$82,943
Annual Revenue
3,860
Total Active Listings
$437
Average Daily Rate
52%
Suburb Average Occupancy Level
Listing optimisation on the Peninsula is a seasonal exercise. We set minimum stays that protect the peak windows, so a three-night booking does not block out the week between Christmas and New Year, and we open up shorter midweek stays through winter when hot springs and winery guests are the ones travelling. Rates move for the Portsea Polo in January, the Red Hill Show, school holidays and long weekends, all of which price very differently to an ordinary Saturday in June. Revenue optimisation here is about capturing the summer at the right rate, not chasing occupancy in months that were never going to fill.
Guests arriving on the Peninsula are usually driving down from Melbourne after work, and plenty of them land late, tired, and unsure which gate the key box is on. We handle guest communication end to end, from the first enquiry through to arrival instructions written for someone approaching a dark coastal street for the first time. Directions cover parking for boat trailers, where the beach access track starts, and how long the drive really takes when the Nepean Highway backs up on a Friday afternoon in January.
Peninsula turnarounds are heavy. Beach houses come back with sand through every room, wet towels, outdoor furniture that has been moved, and barbecues that need proper attention. Our professional cleaning and housekeeping teams work to a property-specific checklist, and our linen service covers the volume that a five bedroom or six bedroom holiday house needs across back-to-back summer bookings. Peak season often means same-day changeovers, so the schedule is built well ahead of the January rush.
Salt air is hard on coastal houses. Window seals, outdoor timber, fly screens, pool equipment and hot water systems all wear faster here than they do inland, and small problems become guest-facing problems quickly. We carry out routine property maintenance between stays, coordinate trades for anything larger, and check the property properly during the quieter months rather than discovering an issue on 27 December.
The guest mix on the Peninsula splits neatly across platforms. Melbourne families and returning holidaymakers book heavily through Airbnb, Stayz / VRBO pulls strong interest for larger houses and multi-family group stays, and Booking.com brings in interstate and international travellers doing a Melbourne and coastal itinerary, often via the Sorrento to Queenscliff ferry. We run multi-platform listing management with synced calendars, so a property is visible everywhere without any risk of a double booking.
You receive clear monthly reporting covering bookings, nightly rates, occupancy and net return, with the seasonal pattern laid out so you can see how the peak weeks performed against the same period last year. If you want to talk something through, you speak to the person who manages your property rather than a call centre.
Our management fee is a flat 15% of booking revenue with no setup costs, no photography charge and no annual listing fee. For a four bedroom house in Rye or a clifftop property in Mount Martha, that means the cost of management scales with what the property actually earns, so a quiet July does not come with a bill attached.
Pricing a Peninsula property is a different discipline to pricing a city apartment. The difference between a good year and an average one usually comes down to six to eight weeks of summer, plus how well the shoulder seasons are worked. We price Sorrento and Portsea against their own peak, not against a regional average, and we know that a Red Hill property with a fireplace and a winery within walking distance holds rate through winter far better than a bayside unit in Capel Sound.
The Mornington Peninsula is the third largest short-stay destination in Australia, and it earned that position without a single tourist high-rise. Demand is anchored by geography: sheltered bay beaches from Mount Eliza through Dromana and Rosebud, ocean surf beaches at Portsea, St Andrews Beach and Gunnamatta, the geothermal pools at Peninsula Hot Springs and Alba, and the Red Hill wine country with Montalto, Port Phillip Estate and Pt Leo Estate drawing weekend visitors year-round. Add Arthurs Seat Eagle, Point Nepean National Park, the Cape Schanck lighthouse and the Sorrento to Queenscliff ferry, and the region has a reason to visit in every month of the calendar.
The guest mix reflects that. Summer belongs to Melbourne families taking whole houses for a week or more, often the same families returning to the same property each year. Autumn and winter shift toward couples and small groups on wellness and wine weekends, staying two or three nights, frequently midweek. January brings event traffic around the Portsea Polo, and the Red Hill and Mount Martha markets pull steady weekend visitors through spring. Interstate and international guests tend to arrive as part of a wider Victorian itinerary rather than as a Peninsula-only trip.
