Vacation rental management for owners in Mexico
GEMA Properties is a private administration office. We provide vacation rental management in Mexico for owners whose house earns for part of the year and stands empty for the rest, in Tulum, Cancún, Playa del Carmen, San Miguel de Allende, Los Cabos and Acapulco. One office holds the calendar, the guests, the suppliers and the filings, and one statement reaches you each month.
Vacation rental management, as this office practises it, is the administration of a calendar and of the obligations attached to it. It begins before the first booking, with two questions that decide everything after them: may this house be let at all, and is it registered to do so.
This page is written for the owner of the house. The guest is somebody we look after; the guest is not the reader, and nothing here is a promise about what a property will earn.
You describe the house and how you want to use it, and we answer with what letting it would actually involve.
Before a house can earn
Choosing a vacation rental management company here starts with a document that has nothing to do with marketing: the condominium regulation. Some developments simply do not allow it — Isla Dorada, inside the Cancún hotel zone, prohibits vacation rental outright — and an owner who discovers that after the photographs have been taken has paid for the discovery twice.
The second question is registration, and it is where most of the year's risk sits. There is no single short-term vacation rental management rulebook in Mexico. Most short-term rental management companies work inside one regulatory map; a house in Mexico can sit in any of four state ones and a federal one, and the four do not resemble each other:
A state lodging tax applies wherever the house stands, and this page does not print a rate: the rate belongs in a proposal for one property, verified against the state's own text on the day it is written. What can be said plainly is that the return is monthly everywhere and the day it falls is not the same — Baja California Sur the first fifteen days of the following month, Guerrero the first seventeen, Guanajuato the first twenty-two, with an invoice that shows the tax and documentation kept for five years. Three dates, three states, one house each. This is a description of how the obligations work, not legal or tax advice, and we do not give either.
Then there is what the platform does to the payout, which is the number most owners find out about afterwards. Withholding is federal and it turns on one thing: with the RFC registered on the platform, the reduced withholding of 4% income tax and 8% VAT applies; without it, the platform withholds under the general regime, at materially higher rates — and below 300,000 pesos a year those withholdings may be treated as final. The difference between a registered house and an unregistered one is not a fine in some hypothetical future. It is visible on the first payout.
Airbnb management in Mexico is not a smaller version of the same job done in Colorado, and the market is neither small nor unwatched: in Quintana Roo the hotel sector itself counts close to 50,000 vacation rental units and has declared their regularisation urgent. The direction of travel is towards more registration, not less: in 2026 the municipal government of Solidaridad — Playa del Carmen — announced that the environmental sanitation charge, until now a hotel matter, will apply to vacation rentals too. Our Airbnb management services therefore begin with the paperwork and not with the listing.
What the service covers
Full-service vacation rental management means one office holds the calendar, the guests, the suppliers and the filings, and answers for all four. The vacation rental management services that follow are the standing ones, performed every month the house is on the calendar:
Where Airbnb co-hosting services stop at the listing and the messages, this office also holds the registrations, the suppliers and the monthly filings. And a vacation rental property manager who cannot tell you which registrations your house is missing is managing an inbox, not a property.
Property management for short-term rentals is not the same undertaking as looking after a house that never earns. The upkeep of the building itself — the preventive calendar, the systems, the custody of a closed house — is a separate service, described on full-service management for luxury homes. Most owners who let their house take both, because a rented house wears faster than an empty one; neither service requires the other, and the two are quoted separately.
Anything a guest asks for beyond this — a chef, a transfer, an event, a boat — is optional, quoted per use and charged when it is used. It is never folded into the fee, and it reaches the statement only for an owner who asked for it.
The calendar is the product
Owners who go looking for Airbnb management companies in Mexico are usually asking a narrower question than the one that decides the year. The year is decided by when a house can be sold at all, and that is not the same month in the six places we work.
Vacation rental revenue management, in a country this seasonal, is mostly the discipline of not selling January at September's price. The published figures show how wide the swing is, and in Quintana Roo it has dates on it: February is typically the month of highest demand and May the lowest. On the Caribbean coast Tulum's hotel occupancy fell to 49.2% in September while the Riviera Maya as a whole dropped to 44%; Cancún averaged 74.0% in November 2025, and in the first five months of 2025 Playacar sat well above the national average. In Baja California Sur the shape is different again: Los Cabos runs above 80% in January and falls to 65–69% by May. In Acapulco it is different a third time — Diamante closed December 2025 at 47.3% against 87.5% in the rest of the city, because Diamante lives on second-home owners who are not coming during the reconstruction, and the city as a whole recorded 56.8% in July 2026. These are hotel figures. They are the shape of a year, not a forecast for your house, and we will not present them as one.
Who fills the calendar changes with the place, and so does the notice you get. Los Cabos is an airlift market: its airport handled 7.5 million passengers in 2025, and in July 2025 the traffic was 59% international against 41% domestic — bookings made months ahead, from abroad. Acapulco is largely the opposite: a domestic, weekend and long-weekend market that arrives by road from Mexico City down the Autopista del Sol, 367 kilometres and four to five hours, which can be booked on a Thursday. A house cannot be run on the same lead time in both.
