By the Unity Stays directors, Marcus Chong & Gadir Al-Khatib · Last updated 12 August 2026
In short: Read your notice clause first — periods run from one to three months, sometimes with a minimum term — and ask whose platform account the listing sits on, because reviews stay with the manager's account if it is theirs. Confirm the new manager's start date in writing before serving notice, then agree forward bookings, the handover and a final statement.
Read the notice clause before anything else
Notice periods in this industry range from one month to three, and some agreements carry a minimum term on top. Leaving inside a minimum term often does not release you from the fees that would have accrued across the remainder.
Work backwards from when you want the new arrangement to start, not forwards from today. If you are on three months' notice, a January start means serving notice in October.
Also check what happens to bookings already confirmed for dates after you leave. Most agreements — ours included — keep the fee payable on those, which is normal but worth knowing rather than discovering.
Who owns the listing and the reviews?
This is the question that catches people, and it is worth asking your current manager before you give notice rather than after.
If your property is listed on the manager's own platform account, the listing history and its reviews sit with that account. Leaving means starting again with a new listing and no reviews — which, on a mature property, is a genuinely expensive thing to lose.
If the listing is on an account in your name with the manager given access, it travels with you. Neither arrangement is wrong, and there are operational reasons for both, but they make leaving very different propositions.
The order that avoids a gap
Handled in this sequence, a switch costs you nothing in income.
- Confirm the new manager can start on the date your notice expires, in writing
- Check what happens to forward bookings — who honours them, at what rate, and who is paid
- Serve notice properly, in writing, in the form the agreement requires
- Agree the handover: keys, access codes, the guest guide, the pricing history, any devices in the property
- Get a final statement, and check it against the bookings you know about
- Confirm the calendar is transferred without double-booking across the changeover date
What to ask the incoming manager
The same questions you should have asked the first time, plus one about the handover itself.
Whose account will the listing sit on. What the notice period is. What sits outside the fee. What happens to the reviews if you ever leave them. And what they will do about the forward bookings that already exist.
A manager who has done this before will have an answer for the forward-booking question immediately, because it is the part that goes wrong. Our choosing a company guide covers the rest.
Switching to us
We will tell you what your notice period means in practice before you serve it, and we will not ask you to serve notice until we can confirm a start date.
Onboarding runs about five to seven days from collecting the keys where the property is already furnished and compliant, so the gap between managers can be very short. Where devices belonging to the previous manager have to come out, that is worth planning rather than discovering on the day.
If the answer is that you should stay where you are — because the notice cost outweighs the difference, or because the listing history would be lost — we will say so.