Property Management for Holiday Homes in Tuscany: What It Includes and How It Is Paid (2026)

Property management for a holiday home is the work of looking after a house and renting it out on the owner’s behalf: keeping it safe and maintained while it stands empty, setting the prices and filling the calendar, looking after guests from the first enquiry to the departure, and handling the money and the paperwork. It can be split into three services that can be bought separately, which is how we offer it: Hausbetreuung, which looks after the house, Revenue Management, which makes it earn, and Komplette Verwaltung, which does everything and includes the other two.

This article is part of our complete guide to buying property in Tuscany. It explains what each service involves, which rules a manager handles for you in 2026, how managers are paid, and what to ask before you hand over the keys. We offer all three services ourselves, so we say so where it matters, and we tell you what to check whoever you choose.

Key takeaways

• Three services, not one. Caretaking looks after the house, revenue management sets prices and fills the calendar, full property management runs the rental from enquiry to statement. You can buy the first two on their own or together.
• An empty house needs someone local. Many Italian home insurance policies suspend theft cover once a house has been empty for more than 45 days in a row. Someone has to check the house, hold the keys and deal with a leak before it becomes a ceiling.
• Pricing is a job of its own. The two pricing studies that publish their figures, from Your.Rentals and Hostaway, point the same way: revenue rose because more nights were booked, while the nightly rate went slightly down. The aim is to fill May, June, September and October.
• The rules are many, and the fines real. A short let in Tuscany needs a national code, the CIN, shown in every listing, safety devices, a notice to the town hall, and every guest identified in person and reported to the police within 24 hours. The income can be taxed at a flat 21% on one house, and if a manager collects the rent, it holds back 21% as an advance on your tax.
• Check how the fee is calculated, not only its size. A share of gross bookings, a share of the net and a fixed fee lead to very different results on the same house. Ask what is deducted before the share is taken, and who pays for cleaning, the pool and the garden.

What is property management for a holiday home?

It is the local, hands-on work that turns a second home into a rental that runs without the owner: the house, the guests, the prices and the money. Managing a holiday home is a different job from managing a long-term let. A long-term manager deals with one tenant, a lease, the rent and the occasional repair. A holiday-home manager deals with dozens of guests a year, prices that change by the week, a changeover and a cleaning every few days, check-ins, reviews, and a set of rules written for short stays.

In Tuscany it is a large market. The Region counted about 61,000 short lets in 2025, offering 304,000 beds, and 77% of those beds are in the provinces of Florence, Livorno, Lucca and Grosseto (Regione Toscana, Ufficio Regionale di Statistica, Arrivi e pernottamenti in Toscana: le principali evidenze 2025, May 2026). When the owner lives somewhere else, that is where a manager comes in.

Caretaking, revenue management and property management: what is the difference?

The three services answer three different needs. Caretaking is for the owner who does not rent the house, or rents it rarely, and wants it checked and ready. Revenue management is for the owner who already looks after guests, alone or with someone local, and wants the house to earn more. Full property management is for the owner who wants the income without the work.

What does caretaking include?

Caretaking, custodia in Italian and home watch in American English, is the service for a house that spends most of the year empty. A typical service includes:

• A regular inspection, for example monthly: opening and airing the house, checking the systems, windows and shutters, the alarm, leaks and damp, with a written report and dated photos after each visit.
• Keys and access for technicians, contractors and anyone the owner sends.
• Garden and pool: coordinating the gardener and the pool company, and checking the work is done.
• Emergencies and breakdowns, handled with the owner’s contractors or the caretaker’s own.
• Opening and closing for the season, so the house is ready when you arrive and closed properly when you leave.
• Deliveries and works, with someone on site to check they go as agreed.

Why it matters:

• Your insurance may stop covering an empty house. Many Italian home policies suspend theft cover once the house has been empty for more than 45 consecutive days: both AXA’s Nuova Protezione Casa (May 2026 edition) and Bene Assicurazioni’s Bene Casa (February 2024 edition) use that threshold, and in AXA’s policy the exclusion for jewellery and valuables starts after 21 days. Some policies treat a declared occasional home differently: AXA’s, for example, keeps the theft cover however long such a house is empty, but with a 20% deductible on thefts while nobody is living there, and covers jewellery and valuables only while you or your family are in the house. Read the vacancy clause of your own policy, and ask your insurer in writing whether a caretaker’s regular visits stop the count: the policies we read do not say they do. What caretaking does give you is an early warning and a dated photo record of the state of the house, which helps with any claim.
• Water does not wait. A leak or a storm in a closed house is found late, when the damage has grown.
• A pool and a garden do not stop. Left alone for a season they deteriorate quickly, and bringing them back costs more than looking after them.
• No flights for a technician. Someone opens the door, checks the work and tells you, and you decide from wherever you are.
• The house is ready when you arrive. No first day of the holiday lost to shutters, contractors and surprises.

