Great Stays Review

Great Stays is a full-service short-term rental manager built around two adjoining Michigan markets: Detroit, where founder Alex DeCamp grew the business from a handful of arbitraged and inherited units into a 100+-property portfolio, and Ann Arbor, where a sister brand called Stadium Suites runs a 64-unit co-living project blocks from Michigan Stadium. Combined, that lines up with the roughly 164 units we'd tracked for the company elsewhere. Unlike most single-market independents in this category, Great Stays also runs its own direct-booking consumer website alongside Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com listings — a detail that matters for owners weighing how dependent their revenue will be on third-party platform fees.

How it works for owners

The owner-facing property management page lists a standard full-service scope: dynamic pricing across Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, and Great Stays' own direct-booking site; professional cleaning between stays; 24/7 guest communication; maintenance coordination; supply restocking; review management; smart-lock/keyless entry; professional photography; and what the company calls compliance with "Michigan short-term rental regulations." Owners get a real-time portal with financial reporting and monthly statements, built on the OwnerRez platform referenced in the site's footer. Onboarding runs through a four-step funnel — free property assessment, custom revenue projection, photography/listing/smart-lock setup, then ongoing management — but every step routes to a "Get Your Free Property Assessment" form rather than a published rate. We found no percentage, flat fee, or fee range anywhere on greatstays.co, including on the Detroit and Ann Arbor market pages and the company's press page.

The two markets are handled differently. Detroit management covers five neighborhoods — Midtown, Brush Park, Corktown, West Village, and the University District/Detroit Golf Club area — with pricing tied to the city's event calendar; the company's press page recaps a WXYZ Channel 7 (Detroit's ABC affiliate) segment on demand around the 2024 NFL Draft. Ann Arbor runs through Stadium Suites, 11 co-living townhomes at a single Henry Street address with private locked bedrooms, shared kitchens, and an on-site business center, aimed at Michigan football weekends, campus visitors, and area hospital-system guests. A separate corporate housing line targets 30+ day furnished stays for employees relocating to named regional employers — Stellantis, General Motors, and Wayne State University — which is one way a portfolio this size can smooth occupancy outside peak leisure and event windows.

What we could verify

Alex DeCamp's founder story holds up outside the company's own marketing. Great Stays' press page names him directly and links a WXYZ segment plus two outside podcast interviews, both of which we opened. On the Get Paid For Your Pad episode, DeCamp describes moving from corporate bank lending into Airbnb arbitrage around 2016, inheriting six units from a departing operator, and now overseeing more than 150 property turns a month using Breezeway for maintenance tracking and ChatGPT-built SOPs for guest communication. A separate Boostly interview, from earlier in the company's growth when DeCamp cited around 26 properties with five more planned, adds that he holds urban-planning and real-estate-development degrees and favors converting distressed multi-family buildings into mixed short-term-rental-and-retail assets. Neither podcast is run by Great Stays, which makes them useful outside corroboration for a founder bio the company's own site otherwise keeps brief.

Other claims are thinner. The owner-facing page markets a "4.96-star Top Airbnb Rating," but the copy attributes that figure to one flagship listing — The Lucien, in Brush Park — not the 164-unit portfolio as a whole. The company's own /reviews page, linked in the main navigation, showed no visible star ratings or testimonials when we opened it. We searched BBB.org directly for "Great Stays" in Detroit, Michigan, and found no matching business profile — not a poor rating, simply no listing. Yelp and Trustpilot both blocked automated access to their review pages for this company, so beyond the site's own marketing we found no independent star rating to check it against. On licensing, Great Stays states on multiple pages that it is "a licensed property management company in the State of Michigan," but no license number, licensing board, or registered legal entity name is published anywhere we could find, and we could not independently confirm the claim against a state registry. No contract length, minimum commitment period, or termination terms appear on the owner-facing pages, and beyond DeCamp, no other leadership names or team size are disclosed.

How it compares to our top pick

Great Stays' real advantages are scale and channel diversity — a combination of size (100+ Detroit units, 64 more in Ann Arbor) and an owned direct-booking site that most single-market independents in this category don't operate. But an owner comparing management contracts still can't find the one number that usually decides the comparison: what percentage of revenue, or what flat fee, Great Stays actually charges. One Fine BnB publishes its terms up front instead of gating them behind a property-assessment call. See the full field in our best Airbnb management companies ranking.

Bottom line

Great Stays is a real, sizable, locally run operator with a founder whose background holds up to outside scrutiny and a two-market portfolio large enough to matter in both Detroit and Ann Arbor. If you own in either market and want a full-service manager with its own booking channel, it's worth a call — just get the fee percentage, contract length, and termination terms in writing before you sign, since none of the three is published anywhere on the site.