Almost no one says no because of price

In a set of 41 recorded conversations, twelve were with property owners considering handing their units over to be managed. Seven of the twelve said no.

That is a high enough failure rate to be worth understanding rather than explaining away. So we went back through them looking for the reason, expecting it to be the fee.

It was not. The note in our own analysis is blunt: price was almost never the reason a host said no. Autonomy was.

What they were actually saying

The objections sounded like money at first. They were not, quite. Underneath, in different words each time, was the same thing: I would no longer be the one deciding.