What is revenue management, and does it make a difference?

Revenue management is the work of selling each week to the right guest at the right price. It sets prices, minimum stays and channels from a reading of demand, instead of from a fixed price list written once a year. Dynamic pricing software is one of its tools; deciding the rules, choosing the channels and improving the listing are the rest of the job.

In practice, for a Tuscan villa, it means:

• Prices by season, week and event: high, mid and low season, bank holidays and local events, reviewed as bookings come in. August does not cost what June does.
• Minimum stays and changeover days that adapt to fill the gaps between two bookings, while the weeks the owner keeps for himself or herself stay blocked.
• Listings that get found: professional photographs and careful texts, revised when bookings slow down.
• Several channels, one calendar: the villa’s own website, Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and partner agencies, with availability kept in sync to avoid selling the same week twice.
• The competition in view: prices and availability of similar houses nearby, so the villa is neither too expensive nor too cheap.
• A monthly report on bookings, income, prices applied and what changes next month.

How much difference does it make? Several of the published figures come from companies that sell pricing software, so read them as such. Your.Rentals compared 541 listings in 34 countries over the same periods of two consecutive years, before and after switching on its own dynamic pricing, and found revenue per listing up 36%, without a control group (2025 Study: Real Data on Dynamic Pricing for Vacation Rentals). Hostaway compared listings using its dynamic pricing with listings priced by hand, and found that revenue per available night grew 25% more, without saying how many listings it studied (January 2026). Some US operators go further and write that dynamic pricing adds 10 to 40% to revenue, without publishing the data behind the range.

The detail that matters is elsewhere. In both studies the average nightly rate did not rise. It fell 0.7% in the Your.Rentals study, and in the Hostaway study it fell 1.1% while the rate of the listings priced by hand rose 1.4%. The extra income came from more nights booked: Your.Rentals measured 37% more. An independent study of Airbnb’s own pricing tool, published in the journal Marketing Science in 2021, found a smaller effect in the same direction: hosts who switched it on cut their nightly rate by about 6% and earned 8.6% more per day. For a Tuscan villa that is the honest lesson. Pricing well is not about charging more in August, which the market does anyway; it is about filling the weeks in May, June, September and October that a fixed price list leaves empty, and the gaps between two bookings that a rigid seven-night minimum creates.

Direct bookings matter too. A booking made on the villa’s own website pays no commission to a portal, while the large platforms keep a share of every booking they bring. A villa with a website and repeat guests keeps more of what it earns.

What does full property management include?

Full property management includes caretaking and revenue management, and adds everything that happens between a booking and the money reaching the owner:

• Guests from enquiry to departure: answering enquiries, preparing the arrival, being the guests’ phone number during the stay, and asking for a review when they leave.
• Check-in, cleaning and linen: someone to welcome the guests in person, as the law requires, with a welcome kit, and the cleaning and linen organised between stays. The cleaning is paid by the guests, inside the booking; the person who does it is paid at cost.
• Compliance: the notice to the town hall, the CIN and the safety devices, the registration of every guest with the police, the tourist tax.
• Collection and payments: rents collected, the 21% tax advance held back and paid to the tax office, and the gardener, pool company and cleaners paid out of the income.
• A monthly statement with income, costs and receipts, a transfer of what is due to the owner, and the annual tax certificate for the withholdings.

Which rules does a manager handle for you in Tuscany?

We cover the national code in detail in our guide to the CIN and the short-let rules. In short, this is what letting a house for stays of up to 30 days involves in October 2026:

