A three-hour conversation on the 4th of May 2026 over a kitchen table in Andratx, with the owner of a six-bedroom Mallorca villa who has self-managed her own rental programme since 2022. The 2025 P&L is the first one she has shared with anyone outside her accountant. The villa grossed EUR412,000 across 22 booked weeks against EUR294,000 across 17 weeks in 2024. After staff, utilities, the cedula and ETV licence, insurance, maintenance, and the 24 percent IRNR non-resident tax reserve, the property netted EUR187,400. That is a 45.5 percent net margin, roughly 8 to 12 percentage points above what a platform-managed equivalent would have returned at the same gross. The numbers are below. The five mistakes she will not repeat are below them.
By The Villas For Kings desk
The owner has asked us to mark her and the villa. The property sits on the south-west coast between Andratx and Camp de Mar, on a 1.4-hectare plot, with six bedrooms, a 14-metre infinity pool, a 1,140 square metre interior programme, and a 280 square metre staff and service wing built in 2022. The asking rate for the peak fortnight in August 2025 was EUR48,000 per week. The shoulder-week rate in May and October was EUR21,000. The licence is a current Mallorca ETV registered through 2027, which the Govern de les Illes Balears has issued at the cap since the 2022 freeze (the freeze remains material to any owner reading this piece).
She listed the villa on Le Collectionist between 2019 and 2021 and on onefinestay between 2020 and 2022, with a parallel relationship with two London-based brokers. By the end of 2022 the aggregate platform take was running at 24 to 30 percent of gross. The inbound enquiry volume on the property's own private channel, combined with the broker referrals, was high enough that the platform listings were producing roughly 35 percent of bookings against 100 percent of the commission burden. She pulled both listings in November 2022. She has not relisted.
What follows is the full 2025 P&L, the operational architecture behind the margin, and the five mistakes she now considers structural. The piece will be useful to two readers: the owner thinking about leaving the platforms, and the renter who wants to know what a properly run direct-let villa actually looks like.
The villa booked 22 of a possible 32 listed weeks (mid-April through mid-November, with an explicit hold on the winter months for owner use and refit). The booked weeks broke into three rate bands.
Peak (eight weeks, EUR42,000 to EUR48,000): the two weeks bracketing 12 to 26 July, the four weeks running 26 July to 23 August, and the two weeks bracketing Easter. Average week, EUR45,000. Total band gross, EUR360,000. The peak fortnight was sold to the same Munich-based family that has now booked the property four years running, at a 4 percent rate increase over their 2024 number.
Shoulder (10 weeks, EUR18,000 to EUR24,000): three weeks in May, two in June, three in September, and two in early October. Average week, EUR20,000. Total band gross, EUR200,000. The shoulder is where the margin came from. Six of those weeks were repeat clients on direct enquiry. Two came through a single broker. Two came through a referral from her London tennis coach (the client base for villas of this size remains a small social network).
Off-shoulder (four weeks, EUR12,000 to EUR16,000): two in late October, one in mid-November, and one for a corporate retreat in early November. Average, EUR14,000. Band total, EUR56,000. The off-shoulder is where she underpriced. She would now hold the rate at EUR16,000 minimum and accept fewer weeks. (More on that below under mistake number two.)
The 10 unbooked weeks (mid-April through early May, plus stray midweeks in June and September) were either reserved for owner use, for routine maintenance turnovers, or refused on character grounds. She refused two enquiries in 2025: a 14-person bachelor party and a corporate brand activation with a 60-vehicle photoshoot day. Both would have netted above EUR40,000. She does not regret either refusal.
Gross 2025 revenue: EUR412,000 across 22 weeks. The deductions, with her line items.
Staff (EUR68,400 annualised). Three heads on a 12-month retainer: a housekeeper at EUR2,100 per month gross, a gardener-pool at EUR1,400 per month gross, and a part-time house manager at EUR1,200 per month gross. Each retainer includes paid summer-peak weeks at a 30 percent premium and is structured under a Spanish indefinido contract with social security and the standard 14-pay annual cycle. Total burden including employer social security at roughly 31 percent: EUR68,400.
