What are concierge services, and who uses them
What are concierge services, once the hotel lobby is taken out of the picture? They are individual requests carried out on the owner's behalf by an office that already holds the relationships needed to carry them out — a car waiting at an airport, a technician convened outside the maintenance calendar, a chef for a single weekend, a table held on the night the owner lands. Each one is optional, asked for singly, and quoted before it is arranged.
The hotel is where the phrase was formed, and it is the concierge services meaning most owners already carry into the conversation. Separating the two is worth the paragraphs, because the confusion has a cost in both directions: work that belongs to the standing administration of a house gets asked for as a favour, and favours that should have been quoted get absorbed into a fee. What the standing work contains is on the page for luxury property management; what follows here is everything that is not it.
What are concierge services, in one sentence?
Concierge services are optional, individually requested acts carried out for an owner or their guests by whoever already holds the keys and the contacts. They sit outside the standing administration of the house, and each one is quoted before it is carried out rather than after.
A concierge services definition that survives outside a hotel has to be built on the request rather than on the setting. The setting varies — a house on the Caribbean coast, an apartment whose owner arrives four times a year, a colonial house used for two weeks each winter — and the constant is the shape of the transaction: someone asks for something that was on no calendar, someone else says what it will take, and then it is done or it is declined.
The word itself began with custody rather than hospitality. Its earliest French attestations, cumcerge in 1195 and concierge around 1220, name someone who has charge of an important building, and the entry traces the form to a Vulgar Latin conservius rather than to any word about guests. The service to visitors is a later layer on a word that started with keys, which is a surprisingly good description of where the work sits today.
What is the difference between a hotel concierge and a property concierge?
A hotel concierge serves a guest passing through a building the hotel controls; a property concierge serves an owner who controls the building and is usually not inside it. The first improves a stay of a few nights, the second acts on a house across the months in which nobody is present.
The hotel version is the older of the two and by far the better organised. The concierges of the Paris grand hotels formed their association after an invitation to twenty of them to dine together on 26 October 1929, and the international network followed when the first six member sections met at the Carlton in Cannes on 25 April 1952. That same history describes the role as created to assist guests with their requirements in unfamiliar cities — which is precisely the part that does not transfer, because an owner is not in an unfamiliar city and the house is not unfamiliar.
What is a property concierge, then? Someone who acts on a house rather than in a lobby, for a person who is frequently on another continent at the moment the request is made. There is no desk to walk up to and no shift to catch, so the request arrives as a message, and the answer has to contain what it will cost before anything moves.
What does concierge services mean once that shift has happened? Chiefly, it changes who is being served. In a hotel the guest is the client and the building belongs to the employer. In a private house the owner is both the client and the owner of the building, and a guest — when there is one — is served on the owner's instruction and on the owner's account. Almost everything else in this guide follows from that one change.
What do concierge services do for a house that stands empty?
For an empty house the work is almost entirely preparation and reception: making the house ready for an arrival that has a date, and receiving whatever has to be let in before that date. None of it is periodic, and an empty house with no arrival scheduled generates no concierge work at all — which is the clearest test there is of what the category contains.
The requests cluster around three moments. Before an arrival: the house opened and aired, water and gas checked against the number of people coming, provisions in place, transport arranged when the flight lands at night. During the stay: whatever the owner or their guests ask for, from a chef to a boat to an appointment that has to be made in Spanish. After: the house closed properly, and anything left behind sent on.
A concierge services list written in advance is a menu, and a menu is the wrong shape for this work. What can be published honestly is the class of request an office will take — arrivals, staff, transport, provisioning, appointments, deliveries — together with the rule that each is quoted before it is arranged. Anything more specific is either a fiction or a price list, and neither belongs on a page about a house.
Concierge services for homeowners are lumpy by nature: nothing for eleven weeks, then four requests inside five days around a single visit. That is not a scheduling defect waiting to be smoothed out. It is the reason the work is quoted per request rather than carried in a monthly figure, which would be wrong in both directions and would be wrong every month.
What is not a concierge service?
Everything the house needs whether or not anybody asks. Inspections on a calendar, the upkeep of equipment, the payment of vendors against their invoices and the monthly record of what came in and what went out are administration, and they happen in the months when no request is ever made.
The distinction is easy to state and constantly blurred in practice, almost always in the direction that costs the owner clarity. A pump that fails between visits is not a favour: it belongs to the calendar of preventive maintenance, and the office answers for it whether or not anyone noticed. A car at the airport on a Friday night is on no calendar and never will be.
Nor is a concierge the right party for anything that carries professional liability. Legal and tax questions about an owner's particular situation belong to that owner's own adviser; an office knows which documents the house produces and when they exist, which is a different thing and worth keeping different. What a property manager does, day by day sets out the standing half of the arrangement in full.
