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When you start thinking of growing your short-term rental business (or any business), the advice everyone gives sounds sensible: dominate your local market first. Build density, cluster your properties so one cleaner covers five houses, get to know the local council, and lock down your local trades. Then, and only then, look at the next town.

It is good advice on paper, but sticking blindly to standard playbooks often means you miss a bigger opportunity. Sometimes building a business around what your clients actually need requires breaking the rules entirely.

This week I sat down with Heather Schlabach from BNB Breeze, a short-term rental management company overseeing more than 175 properties across 14 states while growing by over 20 per cent a year.

Heather’s brother started the business back in 2018, and she bought in two years later when they had about twenty homes. Until recently, every single property came purely through word of mouth. As Heather put it, they wanted to make it as hard on themselves as possible.

Instead of chasing specific geographic markets, they chose to follow investors. Their homeowners are not listing grandma’s cottage; these are cash-flowing vacation assets, and many owners hold multiple properties. When an owner buys a place in Idaho, BNB Breeze simply figures out how to make Idaho work.

That choice dictated their entire operational model: a centralised office managing specialised functions, paired with a single cleaner and a maintenance contact on the ground for every property.

When I asked how on earth she finds remote cleaners, she shared one of my favourite stories. They had just set up a home in rural Pennsylvania and were driving back to the airport without a cleaner locked in. Spotting a local Mennonite couple walking along the road, Heather pulled over, struck up a conversation about local church networks, and had a dedicated cleaner booked by that evening. She has even used her church Facebook group to find a cleaner in Maryland overnight.

Then last year, they did the normal thing: they made their first local portfolio acquisition of around fifty properties in Sarasota, Florida.

Curiously, concentrating density in a single market proved much harder than spreading across fourteen states.

Everywhere else, supplies shipped directly to the cleaner’s home to stock the property. In Sarasota, local volume suddenly justified a physical warehouse, bulk buying, and supply runners moving stock between homes. An entirely new operational layer had to be built while relisting fifty properties in two weeks. Heather admitted the scariest part for an operations leader was having established systems disrupted like that.

Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation:

Control what goes into the property before you worry about distance. BNB Breeze sets up every property themselves using a master spec sheet detailing every single item in the house. The exact same linens, shampoos, and conditioners are used everywhere, backed by deep cleans and inspections twice a year. When you cannot physically be there every week, you control the setup standards and how often they are audited.

Teach values rather than micro-managing decisions. Heather stopped trying to force staff to make decisions the exact way she would. Instead, her remote teams operate on three core principles: excellence (if you are going to bother doing something, do it right), adaptability, and life-giving execution, which she sums up as “don’t be a drain, be a spigot”. That culture gives cleaners true ownership over the home, down to using the pickleball court with their family on off days because the property genuinely feels like theirs.

Never let shiny object syndrome distract you from what already works. If you have a solid thing going in your current market or niche, jumping into new territories just for the sake of it can introduce unnecessary chaos. This industry is full of new opportunities, and most of them are just distractions from the core strategy that is already turning a profit.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• 🗺️ How to run 175 properties across 14 states from one centralised office

• 🧹 How to find and vet reliable cleaners in markets you have never operated in

• 🏭 Why concentrating in a single local market was harder than spreading across fourteen states

• 🎯 How to double down on a single guest avatar instead of physical location

• 🧭 How three simple company values replaced the need for micromanagement

Heather Schlabach co-owns BNB Breeze with her brother, who founded the business in 2018. She bought into the company two years later at around twenty properties and now oversees operations across a portfolio of 175+ homes in fourteen states. Growing over 20 per cent a year almost entirely through referrals, her team focuses on investor-centric property management and centralised systems. bnbbreeze.co.

The real lesson here is that growth was never their primary target. It has simply been the natural outcome of doing good work consistently well. If an owner buys somewhere new, they run the revenue projections, and if the numbers clear the threshold, they go out and build the local network.

Most of us are sitting on a process that needs a proper shake-up, waiting for an external excuse to break the routine. Sometimes you just need to back your systems and build the infrastructure to support where your business actually wants to go.

📺Watch the episode here

🎙️Listen to the show here