Utilities (EUR21,800). Endesa electricity, EUR14,200 (heavy August pool and air-conditioning load). Water, EUR3,400 (Andratx municipal plus one bowser delivery during the August drought). Pool maintenance chemicals and gas, EUR4,200. The villa is on a private septic system, which is included in the gardener contract.
Maintenance reserve (EUR18,000). An annual provision for the routine refits she now treats as scheduled rather than reactive. 2025 spend: a new commercial dishwasher (EUR4,800), the master suite mattress replacement (EUR3,200 for two), and a partial re-coat of the pool deck (EUR9,200). The remaining EUR800 carried forward.
Insurance (EUR8,400). One household policy plus a separate EUR400 short-term-let liability rider. The combined property and public liability sits at EUR2.5 million cover. She declines the umbrella policy her broker offered at EUR2,200 extra.
Licence and admin (EUR4,200). The ETV annual fee, accountant retainer, and one professional photographer's day in May 2025 (EUR1,400 for the refresh shoot).
Marketing (EUR2,800). The cost of the villa's own bookings page, a hosted domain, and a single sponsorship on a regional concierge newsletter. No agency. No paid ads. No platform listing.
Tax reserve (EUR101,000). The 24 percent Spanish IRNR non-resident income tax reserve on rental revenue, plus the IVA she invoices through to her ETV-registered agent for the cleaning and concierge service. The accountant's working figure for the year sits at EUR101,000 against EUR412,000 gross. The published net of EUR187,400 is after the reserve, not before.
Total deductions: EUR224,600. Net: EUR187,400. Net margin: 45.5 percent.
The platform counterfactual is not a perfect comparison. The platforms would have produced some incremental bookings she did not get directly. They would also have priced the property slightly differently and absorbed some of the marketing burden. Her own working model says the platforms would have lifted gross by roughly 4 to 8 percent, net of the weeks she would have refused for the same reasons she refused them in 2025.
Against that lift, the commission stack on the platform-managed scenario would have run, on a midpoint estimate, at 24 to 27 percent of the higher gross. On a EUR430,000 platform-modelled gross, the commission would have been EUR104,000 to EUR116,000. Her direct-channel cost of customer acquisition in 2025 was EUR2,800, plus the unbillable time of her own enquiry handling. The pre-tax delta is between EUR101,000 and EUR113,000 in her favour. Net of the tax reserve, the delta narrows. It does not close.
She is willing to say in print that the platform model is a defensible choice for an owner who does not want to do the enquiry work, who does not have a repeat client base, or who does not have a brokerage relationship. It is not, in her view, the right choice for an owner who has the time, the temperament, and the network.
"My biggest 2025 mistake was treating the late-October and early-November shoulder as a discount band rather than a quality band. The four weeks I booked at EUR12,000 to EUR16,000 each absorbed full operating cost (staff was on retainer either way, the turnovers were the same, the wear on the linen and the pool deck was the same) for roughly half the per-week margin. I should have held the rate at EUR16,000 minimum and accepted three weeks instead of four. The fourth week's gross of EUR12,000 produced roughly EUR4,200 of net after the variable costs and the proportional fixed cost allocation. The 36 hours of admin and the wear on the property was not worth EUR4,200. I am holding the floor at EUR16,000 for 2026 and refusing below that."
"For my first two rental years, 2022 and 2023, I hired the housekeeper and the gardener on a per-week contract paid at the higher August rate, on the assumption that I would save money in the unbooked weeks. The result was that I lost both of them to year-round contracts with neighbours by the end of 2023. In 2024 I rebuilt the team on 12-month retainer at lower headline pay, with social security and the 14-pay structure that Spanish law actually expects. The retention has been complete. The 2025 housekeeper is the same housekeeper as the 2024 one, which is the single biggest reason the property is renting at the rate it is. The retainer cost runs maybe EUR8,000 more per year than the per-week alternative if I had been able to keep the same heads. I could not have. The retainer is the price of consistency."
