges a 6% state hotel occupancy tax on a stay like mine, and that tax does not file itself. Someone has to calculate it, remember the due date and send it in, every period, whether the property had a great month or a quiet one. That single recurring task is a small preview of everything else that comes with running a rental: pricing the calendar, answering a guest at 11 p.m., coordinating a cleaner, deciding whether a maintenance call is worth a service fee or a quick fix yourself.

I have spent 16 years in digital marketing and search, most of it on how buyers find and choose a company before they ever talk to a salesperson. I studied visual communication at the University of Texas at Arlington, and I still work out of Fort Worth. None of that is short-term rental experience. What it gave me was a trained eye for a specific kind of failure: a market where the buyer has no way to compare offers because almost nobody selling into it will put a number in writing.

That is exactly what I found when I started looking at property management in other STR markets to understand what a fair deal looks like for my own property. I picked the Poconos as the first market to index seriously, mapped sixteen companies that manage short-term rentals there, and went through every one of their own pricing pages looking for an actual rate. Two of them had one. The other fourteen either quote privately or point you to a third-party estimate instead of their own number.

Two of sixteen is not a market that is being coy about pricing. It is a market that has decided quote-only pricing works better for the seller than for the buyer, and it has decided that at scale. I do not think every quote-only manager is hiding something. I think most owners never get the chance to find out, because they only ever talk to one or two companies before they run out of patience and pick one.

STR Select is my attempt to fix that for the parts of the country I can actually verify, one market at a time. Every fact on the site traces back to a company's own page or a public record, with the date I checked it. Nothing gets ranked on a feeling. The scoring formula is public: fee transparency weighted at 30%, ahead of verified reviews, local depth and service scope, because fee transparency is the one thing a company fully controls and still withholds most often. If a company changes its rate, or starts publishing one, the site is supposed to catch it and update.

I am not neutral in the way a stranger to this space would be. I own a rental. I want a good manager for it, or a good reason to keep self-managing, and I want the same answer for anyone reading this who is in the same spot I was in.

If you read one page on this site before any other, read the fee index for whatever market you are in. If your manager is not in it yet, ask us to add them, and ask your manager the same question I kept asking mine: what do you actually charge, in writing, before I see a walkthrough. Most of them will not answer. That is useful information too.