What does villa management cost in Bali?

15 or 20 percent of the rental payout, after OTA fees, depending on how much you want us to run. At 15 percent we handle the marketing and the bookings. At 20 percent we also run the villa day to day: staff, maintenance and housekeeping. Either way, the fee pays for the work of running it. The running costs themselves, staff wages, utilities and maintenance, are funded from the villa's income, not absorbed into our percentage.

What does a villa legally need before it can be rented out?

An NIB, which is the business registration number, a pondok wisata licence, and the correct KBLI, which is the Indonesian business classification for the activity. Zoning matters too: a foreign owner generally needs to be in a pink zone, while an Indonesian owner can be in a yellow one. We deal with this rather than hand you a list.

Can I rent the villa out through my own foreign company?

Not on its own, under the current position. A new foreign-owned company cannot carry the daily rental activity by itself, so the arrangement has to be structured with the landowner and written into the agreement from the start. This is one of the things we establish before land is committed to, because discovering it afterwards is expensive.

Do you manage villas you did not build?

Yes. It is worth knowing that we will survey it first and may come back with a list, because taking on a villa with a waterproofing problem or an electrical installation we would not have signed off means inheriting it. We would rather tell you what we found than quietly absorb it and put the cost in the fee.

What return should I expect?

We will not give you a yield figure for a villa that does not exist yet, and we would treat anyone who does with caution. What we will tell you is what comparable villas we manage in that area actually do, which is a different and more useful conversation. Feel free to book a meeting with us and we can show you comparison studies on previous villas.

Villa management

Villa management, by the people who built it.

We design it, we build it, and then we run it. That is a different proposition from an agency that met your villa on handover day.

A Fidé Estate managed villa in Bali, prepared for guest arrival.

Fidé manages villas in Bali for 15 or 20 percent of the rental payout, after OTA fees. The difference is how much we run. At 15 percent we handle the marketing and the bookings: channels, pricing, reviews and guest communication. At 20 percent we also run the villa itself: staff, maintenance, housekeeping and expense reporting. Either way, the fee is what you pay us to run it. Maintenance, utilities and staff wages are funded from the villa's income, not absorbed into our cut.

We also designed and built a large share of the villas we manage, which matters more than it sounds. When something fails at three in the morning, the people fixing it are the people who specified it, and there is nobody to blame it on.

The two ways we do it

Neither is the better one. They suit owners with different amounts of time and different appetites for detail.

	Marketing, 15%	Full management, 20%
Who runs the villa day to day	You do, or your own manager. We are not involved in staff or maintenance.	We do. Staff, maintenance, housekeeping and expenses all sit with us.
Maintenance and utilities	Outside this package. Arranged and funded by you.	We arrange it, reactive and planned. Funded from the villa's income either way, not from our fee.
On-site manager	You need one. Staffing is outside this package.	We provide one, as part of running the whole operation.
Bookings and guest communication	All of it. Airbnb, Booking.com, direct, before, during and after.	All of it. This does not change between the two packages.
On-site guest service	Outside this package. Someone on your side greets guests and handles what comes up.	Included. We are the on-site presence.
Best for	Owners with their own person on the ground already running the villa.	Owners who live abroad, or who do not want the villa to be a job.

What is actually included in full management

Written out in full, because a fee percentage on its own tells you nothing about what you are buying. This is the 20 percent package. At 15 percent you get the marketing and booking items only, further down this page.

The villa

Staff, hired, trained and managed
Maintenance arranged, both the emergency at midnight and the service nobody thinks about, funded from the villa's income rather than our fee
Utilities, gardening and cleaning, arranged and paid from the villa's income
Pool and grounds

The guests

Airbnb, Booking.com and direct enquiries, all handled
Contact before arrival, so nobody turns up not knowing where the gate is
Airport pickup and drop-off arranged
Someone at the door to greet, within working hours

When something goes wrong

On call 24 hours, seven days
A blocked toilet dealt with that night or the next morning, depending on when it comes in
Electrical faults attended straight away
If a guest is hurt, we find the nearest hospital and send the taxi

Short stay or long stay, honestly

Short stay earns more per night. Our own estimate is that a nightly rate runs ten to twenty times what the equivalent night would earn on a monthly or yearly let. It also costs more to run, because the villa has to be reset completely every two or three days and held to a standard a three-night guest will judge instantly.