"From 2019 to 2022, when I was on Le Collectionist and onefinestay, I treated maintenance as reactive. A pool pump fails, I call the plumber. A mattress sags, I replace it next refit. The result was that by my third year of trading, roughly six things needed replacing at once and the bill landed at EUR41,000 in a single quarter. The pump, the mattresses, the linen programme, the dishwasher, the pool deck. Since 2023 I have run a EUR18,000 maintenance reserve as a hard line on the P&L. The reserve is not a savings account. It is a number I will not let the property drop below. In 2025 I spent EUR17,200 of it. The villa looks the same in November as it did in April. That continuity is the rental rate."
"One of the things the platforms quietly absorbed was the refresh photography. Onefinestay sent a photographer every 18 months. Le Collectionist sent one every two years. When I left the platforms, I forgot to budget for it. The villa was running on 2021 photography through the end of 2023. The 2024 booking velocity dipped, and the diagnosis was that the photographs looked dated. I booked a Mallorca-based photographer in May 2025 for a single day at EUR1,400 and a full reshoot of the interior, the pool deck, the gardens at golden hour, and the staff in service. The booking velocity for 2026 has already exceeded 2025 at the same point in the calendar. The shoot pays for itself, on my working math, inside three weeks of booked rental. I will refresh every two years from now on."
"My first three years I ran a 30 percent deposit at booking, 70 percent at 90 days, and a refundable security deposit of EUR8,000 returned within 14 days of departure. In April 2024 a confirmed booking for the EUR42,000 peak fortnight cancelled at 84 days, on a soft excuse, and I refunded the deposit out of goodwill. The same week was unsold for 2024. I learned that goodwill on a peak fortnight is goodwill priced at EUR42,000. The 2025 contract was non-refundable from booking inside the 120-day window, with a 50 percent payment at booking and the balance at 60 days. The cancellation rate has not gone up. The cancellations I have absorbed have been from clients who had banked the booking and treated my calendar as optionality. Optionality is a cost I am no longer willing to fund."
The five mistakes are a pattern. She would describe the pattern as: a rental villa is a service business with a real cost stack, not a passive product riding a postcode. The owners who treat it as a service business price it correctly, staff it correctly, maintain it correctly, photograph it correctly, and contract it correctly. The owners who treat it as a passive product underprice the shoulder, churn the staff, defer the maintenance, run dated photography, and refund the deposits. Our work on the villa manager job described walks the same operating question from the manager's side.
The renter's filter on a direct-let property of this register is short. Three questions. Does the owner answer the first enquiry inside 24 hours, by name, with the calendar and rate sheet attached. Does the contract list the staff by role with their hours, with a named house manager. Does the property carry public liability insurance at a stated amount with the policy number on request. The villa we have profiled answers yes to all three. The villas we have passed on for our Mallorca best-of list have, on our 2025 walking schedule, often failed on at least one. Our work on the best villas in Mallorca ranks against the filter.
What did the villa gross in 2025? EUR412,000 across 22 booked weeks, against EUR294,000 across 17 weeks in 2024.
What did the villa net after costs? EUR187,400 after staff, utilities, maintenance, the rental licence, insurance, and the tax reserve. The 45.5 percent net margin runs roughly 8 to 12 percentage points above the equivalent platform-managed return at the same gross.
Why did she leave the platforms? The aggregate platform take was 24 to 30 percent of gross. Her own enquiry channel and a single broker relationship were producing the majority of bookings against 100 percent of the platform commission burden.
What is the biggest mistake she made? Underpricing the late-shoulder weeks. She is holding a EUR16,000 floor for 2026 and refusing below that.
What does the ETV licence cost? Roughly EUR4,200 a year on her property, between the annual fee and the renewal admin, on a current ETV registered through 2027.
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Last updated 2026-02. We have not adjusted our editorial for the commission rate. See how-we-make-money for the full disclosure.