Design Firm Hiring Guide for Vacation Rental Owners
What to Look for in an Interior Designer for Your Vacation Rental Property
If you're choosing an interior designer for a vacation rental, you're choosing someone whose work can affect your return on a significant investment.
Reliable cash flow is the goal, and consistently healthy average daily rates (ADR) and occupancy drive that.
Interior design contributes by making people click on your listing, giving them a reason to book at the rate you need, and shaping a stay worth reviewing, recommending, and booking again.
That changes what you should look for in a designer: prior success with vacation rentals, an understanding of what makes them perform, the ability to complete the work on your timeline, a performance guarantee, and fees that keep your interests aligned.
Prior success with vacation rentals
Someone can be a skilled interior designer and still be new to what a vacation rental needs. We know because that was us when we first began designing them. We knew how to make a space look good, but it took years of vacation rental projects to develop the process we use today for investment properties.
That learning curve matters when it's your property and your money. Look for designers who have worked on vacation rentals like yours.
Ask what they were responsible for, what the owner wanted the property to achieve, and what happened after the work was finished.
A portfolio shows you the rooms; the conversation should tell you whether the designer understands the outcome you are hiring them for.
If your budget leads you to a designer who is still learning this niche, that can be a reasonable choice. Just make it with your eyes open. Experience with beautiful residential interiors and experience helping a vacation rental perform are different things.
An understanding of what makes a vacation rental perform
Return on investment (ROI) matters: each design choice has a cost and should have a reason for being there, whether it helps attract guests, justify the nightly rate, improve the stay, or reduce replacement costs. A vacation-rental designer should be able to explain that work at three stages:
- Stop the scroll. When guests scan listings, a property needs distinctive spaces that catch their attention in photos. Ask how the designer will create those scenes in your property, rather than give it a look that blends into every other listing.
- Convert browsers into bookers. Once a guest opens the listing, the property needs to give them a reason to choose it beyond price. Design choices should make the experience and value of the stay apparent. When demand softens or supply grows, an interchangeable property has to fight on price. That can shrink margins and threaten cash flow.
- Create a memorable stay. The property has to deliver after check-in. Its feel, function, and friction matter: whether the spaces work for the group, whether furnishings stay comfortable and intact, and whether small annoyances get in the way of the stay. These choices can support or detract from the 5-star reviews, referrals, and rebookings that help sustain occupancy.
Durability belongs in this conversation. Furnishings in a rental have to withstand repeated use, and worn or broken pieces create replacement costs as well as a poorer guest experience. Ask how the designer chooses materials and furnishings for the way your property will actually be used.
We explain the three stages in more detail in our Vacation Rental Performance Kit.
The key thing here when choosing a designer is whether they can connect their design decisions to what the property needs to accomplish at each stage.
Full service that gets the property finished
Launching or refreshing a high performing vacation rental is a very time consuming process.
If you're like most investors, you don't have that much free time. Or, if you do, you can get a higher return on your time by doing other things instead. This means you probably need a full-service design firm.
Full service can be broken down into design planning, procurement, and installation.
The design plan establishes the design direction and design language that determines what ends up being purchased for the project.
Procurement turns that plan into purchases and manages the many things that happen between placing an order and receiving it.
Installation brings the pieces together so the property creates a powerful impression in-person and in listing photos.
Look for a performance guarantee
When we were new to vacation rentals, it was hard to bid a project accurately. Years of experience in the vacation rental space have refined our understanding of what a realistic budget is to launch or refresh a high performing property.
Our performance guarantee grew out of that understanding: if we give you a budget, we stick to it. If we go over the amount we bid, we cover the difference. If you request something outside the bid, we tell you the additional cost in advance and let you decide whether to proceed.
This isn't the only guarantee possible, but whoever you work with should have some way of reducing risk for you as an investor when it comes to choosing who to work with.
Watch out for misaligned incentives
The way a designer is paid can influence whether or not your interests are aligned with theirs, and any misalignment at this level increases your level of risk as an investor.
Hourly billing
With hourly billing, the designer's fee grows as the hours grow. This incentivizes the designer to spend more time than necessary and, as a result, charge you more than necessary to get the project done.
Percentage billing
With fees that are based on a percentage of furnishings, the designer's fee increases as furnishing spend grows. This incentivizes designers to spend more money than necessary on furniture, soft goods, art, accessories, essentials, and amenities.
For more details on how large this impact can be, see our Budget Breakdown for High Performing Vacation Rentals.
Low fixed fee, high markups
With a low design fee where the majority of the firm's profits come from product markups, the designer earns more from the purchases. The firm is once again incentivized to spend more than necessary on goods.
In each of these three cases, a decision that costs the investor more can also pay the designer more. That tension is worth seeing clearly before you choose a design firm.
Why we chose our fee structure
We structure our design fee as a flat amount based on the property and scope, separate from what you spend on furnishings.
We put a great deal of time into every project; if we billed for every hour, many investors could not afford the work we do. A flat fee lets us give the project that attention without increasing the design fee as the hours add up.
Separating our fee from furnishing spend also keeps our focus on the pieces that best serve the property. The health of our business does not depend on recommending a more expensive sofa or filling a larger shopping cart.
Fee offsetting
Our trade relationships, trade discounts, and deal hunting significantly reduce what clients spend on goods. In our projects, those savings offset most of our design fee and sometimes all of it.
Our goal with every project is to save you so much that our services are effectively free.
To give you a sense of how close we get to that, our average right now is 92.4%.
Putting it all together
Compare the results a firm has delivered for vacation rentals and how its design will help guests click, book, and generate rebookings, referalls, and 5-star reviews.
Consider whether the team can finish on your timeline and understand which parts of the work they will handle. A limited scope can leave hundreds of purchases and an installation on your plate.
Ask for a performance guarantee to minimize risks associated with choosing your design firm.
Finally, look at whether a firm's fee structure rewards the decisions you want it to make. The lowest design fee is not always the lowest-cost path to a property that's ready to rent.