• The CIN. Every short let needs the national identification code, the Codice Identificativo Nazionale, displayed outside the building and shown in every listing, wherever it is published. Letting without it costs a fine of €800 to €8,000; not displaying it, €500 to €5,000. A foreign owner without Italian digital identity can ask the Ministry of Tourism for credentials, or let the manager apply as a delegate.
• Safety devices. Every short let, business or not, must have working gas and carbon monoxide detectors and portable fire extinguishers, with at least one extinguisher on every floor and one for every 200 square metres. Missing them costs €600 to €6,000 for each violation.
• The police, and a person at the door. Guests must be registered with the police through the Alloggiati Web portal within 24 hours of arrival, or within six hours for stays of 24 hours or less. In November 2025 the Council of State confirmed that their identity must be checked in person: a passport copy sent by email and a code for a key box are not enough. The court added, without ruling on it, that a live video link at the entrance might do the same job if it verifies, there and then, that the guest is the person on the document.
• The tourist tax. It is set by each municipality, and not every municipality charges it. Whoever collects the guest’s payment, the manager or the portal, is responsible for paying it to the town hall and filing the annual return.
• The Region. In Tuscany a private owner who lets a villa on short stays, directly or through a manager, must notify the municipality’s one-stop business office, the SUAP, online when the activity starts; the villa then receives a regional code, needed to obtain the CIN. The towns with the highest tourist density and all provincial capitals, Florence, Siena and Grosseto among them, may adopt their own rules, with zones where each house needs a five-year permit, so check with the town hall before you start (Tuscany’s tourism law, as amended in June 2026).
• No hotel services. Cleaning, linen, wifi and utilities are fine. Breakfast, meals, car hire or guides take the let out of the short-let rules, and in Tuscany offering the extra services typical of hotels and other accommodation businesses can cost a regional fine of €2,000 to €12,000. Extras for guests have to be organised and paid separately, with the people who provide them.
• The tax. A private owner can pay a flat 21% tax, the cedolare secca, on the short lets of one house chosen in the tax return, and 26% on a second one. From 2026, letting three or more apartments on short stays is presumed to be a business, with a VAT number and different rules, and a villa owned through a company is outside this regime altogether. The tax is due on the full price of the stay, including a cleaning fee charged in the booking; the commission paid to the portal or to the manager is not deducted, and under the flat-rate regime no other cost is deductible either. If a manager or a portal collects the rent, it must hold back 21% and pay it to the Italian tax office as an advance on your tax, whatever rate you end up paying, and certify the amount to you by 16 March of the following year. If you live abroad the income is still taxed in Italy: you file an Italian tax return each year, which is also where you choose the flat-rate regime. Your home country may take the same income into account too: the tax treaty between the two countries decides how double taxation is avoided, by a credit or by an exemption, depending on the country (Agenzia delle Entrate, Locazioni brevi, April 2026 edition).

None of this is difficult, but most of it is ongoing: every booking, every guest and every month. That is most of the case for a manager, and it is also the first thing to check in one: a good manager will not list a house that is not compliant.

How is property management paid?

We have found no official or independent survey of what property managers charge in Italy. The percentages that circulate online are given without data behind them, so we do not quote a market range. What we can describe is how fees are built:

• Full management is priced as a percentage of the booking income: either of the gross, what the guests pay, or of a net figure, after some costs have been deducted.
• Revenue management on its own is priced as a percentage of the booking income, while the owner keeps the operations.
• Caretaking of an empty house is priced as a fixed monthly fee or a quote.
• A guaranteed rent, offered by some operators, pays the owner a fixed sum and leaves the operator whatever the house earns above it.

An Italian company adds VAT, at 22%, to its fee, so check whether the figures you are shown include it.

Whatever the model, three questions make offers comparable:

• What is deducted before the percentage is taken? Portal commissions, cleaning, the pool and the garden, utilities during stays, the tax. The same percentage on a different base is a different price.
• Wer bezahlt Reinigung und Wäsche? Cleaning can be charged to the guest as part of the booking. If it is, and the manager charges it to the owner as well, you pay twice.
• Are contractors charged at cost? A manager may add a margin to the gardener, the pool and the cleaners. Ask to see the receipts.

This is how our three services are priced. Hausbetreuung is quoted villa by villa, in writing, after we have visited the house, because the price depends on its size, the garden, the pool and how many visits it needs. Revenue Management is a percentage of what the bookings bring in after the portals’ commissions, and the running costs of the house stay outside it. Komplette Verwaltung is a share of the net: what is left of the booking income after the portals’ commissions, the cleaning, the ordinary running costs of the rental and the tax. We earn more only when the owner does, so we have every interest in keeping costs low and prices right. Utility bills, IMU, TARI and extraordinary maintenance stay with the owner, in the owner’s name; we explain those costs in what it costs to own a house in Tuscany.

How to choose a property manager in Tuscany

Before you hand over the keys, ask for these in writing:

1. A separate account for your money. Rental income should sit in an account dedicated to your house, never mixed with the manager’s own funds.
2. A monthly statement with receipts, not only a total.
3. Contractors at cost, with the supplier’s invoice, and no margin added.
4. A spending limit. Works above an agreed amount only with your written approval on a quote.
5. Compliance before the first booking. A good manager will not list a house without a CIN, the safety devices and the municipality’s requirements in order.
6. Who withholds and pays the tax, and who issues your certificate of withholdings.
7. A named contact for you, and a separate number for the guests.
8. Presence on the ground. How long does it take them to reach your house when a pipe bursts in January?
9. Languages. Your guests may write in English, German, Dutch or French, and the plumber speaks Italian.
10. Notice and exit. How long the contract lasts, how you leave it, and who owns the listing, the photos, the reviews and the website when you do.