This creates a demand curve that looks nothing like an inner-city suburb. A Fitzroy apartment fills at a fairly even rate across the year. A Blairgowrie or Rye house does the bulk of its earning inside a narrow summer window, then needs a completely different pricing and minimum-stay strategy to make the other nine months worthwhile. That is the core reason vacation rental management Mornington Peninsula owners search for tends to be more hands-on than a city equivalent: the calendar has to be actively worked rather than set and left.
Compliance adds another layer. The Mornington Peninsula Shire operates its own Short Stay Rental Accommodation Local Law, which requires registration, an annual fee, a code of conduct displayed in the property and a designated contact person available to respond to neighbour complaints. Short-stay property management Mornington Peninsula owners take on themselves often stumbles here, because the obligations sit with the owner regardless of who is answering the phone. Airbnb property management Mornington Peninsula owners hand to a professional team should cover that responsibility as standard, which is how we structure it.
We provide short-term rental management Mornington Peninsula wide, covering Mornington, Mount Eliza, Mount Martha, Safety Beach, Dromana, McCrae, Rosebud, Capel Sound, Tootgarook, Rye, Blairgowrie, Sorrento and Portsea along the bay, the ocean side at St Andrews Beach, Fingal and Cape Schanck, and the hinterland and eastern villages including Red Hill, Main Ridge, Merricks, Balnarring, Somers, Shoreham, Point Leo and Flinders. Our cleaning and maintenance teams are based locally, which matters for fast turnarounds between bookings and for responding quickly when a guest raises an issue mid-stay.
We charge a flat 15% of booking revenue. There are no setup costs, no photography fees, no listing fees and no lock-in contract. Airbnb management Mornington Peninsula owners are quoted elsewhere often looks cheaper on the headline rate until the extras are added, so it’s worth comparing the total cost rather than the percentage alone. Cleaning is charged to the guest, not to you.
The market average sits at a $437 average daily rate and 52% occupancy, which works out to roughly $82,943 a year across 3,860 active listings. Well-presented properties with strong photography and active pricing management typically run ahead of that average, particularly larger houses that can take group bookings through summer. The honest answer is that profitability here depends heavily on how the peak weeks are priced. For a broader look at the numbers.
Yes. The Shire’s Short Stay Rental Accommodation Local Law applies to any property let for 30 consecutive days or less for commercial gain, which covers almost every Airbnb on the Peninsula. You need to register with the Shire and pay an annual fee, display the code of conduct inside the property, notify adjoining neighbours, and nominate a designated contact person who can respond to complaints quickly, currently within two hours. Registration can be revoked after three substantiated complaints in a rolling 12 month period, and in serious cases after a single incident. We act as the designated contact person for the properties we manage and handle the guest-conduct side of it. Fees and requirements are set by the Shire and reviewed periodically, so confirm the current details with council before you list.
The 7.5% short-stay levy applies to bookings under 28 days across Victoria, including the Peninsula. It is collected on the booking and remitted to the State Revenue Office, and there are exemptions worth understanding if the property is your principal place of residence. We walk owners through how it affects their pricing during onboarding.
You can, and most of our Peninsula owners do. You block the dates you want in the calendar and we work around them. The one thing we’ll flag is the cost: a week over Christmas or in early January is worth several times what the same week is worth in May, so if the family holiday is flexible, moving it to the shoulder season makes a real difference to the annual return. Plenty of owners keep the Easter or Melbourne Cup weekend for themselves instead.
Book a free appraisal and we’ll give you a realistic earnings estimate for your property based on its size, location and condition, along with what it would need to be ready. Book one here. From there we handle the listing setup, professional photography, styling and furnishing if the property needs it, and cleaning and linen from the first booking onward. Most properties are live within two to three weeks. You can read more about our approach to Airbnb and short-term rental management across Melbourne.
Find out what your Mornington Peninsula property could earn as a short-term rental. We’ll run through the numbers, answer any questions about how our management service works, and outline next steps, all with no obligation.
