For new Coral Compass owners

From signed to first guest, charted.

Coral Compass is an open-book short-term rental manager on the Grand Strand, licensed in South Carolina. You've just received our management agreement, and the natural next question is "okay, what actually happens now?"

This page is the answer. Every step from your signature to your first guest, then what steady operation looks like after. And because open-book is how we work, every claim below cites the clause in your agreement that backs it.

See the course
The course

Five waypoints from signature to go-live

Tap any waypoint to see exactly what we handle and what we'll need from you. The small tags, like §8.4, point to the section of your agreement that backs each promise.

What we do

  • Countersign and open your property file.
  • Send your onboarding form within the first week, typically days 3 to 7 after signing. It comes after the agreement, not with it.
  • Take over servicing your confirmed future bookings, so guests who already reserved stay happily booked. If one carried a lower cleaning fee than our published fee, we absorb the difference.§2.5

What you do

  • Sign and return the agreement. Electronic signature is fine.§16
  • Share any confirmed future reservations: dates, channel, guest contact, amounts.§2.5
  • Complete the onboarding form when it arrives: access details, house quirks, HOA or condo rules, and any cameras or monitoring devices.§6.1

Nothing here is a memory test. The onboarding form walks you through every question, one at a time.

What we do

  • Walk and assess the property in person before setting anything in stone.§8.4
  • Run the inventory audit against our Inventory Audit Checklist. You receive your own copy at onboarding.Exh. B
  • Confirm the home meets our standards before any guest stays.§6.4
  • Set the published turnover fee at or below the market cost of a comparable turnover, with a documented comparison you can request any time.§8.4

What you do

  • Hand over access: keys, codes, WiFi details, manuals.§6.1
  • Clear any items we flag before go-live.§6.4
  • Set your repair approval limit in the onboarding form. Nothing above it gets approved without you, outside genuine emergencies.§7.1

What we do

  • Coordinate photography, then build and publish your listings across booking channels.§2.2
  • Write the listing copy and choose the photos, and stay responsible for the accuracy of what we write.§6.3
  • Run dynamic nightly pricing, tuned channel by channel. The pricing tools are ours and are never billed to you.§2.4, Exh. C
  • Disclose your published turnover fee in writing before we accept a single reservation. It stays visible on the listing and your owner portal.§8.4

What you do

  • Confirm the property details you gave us are accurate: amenities, views, access, occupancy.§6.3
  • Going forward, tell us within ten business days if anything about the home or its surroundings changes.§6.3

What we do

  • Set up lodging tax collection and remittance through a compliance service, filed on your behalf.§10.1
  • Coordinate licenses and permits as a pass-through, at cost, with no markup.§10.2
  • Hold your funds in a South Carolina trust account, as the law requires.§9.1

What you do

  • Send your insurance certificate: a liability policy written or endorsed for short-term rental use, naming Coral Compass as additional insured, before the first guest stay.§11.1
  • Sign any tax authorizations the filings require.§10.1
  • Keep the property's required licenses and permits current. We'll coordinate, and the accounts stay yours.§10.2

What we do

  • Give the home its final standards check.§6.4
  • Open the calendar and start welcoming reservations.
  • Handle every turnover through our own crew, funded by the guest-paid turnover fee, never by you.§8.4
  • From here, handle all guest, cleaner, and vendor communication so you don't have to.§6.5

What you do

  • Watch the first booking land. That's genuinely it.
Steady on

Life after go-live

Once the first guests arrive, this is the rhythm you can expect, month after month.

Every month

Statement and payout by the 10th

Your monthly statement and payout arrive by the 10th of each month, or the next business day if the 10th falls on a weekend or holiday, covering the prior month's completed stays, once platform funds have arrived. §5, Exh. B

Any time

Your owner portal

A continuous online view of your property's income and expenses, plus the current published turnover fee. Monthly statements remain the formal record. §5

Between the lines

Periodic quality checks

We check the home's condition periodically, not just when something's reported. Standards don't hold themselves. §5

Twice a year, at most

Turnover fee, kept honest

The published turnover fee is reviewed against market cost no more than twice a calendar year, always on 30 days' written notice. Reservations already confirmed keep the fee they were booked at. If we revise it in that cycle and you object, you can exit with no termination fee. §8.5

It's still your home

Your own stays

Reserve up to 28 nights a year for yourself with at least 7 days' notice, around confirmed guest bookings. After a personal stay, the same published turnover fee a guest pays applies. Same crew, same standard, no surprises. §12

In writing, not in spirit

Your protections

The exits and rights below aren't policies we could quietly change. They're clauses in the agreement you're holding.