San Miguel de Allende does not have a season so much as a diary. Día de Muertos closed above 98% occupancy in 2023, with more than 110,000 visitors; La Alborada is held on the weekend closest to 29 September and Semana Santa is among the year's principal celebrations; music festivals and the Feria de la Lana y el Latón, in mid-June, lift both price and occupancy. Those dates are known years in advance, which means the mistake there is never a surprise — it is a calendar left unblocked.
Two things close a calendar rather than fill it, and both are seasons rather than events. The first is sargassum: the season runs April to October with a June-to-August peak, the clean months are November to April, and in 2026 it reached Quintana Roo in January, months ahead of the typical April start — the same source describes the north-facing beaches at the top of the Cancún hotel zone as naturally sheltered from the main currents, which is not the same thing as clean. The second is weather: the Atlantic season opens on 1 June and the Eastern Pacific on 15 May, both closing on 30 November, and in Los Cabos the most active phase is August to October — precisely the inverse of the December-to-April window that pays for the year. Villa rental management on the Pacific side is written around a season that opens two weeks earlier than the Atlantic one, and San Miguel de Allende, inland and on neither ocean, has no such season at all. What a storm costs is not only the nights it cancels: after Odile, a category 3 in September 2014, left nearly the whole state of Baja California Sur without electricity. A calendar has to be able to close, refund and reopen without improvising.
Luxury vacation rental management adds one constraint that ordinary letting does not: the house has to be returned to its own standard between two stays, not to an average one. That is a turnover specification, and it is written per house, before the first guest.
How the work starts
- A private valuation. You describe the house, how you use it and how often you want it for yourself. We answer with what letting it would involve, including the answer you may not want: that this house should not be let at all.
- Eligibility and inventory. The condominium regulation, the deed and the existing registrations, the systems, the inventory, the linen, the keys and the meters — and the list of what is missing. In Quintana Roo that list has a particular shape, because the RETUR-Q folio and the COFE are issued per property rather than per owner: a house bought from someone who let it does not inherit them.
- Registration. What has to be opened is opened, and what has to be renewed goes on a calendar with a date and an owner, not a reminder. The COFE is renewed between January and February; the Guanajuato lodging certificate has its own renewal clock; a Protección Civil clearance is a visit, not a form.
- The calendar and the specification. Your blocks first. Then the turnover standard, the suppliers, the arrival routine and the rules the house itself imposes — in San Miguel de Allende, the municipal change of use has to exist before the first guest rather than after the first complaint.
- Operation and one statement a month. Guests, suppliers, filings, and the same statement on the same day.
How the fee works
Vacation rental management fees here are a single percentage of income, net of expenses, and nothing else. No fixed fee, no setup fee, and no figure on this page: a percentage that means anything is written against one house.
Vacation rental property management fees are the easiest thing to compare and the least useful. Property management fees for vacation rentals are quoted as a percentage almost everywhere, so the percentage on its own tells you very little — what matters is what sits inside it and what does not. Here the standing work above sits inside it; guest extras never do, and the upkeep of the building is a separate service with its own quotation.
What moves the percentage is the house and where it stands: how many nights a year the place can realistically be sold, how much of the year it is closed, whether the calendar is fed from abroad months ahead as in Los Cabos or from Mexico City on a Thursday as in Acapulco, how many registrations the state attaches to the property, and whether the condominium adds rules of its own on top. Short-term rental property management companies are compared on commission and chosen on what happens in September.
Where we let and manage
The service does not change between the six; the year does.
If the open question is which of the four services this house actually needs, the services overview puts them next to each other.
Can any house be let?
No, and it is the first thing we check rather than the last. Some condominium regulations prohibit vacation rental outright — Isla Dorada in Cancún is the documented case — and others restrict minimum stays, access or the use of common areas, so we read the regulation before anything else is discussed.
What has to be registered before the first booking?
It depends on the state, and there is a fiscal track and a tourism track almost everywhere. In Quintana Roo that means the RETUR-Q registration inside SITUR-Q plus the RFC, the state REC and the COFE, renewed each year between January and February; in Baja California Sur, registration with the state taxpayer register within fifteen days of starting; in San Miguel de Allende, a municipal change of land use; and above all of them the federal Registro Nacional de Turismo.
Why is the platform keeping so much of my payout?
Because of how the RFC is registered, in almost every case. With the RFC registered on the platform the federal withholding stays at the reduced 4% income tax and 8% VAT; without it the platform withholds under the general regime, and putting that right is part of the first month's work rather than a service you buy later.
Do you guarantee occupancy, or a return?
No, and any figure presented to you as a guarantee is worth reading twice. What we can show is the published shape of the year in your area — Tulum at 49.2% in September is not a failure of management, it is September — and the plan for the months that do not sell themselves.
What happens to the bookings when a hurricane season opens?
The house is prepared before the season opens rather than when a forecast appears, which on the Atlantic side means 1 June and on the Pacific side 15 May. The closing sequence, the cancellation and refund rules and the reopening checks are agreed in writing before the season, because a calendar that has to improvise a refund loses more than the nights it cancels.
Can I still use the house myself?
Yes, and your dates go into the calendar before any of it is offered. Owner blocks, family stays and the closed months are entered first, and the house is prepared for your arrival and closed after you leave in exactly the way it is for a guest.
Start with a valuation
Tell us where the house is, how it is held, how often you want it for yourself, and whether it has ever been let before. We will answer with what letting it would involve here — the registrations, the calendar, the turnover standard — and, if the answer is that it should not be let, we will say that instead.