Guest-facing communication for a house that is rented is its own discipline rather than a concierge extra. When a house receives paying guests, the messages, the arrival instructions and the question asked at eleven at night are part of managed rentals, staffed and scheduled as such, and they continue in weeks when the owner has asked for nothing.
How are concierge services usually priced?
Per request, quoted before the request is carried out, and billed as its own line rather than folded into the fee for administering the house. The two are separate because their bases are different: administration is continuous and charged as a share of what the house earns, while a concierge request is a single act with a supplier and an amount behind it.
This office charges no fixed or setup costs, only a percentage of income, net of expenses — and concierge requests sit outside that percentage entirely. They are optional and they are paid for. Describing them as included would be the same as pricing them at zero, which is how an office ends up owing a favour it never quoted. What the percentage itself is calculated on is a question of its own, and what a management fee is charged on answers it.
A concierge services cost in Mexico also has two components, and a quote should show both. Errands of this kind are an independent service in the sense the value added tax law gives the term — an obligation to do something that one person performs in favour of another — so they fall among the acts that law taxes, with the tax calculated by applying a rate of 16% to the values the law specifies, and the same article requires it to be passed on expressly and separately to the person receiving the service. A quote that arrives as a single undivided number is concealing one of the two.
The second component is documentary rather than arithmetical. Whoever supplies the service issues the fiscal receipt as a digital document through the tax authority's own portal, and the law places a matching obligation on the other side: those who receive services must request the corresponding digital receipt. Applied to concierge work, that means every arranged request ends with a document, and every document should be traceable to a line on the monthly statement the owner receives.
What does a concierge do that a property manager does not?
A concierge acts on request and stops when the request is finished; a property manager acts on a calendar and answers for the house between requests. The concierge's unit of work is an occasion, the manager's is a period, and that is the whole of the difference.
Both roles can sit inside the same office, and in a private house they usually should, for the plain reason that whoever can get a technician through the door at short notice is whoever already holds the keys and the vendor list. Keeping them as separate lines is not bureaucracy. It is what lets an owner see, at the end of a month, which part of the bill was the house running and which part was the owner arriving.
The table below reads the same boundary from the request rather than from the job title, which is how it actually presents itself to whoever is paying.
| The request | Whose work it is | How it is normally paid for |
|---|---|---|
| A pool pump that stops between visits | Administration: it sits on the inspection calendar | Inside the management fee; the repair itself is a house expense with its own invoice |
| A car waiting at the airport for a night arrival | Concierge: nothing scheduled it | Quoted before it is arranged, billed as its own line |
| The annual service of the gate motor | Administration: a dated act, done whether or not anyone comes | Inside the fee; the vendor's invoice is a house expense |
| A chef for one weekend, and someone to receive them | Concierge | Quoted for that occasion, with the chef's own receipt behind it |
| The monthly statement of income and expenses | Administration: produced in the months when nothing happened | Inside the fee |
| A table held at eight on the night the owner lands | Concierge | Quoted, or declined when it cannot be done |
Read down the middle column and the rule appears on its own: if the house would have needed it with nobody coming, it is administration; if it exists because a person is arriving or asking, it is concierge. That boundary holds in a house of any size, and it is the one worth insisting on before anything is agreed.
Are concierge services included in a property management fee?
No. Concierge requests are optional, quoted before they are carried out and billed separately from the fee for administering the house, because the two are calculated on different things: administration is continuous and charged as a share of what the house earns, while a concierge request is a single act with a supplier and an amount behind it. An office that describes them as included has priced them at zero, and something priced at zero is either not being done or is being paid for somewhere the owner cannot see.
What is a property concierge?
Someone who carries out individual requests on a private house for its owner, rather than for a guest in a hotel: preparing the house for a dated arrival, receiving whatever has to be let in beforehand, and arranging staff, transport or appointments while the owner is in residence. The role exists in the shape it does because the owner is usually somewhere else when the request is made, so it arrives as a message and has to be answered with a scope and a number before anything moves.
Is there a fixed price list for concierge services?
There is not, and a published list would misdescribe the work. Each request has its own supplier, its own scope and its own timing, so it is quoted for that occasion and confirmed before anything is arranged. What can be stated in advance is the class of request an office will take on and the rule that nothing is set in motion until the owner has the figure.
Do concierge services make sense for a house that is never rented?
Frequently more than for one that is. A house used four or five times a year concentrates all of its demands into the days around each visit, which is exactly the pattern this work is shaped for, while the rest of the year is administration and nothing else. A house that receives paying guests spreads the same demands across the season, and much of what looks like concierge work there is guest communication, which is scheduled rather than requested.