For years, the public conversation about vacation rentals has swung between two pictures. In one, a family rents out its own home while away. In the other, companies run dozens of flats as a hotel in all but name. Both exist. The interesting question for anyone working in the sector is the proportion between them, and how that proportion shapes what guests expect and what owners need.
What the listing data shows
Inside Airbnb publishes, for each listing, the number of listings held by the same host account in that city. Grouping active entire homes by that number gives a rough picture of how much of the market is run by single-home hosts and how much by accounts managing several properties.
| City | Active homes | 1 listing | 2–5 listings | 6–20 listings | more than 20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brussels | 2,425 | 47.7% | 31.6% | 14.7% | 6.0% |
| Antwerp | 1,370 | 39.1% | 28.4% | 18.8% | 13.7% |
| Ghent | 717 | 48.4% | 31.4% | 15.8% | 4.5% |
Source: Inside Airbnb, September 2026 snapshots, CC BY 4.0. Active entire homes only (at least one review in the previous twelve months). See sources and method.
Two cautions apply. A host account is not the same as a company: a family with three flats appears as a multi-listing host, and some management companies run several accounts. And these are listings on one platform only. Still, in each of these cities a large part of the active homes are run by accounts with more than one listing, and a meaningful share by accounts with more than five.
Why management became a profession
Several forces push in the same direction. Guest expectations have converged towards hotel standards of cleanliness and responsiveness (see what guests expect now), which are hard to meet alone. Pricing has become dynamic, distribution has spread across several channels, and guests expect answers in minutes at any hour. Each of these rewards scale: a team that handles twenty homes can afford software, a cleaning schedule with back-up staff and someone on call at night in a way that a single owner cannot.
What professional management actually means
"Professional" is not a size; it is a set of habits. The operators that guests and owners trust tend to share them, whatever their portfolio:
- Written standards for cleaning, inventory and inspection, applied the same way at every turnover.
- Clear reporting to owners: bookings, revenue, costs and incidents, on a regular schedule and in the same format.
- Separation of roles: who answers guests, who prices, who cleans, who repairs — and who covers when one of them is away.
- Decisions based on data rather than on the last guest's complaint.
What it means for individual owners
For an owner with one or two homes, professionalisation is both a pressure and an opportunity. The pressure is competitive: listings run with professional standards set the reference point guests compare against. The opportunity is choice. An owner can adopt the same habits personally, use software and freelancers for the parts that benefit from scale, or hand the whole operation to a manager. None of these is right for everyone; what has changed is that running a rental casually is becoming harder to do well.