Do you need a property manager?

Not always. If you live nearby, speak Italian and rent a few weeks a year to people you know, you can manage with a local cleaner, a gardener and a good accountant. A manager starts to earn its fee when you live abroad, when the house is rented for many weeks a year, when you want the income without the phone calls, or when the paperwork, from the police registration within 24 hours to the tourist tax and the tax withholding, is more than you want to handle from another country. You do not have to decide everything at once: you can start with caretaking and add revenue management, or full management, when you decide to rent.

How we can help

We are a boutique agency based in Grosseto, and we look after villas in the Maremma and southern Tuscany, where we can reach a house quickly. We offer the three services described here, separately or together: caretaking, revenue management, and Komplette Verwaltung, which includes the other two. The photographer, a website for the villa and the listings on the portals are included in revenue management and property management. Rental income goes into an account dedicated to the villa, never mixed with ours; contractors are paid at the supplier’s price with the receipt; works above €500 need the owner’s written approval on a quote; and a villa is rented only once it is compliant. Each owner has one named contact, and the guests have their own number.

If you own a villa in Tuscany, or you are buying one and plan to rent it, Gespräch buchen, in English, Italian or German. We will visit the house and tell you in writing what it needs and what we estimate it can earn.

Häufige Fragen

What does a property manager do for a holiday home in Tuscany?

A property manager looks after the house and rents it out for you: inspections, keys, the pool and the garden, prices and listings, guests from enquiry to departure, check-in and cleaning, the police registration of guests, the tourist tax, rent collection and a monthly statement. Some managers sell parts of this separately, as caretaking or revenue management.

What is the difference between property management and revenue management?

Revenue management is only the commercial side: prices, minimum stays, listings and booking channels. Property management covers everything, including the house, the guests, the cleaning, the paperwork and the money, and normally includes revenue management.

Brauche ich eine Hausbetreuung, wenn ich das Haus nicht vermiete?

If the house stays empty for long periods, yes, it is the service designed for that case. Someone checks the house regularly, holds the keys, deals with emergencies and contractors, and opens and closes it for the season. Remember that many Italian home policies suspend theft cover after 45 consecutive days of vacancy, so read your policy’s clause too.

How much does property management cost in Tuscany?

We have found no official survey of managers’ fees in Italy, and the ranges found online have no data behind them. Full management can be priced as a percentage of the booking income, revenue management as a percentage on its own, and caretaking as a monthly fee or a quote. Compare offers by asking what is deducted before the percentage is taken, who pays for cleaning, whether contractors are charged at cost and whether VAT is included.

Wer bezahlt Reinigung und Wäsche?

Cleaning can be charged to the guest as part of the booking price, and that is how we do it. That money is then part of the rental income: it is taxed with the rent, and a portal may take its commission on it too. A manager should pay the cleaners at cost and show you the receipt.

Can I still use my villa if a manager rents it?

Yes. You tell the manager which weeks you keep for yourself and they are blocked on every channel. With a good revenue manager the weeks you choose stay yours, and prices and minimum stays are adjusted around them.

How is holiday rental income taxed in Italy?

A private owner can choose the flat-rate cedolare secca: 21% on the short lets of one house and 26% on a second, on the full price of the stay, with no deductions. From 2026, three or more apartments on short stays are presumed to be a business. If an agency or a portal collects the rent, it holds back 21% as an advance. If you live abroad you still file an Italian tax return for this income, so ask an Italian accountant, and one at home, how it applies to you.

Do property managers guarantee bookings or income?

Some operators offer a guaranteed rent, in exchange for keeping whatever the house earns above it. We do not. What you should get before you start is a written estimate of what the house can realistically earn, based on a visit.

Wie wählt man eine Verwaltung für ein Ferienhaus in der Toskana?

Ask five questions before you sign. Is the company based near the house, so someone can get there quickly? Are guests checked in in person, as Italian law requires? Does the rental income go into an account separate from the company’s own? Are cleaners and contractors paid at cost, with receipts? After a visit, will they tell you in writing what the house can earn? The full checklist is in the section above. In the Maremma and southern Tuscany our answer to all five is yes: see our property management service.

This article explains how property management works for holiday homes in Tuscany. It is not legal or tax advice. The rules quoted here are those in force in October 2026, from the sources cited; confirm your own case with an accountant before you rent.

Last updated October 2026. Written by Alessandro Ciacci, Co-founder, Easy Living Tuscany.