§3.3

60-day no-fee exit

Either of us can end the agreement within the first 60 days by written notice, with no early termination fee. If it's not working, you're not trapped.

§3.2

Free exit at term end

The agreement runs in 12-month terms. Give written notice at least 30 days before a term ends, and it simply doesn't renew. No termination fee.

§9.5

Annual audit right

Once every calendar year, you can inspect the books and records for your property: reservations, payouts, turnovers, expenses. Open-book means checkable.

§3.6

Your data leaves with you

If we ever part ways, your booking calendar, confirmed reservation details, and guest-stay history are delivered to you in a usable electronic format within 30 days.

The open-book promise

You will never see a cleaning, restocking, or linen charge on a statement.

Guests fund turnovers. One guest-paid fee covers the crew, the supplies, restocking to par, and the full linen program. Every charge you can see is listed in Exhibit C. None of them is cleaning. §8.4, Exh. C

Asked before signing

The questions owners actually ask

We researched the most common complaints owners raise about short-term rental managers, then answered each one from the agreement, not from a sales script.

This is the number one complaint owners report about the industry: the gap between the rate quoted at signing and what actually gets deducted from statements. Our answer is structural, not a promise. Exhibit C is the single controlling list of every fee: who is charged, who keeps it, and in what share. If a charge isn't in Exhibit C, it cannot appear on your statement.Exh. C

And we're contractually barred from publishing any fee summary, schedule, or marketing material that differs from it. This page included.§4.3

Whatever Exhibit C says, row by row, and nothing else. Some guest fees are shared with you, like the pet fee, which offsets wear on your furnishings. Some are ours because they fund work we perform, like the turnover fee, which pays every cost of the turnover. Every guest-paid fee has its own row showing the split.§8.3, Exh. C

Platform commissions pass through with nothing retained by us.§8.6

Never. This one's written as a promise in the agreement itself: you will never see a cleaning, restocking, or linen charge on a statement. One guest-paid turnover fee funds the crew, the supplies, consumables restocked to par, and the full linen program, laundering and replacement included.§8.4

No. Third-party vendor invoices pass through at actual cost with no markup. Where we coordinate a vendor job, the coordination fee is its own disclosed line item on your statement, never buried in the invoice.§7.4, Exh. C

You set your own repair approval limit, and nothing above it moves without you outside genuine emergencies. You can also request a third-party quote on any in-house work, any time.§7.1, §7.6

No, and we'd encourage caution with anyone who does. The agreement says it plainly: no minimum revenue, occupancy, or profit is promised.§5

What you get instead is checkable performance: a live portal, monthly statements, and the contractual right to inspect the books for your property once every calendar year.§9.5

Our own crew, exclusively. That's the point of the model: because we perform the turnover, we're contractually responsible for the work and for our crew's conduct at your property, unlike third-party vendors a typical manager just dispatches.§7.3

Turnovers are documented with dated photographs kept for at least twelve months, and we run periodic quality checks between stays.§11.4, §5

Recovery runs in a fixed order, and you're last, not first: any damage protection program you've elected, then a claim against the guest or platform, then your insurance, and only then you, for the unrecovered balance. Each step is pursued and documented on your statement.§11.4

If a recovery fails because we didn't document or didn't file on time, that loss shifts to us under the limits in the same section.§11.4

Owners across the industry report exits harder than disclosed and losing their listing history on the way out. So the exits are in writing: either of us can walk in the first sixty days with no fee, and any term can simply end with thirty days' notice.§3.3, §3.2

If we ever part ways, your booking calendar, confirmed reservations, and guest-stay history are delivered in a usable electronic format within thirty days, and the photos and descriptions you paid for are yours.§3.6, §13.2

Before you sign

Questions? That's what we're here for.

Read the agreement at your own pace. If any clause deserves a plainer explanation, or you just want to talk it through, write to us and a real person will answer.

Email hello@coral-compass.com