Long stay is quieter money. You pay a single fee once rather than a percentage of every booking, a cleaner comes two or three times a week instead of between every guest, and tenants look after their own day to day. Their expectations are lower, and a tap that drips is a Thursday problem rather than a one-star review.

Which one wins depends on the area, the villa and what you want from it. In some areas the long stay genuinely comes out ahead once the servicing cost is counted properly. We will tell you which one your villa is, and we would rather say long stay and be right than talk you into the version that pays us more per booking.

What actually makes a villa rent well

This is where being the builder and the manager stops being a slogan. We see which features earn their money back across a portfolio, and which ones photograph well and do nothing.

It is having something the villa next door does not. The market in Canggu and Pererenan is deep enough that a well finished three bedroom with a pool is now the baseline rather than the differentiator, and a villa with no answer to why book this one competes on price alone.

The things that work are specific and often unglamorous: an onyx feature wall that every guest photographs, a children's room with a playhouse built into it that wins the whole family booking, a sauna, an ice bath, a room the dog is allowed in, a room built properly for watching football. None of these is expensive relative to the build. All of them are decided at design stage and are painful to add later.

That is the argument for building and managing with the same team. The decisions that determine what a villa earns are made long before anyone lists it.

What owners get wrong about the running costs

The most common mistake is assuming Bali is cheap because labour is cheap. Labour is the part that is cheap. Electricity and water are not, and both can run higher than owners are used to paying at home. An owner who budgeted on staff costs and forgot the utilities is the owner who gets a surprise in month two.

The second mistake is budgeting a fixed monthly figure at all. Expenses move. A month with a failed door lock and a replaced pump does not look like the month before it, and any manager who gives you one tidy number every month is either averaging or not telling you something.

When you should not use us

Three cases where we are the wrong answer, said plainly.

If you want the cheapest percentage on the island, that is not us and we will lose that comparison. There are managers charging less, and the difference tends to show up in what happens when something breaks rather than in the monthly statement.
If your villa is a long-stay let in an area where long stay is genuinely the better play, you may not need a full management contract at all. We will say so.
If you want to be involved in every decision, day to day, a management contract will frustrate you and you will end up paying us to be overruled. Some owners genuinely enjoy running the villa. That is a legitimate answer and it is cheaper.

Questions owners actually ask

What does villa management cost in Bali?: 15 or 20 percent of the rental payout, after OTA fees, depending on how much you want us to run. At 15 percent we handle the marketing and the bookings. At 20 percent we also run the villa day to day: staff, maintenance and housekeeping. Either way, the fee pays for the work of running it. The running costs themselves, staff wages, utilities and maintenance, are funded from the villa's income, not absorbed into our percentage.
What does a villa legally need before it can be rented out?: An NIB, which is the business registration number, a pondok wisata licence, and the correct KBLI, which is the Indonesian business classification for the activity. Zoning matters too: a foreign owner generally needs to be in a pink zone, while an Indonesian owner can be in a yellow one. We deal with this rather than hand you a list.
Can I rent the villa out through my own foreign company?: Not on its own, under the current position. A new foreign-owned company cannot carry the daily rental activity by itself, so the arrangement has to be structured with the landowner and written into the agreement from the start. This is one of the things we establish before land is committed to, because discovering it afterwards is expensive.
Do you manage villas you did not build?: Yes. It is worth knowing that we will survey it first and may come back with a list, because taking on a villa with a waterproofing problem or an electrical installation we would not have signed off means inheriting it. We would rather tell you what we found than quietly absorb it and put the cost in the fee.
What return should I expect?: We will not give you a yield figure for a villa that does not exist yet, and we would treat anyone who does with caution. What we will tell you is what comparable villas we manage in that area actually do, which is a different and more useful conversation. Feel free to book a meeting with us and we can show you comparison studies on previous villas.

Where we manage