Tampa Bay Stays Review

Tampa Bay Stays is a Tampa Bay, FL co-hosting service founded by Jack, described on the company's own homepage as "a lifelong Tampa Bay local (and owner of Marker 26 Boat Rentals)" who runs the business with a small team. Rather than the full-service model most Tampa Bay managers use — where the company takes over the Airbnb account and typically charges 20% or more of revenue — Tampa Bay Stays operates as a co-host: owners keep their own listing and account, and the company handles day-to-day operations underneath it for a fee it says averages about 10% of the nightly rate. Its properties are spread across Bradenton, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Dunedin, Palm Harbor, Seminole, Apollo Beach, and Tarpon Springs.

How it works for owners

Tampa Bay Stays' short-term-rental-management page states the fee plainly: "an average management fee of just 10% per nightly rate," which it says covers listing setup and optimization, guest screening and messaging, calendar syncing across platforms to prevent double bookings, cleaning coordination, dynamic pricing tied to demand and seasonality, and 24/7 guest support. The same page emphasizes "No long-term contracts" and bills itself as "Flexible for Owners," and the homepage separately promises "Unlimited Owner Stays" with "no blackout dates" — an explicit commitment that owners can still use their own property on demand.

A separate Tampa-specific landing page repeats the service list — listing optimization with "keyword-rich titles, strong descriptions, and professional photography," guest communication, cleaning and turnover coordination, maintenance requests through a "local vendor network," and monthly reporting through "real-time dashboards" — but doesn't restate the fee itself; pricing lives only on the homepage and the short-term-rental-management page.

What we could verify

The ~10% figure is genuinely consistent: the homepage states "Our management fees average about 10% of the nightly rate," and the short-term-rental-management page independently confirms "an average management fee of just 10% per nightly rate." That's a real point in the company's favor — plenty of competitors we've reviewed publish a fee on one page and a different number (or a contradictory framing) on another.

Portfolio size is where the company's own pages disagree. The homepage highlights six properties as its featured listings, which matches the smaller figure most quick homepage scans would find. But the site's own rentals directory and XML sitemap both list 15 individual property pages — in Bradenton, St. Petersburg, Dunedin (three properties), Clearwater, Palm Harbor (three properties), Seminole, Apollo Beach, and Tarpon Springs (three properties). We opened one directly — the Bayfront Oasis, a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath St. Petersburg home sleeping 7 with a pool, hot tub, and private dock with boat lift — and confirmed it's a real, specific listing rather than a placeholder. So the true portfolio appears to be 15 properties, not the six the homepage foregrounds; still a small operation, but roughly 2.5x larger than a homepage-only read would suggest.

Company background is thin everywhere we looked. Neither the homepage, the Tampa-specific landing page, nor the company's own blog post on Tampa property management states a founding date, years in business, or team size — the blog post describes only "a growing portfolio of luxury waterfront homes, family-friendly properties, and downtown condos across Tampa and the surrounding areas," without a number. The contact page publishes no phone number or address, just a form that promises a reply "within 24 hours" and support "7 days a week."

On independent verification, we searched the Better Business Bureau's own directory directly for "Tampa Bay Stays" and found no matching business profile. Yelp and Trustpilot both returned an HTTP 403 error and blocked our automated access outright, so neither could be checked at all. That leaves the six guest testimonials quoted on the homepage — sourced from Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com reviews, per the company — as the only performance data available, and they're self-selected by the company rather than independently confirmed.

How it compares to our top pick

Tampa Bay Stays' real differentiator is structural: a true co-host model at a consistently published ~10% fee is a genuinely rare combination in a Tampa Bay market where most managers charge double that and plenty won't publish a number at all. What it lacks is scale and an independently checkable track record — no BBB profile, no accessible third-party reviews, and a homepage that undercounts its own portfolio. Our top-ranked pick, One Fine BnB, pairs that same transparent, owner-first pricing approach with a nationwide footprint rather than a single eight-community pocket of Tampa Bay. See how it stacks up against the rest of the field in our full best Airbnb management companies ranking.

Bottom line

For a Tampa Bay owner who wants to stay the host of record and pay close to half the typical local full-service rate, Tampa Bay Stays' published ~10% average fee is a legitimate draw, and the 15 properties behind it are real and currently active — not just the six the homepage shows. Before signing, ask directly for a current, written property count and a minimum-stay or contract-length policy (neither is published), and don't expect the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, or Trustpilot to back up the testimonials on the company's own site — none of the three could be independently checked during our research.