MasterHost Review

MasterHost is a co-hosting company for Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com listings, headquartered at 422 Richards St in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia — its own team page also claims a second headquarters in Dubai. It's a Canadian operation first: the company says it "officially launched" in 2014 as "the first company in Canada specializing in Airbnb management," and its home-market pricing is still built around Metro Vancouver. But masterhost.ca has built out dedicated, city-specific landing pages marketing into at least 15 US states plus Washington, D.C. — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Santa Barbara, Sacramento, San Jose, and State College among them — alongside a similar sprawl of pages for roughly 20 other countries. For a US-owner-focused site like this one, that distinction matters up front: you'd be hiring a Vancouver-run business with no US office to manage a property in your city, not a US-headquartered manager already on the ground there.

How it works for owners

MasterHost runs a co-host model: per its pricing pages, owners "maintain full ownership of their Airbnb accounts and listings and receive payments directly from the platform," rather than revenue flowing through MasterHost first. Services listed on the site cover listing creation and SEO, calendar and booking management, guest screening and 24/7 communication, cleaning and maintenance coordination, key exchange, dynamic price optimization, and multi-channel distribution across Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor.

Pricing is published in tiers and, usefully, broken out by city rather than given as one flat national number. On the Vancouver home-market pricing page, the three tiers are Basic (12%), Full (15%), and Premium (18%). On the New York page, the same three tiers run 10% / 12% / 15%. On the Chicago page, there's a fourth, cheaper "Online" tier at 8%, with Basic at 10% and Full at 12%. Higher tiers add a dedicated senior manager, priority response, concierge service, up to two free emergency visits a month, free photography, licensing support, and insurance consulting. Every page we checked states there's no onboarding fee and no cancellation fee, and that contracts run month-to-month with a one-month cancellation notice — a genuinely low-commitment structure on paper. The New York page also flags that "every Airbnb host in New York has to obtain a permit or special license," and positions MasterHost's licensing support as how it handles that for owners — a reasonable value-add in a market where the rules are a real source of owner headaches.

What we could verify

The pricing tiers above are real and published — we checked them directly on the Vancouver homepage, the pricing page, and the New York and Chicago city pages, and they're consistent with what our own competitor research already had on file. Where MasterHost gets thinner is everything around the fee. Its /team/ page describes staff only as "seasoned, hard-working, and talented specialists" — no names, no roles, no headcount, there or anywhere else on the site we could find. The "300+ Properties" figure and the phrase "Largest Airbnb Management Portfolio" both appear, near-verbatim, on the Vancouver homepage and on both the New York and Chicago city pages — the same superlative claimed for three different cities at once, with no city-level breakdown to check it against.

We could not confirm a Better Business Bureau profile for MasterHost. A property-management listing does exist on BBB at MasterHost's exact Vancouver street address, but it's registered under a different legal and DBA name — Goliath Investments Inc., "Airbnb Property Management in Metro Vancouver" — with a different phone number than MasterHost publishes, and a linked website (goliathinvest.ca) that no longer resolves at all. Nothing on that BBB page mentions MasterHost by name, so we're not counting it as MasterHost's record; whether it's a related entity, a former name, or an unrelated business sharing an office building, we can't tell from what's public. We also tried Yelp and Trustpilot directly and both blocked our request with an HTTP 403. The one third-party review count we could actually load was on Birdeye, showing 4.9 stars across 335 reviews, including at least one specific complaint dated to roughly 2022 describing cleaning-service lapses and carpet stains not reported promptly. Birdeye is a review-widget platform companies actively manage and solicit reviews through, so we're treating that rating as a data point rather than independent proof — on top of it being several years old.

How it compares to our top pick

MasterHost's per-city published pricing is a real point in its favor — most co-hosts we review make owners call for a number, and MasterHost's published US rates (8-15% across the pages we checked) undercut plenty of the field. But a published percentage is only part of the picture: it comes from a company with no US office, no named team, and no BBB record we could confirm, repeating the same "largest portfolio" line into market after market.

Our top-ranked pick, One Fine BnB, publishes one flat 10% fee rather than a tier ladder that climbs to 15-18%, and it's a single accountable US operator rather than a Vancouver-run business layering city landing pages over a remote footprint. See the full field, including other cross-border and remote operators, in our best Airbnb management companies ranking.

Bottom line

MasterHost publishes real, checkable tiered pricing that's genuinely competitive in several US markets, and its co-host structure keeps owners in control of their own Airbnb account. But it's a Vancouver, BC-run business — with a second claimed HQ in Dubai — marketing into US cities remotely, with no named staff, no headcount, and no BBB record we could confirm belongs to it. If you're a US owner considering MasterHost, get specifics in writing on who locally handles emergencies at your address before you sign; the city pages themselves don't say.