The portfolio had grown to seven villas over five years. Each villa had inherited its own marketing freelancer — Villa A through a UK-based agency; Villa C from the original owner's nephew; Villa F from a sole-trader after a 2022 transition. Each ran its own Airbnb listing, its own Vrbo listing, its own Booking.com listing, and its own micro-budget Google Ads account.
The damage was structural. Brand-name search auctions had the villas bidding against EACH OTHER ("Mallorca villa olive grove" pulled up two of the portfolio's own properties competing for the same click). Negative-keyword lists were duplicated across seven accounts with seven different ideas of what counted as bad traffic. Reporting was impossible — no single number for "how the portfolio is performing this month."
And the OTA commission line item, when finally totalled across the portfolio: €620K per year. Twelve percent of revenue, paid in commissions, for an operator who was actually doing the local-market knowledge work that should have made direct booking the obvious channel.
