On the indicative model we publish, a two-bedroom flat in central Bournemouth grosses around £38,700 a year when it is well distributed and actively priced. A one-bedroom seafront flat models at about £33,500. Marketed through a single channel at a flat rate, that same two-bed models at roughly £26,700. Those are model outputs, not measurements, and gross is not what you keep. The number that decides your answer is not the nightly rate. It is how many nights you actually sell.
Rate times nights. That is the entire equation
Annual gross booking revenue is achievable nightly rate multiplied by nights booked. Nothing else. Owners spend their energy on the first number and almost none on the second, which is backwards.
Your rate has a ceiling. It is set by the flat, the postcode and the competition, and good photography and listing copy move it by a sensible margin, not a heroic one. Nights booked have a far wider spread. The same flat can sell under half the year or more than two-thirds of it, depending on how many shop windows it sits in and whether the price moves with demand. That is where the money is won or lost.
The model, published in the open
Here is the whole thing. We would rather you argue with it than take it on trust.
| Property | Indicative base nightly rate |
|---|---|
| Studio | £82 |
| One bedroom | £108 |
| Two bedroom | £142 |
| Three bedroom | £188 |
| Four bedroom | £250 |
Then a location multiplier:
| Location | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Seafront / beachfront | 1.25 |
| Poole / Sandbanks | 1.18 |
| Central Bournemouth | 1.10 |
| Suburban Bournemouth | 0.95 |
| Wider Dorset | 0.90 |
And an occupancy assumption: 0.68 of the year for a well-distributed, actively priced property, against 0.47 for one on limited distribution. The same maths runs inside the income estimator on our holiday let management page, so you can play with it yourself.
This is an indicative model. It is a starting point built from typical figures for the area, not data measured on your street, and it is not a promise. We recalibrate it against a real property at valuation, and against real booking data once a property is live. Treat any agent who hands you a single confident number with suspicion.
Worked example: two-bed, central Bournemouth
£142 base, times the 1.10 central multiplier, is a £156 nightly rate. Occupancy of 0.68 across 365 nights is 248 booked nights.
£156 x 248 = about £38,700 gross a year.
Worked example: one-bed seafront flat
£108 base, times the 1.25 seafront multiplier, is £135 a night. Same 248 nights.
£135 x 248 = about £33,500 gross a year.
Look at what the multiplier does. A flat with one fewer bedroom, in the right spot, comes within £5,000 of the bigger property inland. Location is doing more work than the extra room. That is worth remembering before you buy, and it is the thread running through our note on the best areas to buy a holiday let in Dorset and the area pages for Bournemouth and Poole and Sandbanks.
Why “£156 a night x 365” is always wrong
That two-bed at £156 a night, multiplied by 365, comes to £57,000. People quote themselves that figure all the time. It is wrong by about £18,000, and the £18,000 is the 117 nights nobody booked.
Three habits produce the fantasy number:
- Annualising the August rate. The rate you can charge in the second week of August is not the rate you can charge on a wet Tuesday in February. Demand in Bournemouth is seasonal and the curve is steep, which is the whole point of pricing month by month rather than setting one price and leaving it.
- Assuming full occupancy. Nobody sells 365 nights. Hotels do not. You lose nights to gaps between bookings, to minimum-stay rules, to your own weekends there, and to weeks when the demand simply is not in the market.
- Confusing gross with net. The booking revenue is not your income. See below.
Now subtract, honestly
Take the £38,700 gross on the central two-bed, on the fully managed plan.
| What comes off | How it works | On the worked example |
|---|---|---|
| Channel commission | Charged per booking by each platform, at its own rate. Direct bookings through the Flexiestays platform carry none, which is the cheapest revenue you can get | {{TODO: confirm with FSM}} |
| Management fee | 15% of booking revenue on the fully managed plan, covering the whole service | £5,805 |
| Changeover cleaning and linen | Per changeover, coordinated through vetted local partners. Depends entirely on how often you turn the property over | {{TODO: confirm with FSM}} |
| Consumables and replacements | Coffee, loo roll, welcome pack, the mugs that vanish | {{TODO: confirm with FSM}} |
| Utilities, broadband, council tax or business rates | On a holiday let these are yours, not the guest’s | {{TODO: confirm with FSM}} |
| Insurance | Standard home cover does not extend to paying guests. See what cover a holiday let needs | {{TODO: confirm with FSM}} |
| Furnishing, written down | Take your fit-out invoice and divide it over five years. A £20,000 fit-out is £4,000 a year against the income, whether or not anyone sends you a bill for it | Your invoice ÷ 5 |
The placeholders are honest. Commission rates, partner rates and your own utility bills are specific to your property and your contracts, and we are not going to invent them to make a table look complete. The valuation puts real figures in every row.
The changeover arithmetic nobody does
248 booked nights at an average stay of three nights is roughly 80 changeovers a year. Eighty cleans, eighty linen sets, eighty restocks. Lift the average stay to four nights and you are at 62. That single policy decision, set in your minimum-stay rules, removes 18 changeovers from the cost line without removing a single booked night.
This is also why cleaning is never a footnote. It is coordinated on every turn through a vetted partner network, and the fee you charge guests offsets part, though rarely all, of what it costs.
One thing not to subtract
Void weeks. They are already inside the 0.68. The occupancy assumption is the empty nights. Deduct a separate line for voids and you have counted them twice, which is how owners talk themselves out of a perfectly good property.
The distribution gap: 248 nights against 171
In the model, a well-distributed property books 0.68 of the year. A property on limited distribution books 0.47. On 365 nights that is 248 against 171: a gap of 77 nights. At £156 a night, the gap is worth roughly £12,000 of gross revenue a year on the same flat, in the same street, with the same furniture. The model also assumes a listing without active pricing achieves about 10% below the rate it could.
You do not need a manager to close that gap. There are two doors. Hand the property over and it is included in the 15% fee, along with everything else in the table above. Or, if you already run the place and enjoy running it, list on Flexiestays for 5%, keep your pricing, your guests and your standards, and simply take the extra nights. Both doors lead to the same distribution across every major channel.
What actually moves your number
In roughly this order:
- Nights booked. Distribution and dynamic pricing. Nothing else comes close.
- Location multiplier. Fixed at purchase. Unfixable afterwards.
- Bathrooms, more than bedrooms. A second bathroom is what lets a two-bed take two couples rather than a family, and two couples pay differently.
- Photography. The first image decides whether anyone sees the other twenty.
- The furnishing itself. A well-specified interior earns a higher nightly rate and a better review score, which then feeds ranking, which then feeds occupancy. It compounds. We wrote about that in interior design that lifts your nightly rate.
- Minimum stays. Costs, not revenue, as the changeover maths shows.
What barely moves it: the exact shade you painted the hallway, a listing title with more adjectives, a hot tub you have no plan to service, and being on one extra channel that sends you nothing.
Gross is vanity. Net per year is the answer
When you compare a holiday let against a long-term tenancy, compare net against net. A tenancy has one changeover a year, no linen, no consumables and no commission. A holiday let has a much bigger top line and a much longer list of costs. Sometimes it still wins comfortably, sometimes it does not, and the answer depends on the flat. We set the two side by side in holiday let versus long-term let in Bournemouth.
Verify before you rely on it. The Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime was abolished from April 2025, and England’s short-term-let registration and planning rules have been changing. Whether your property is rated for council tax or business rates, and how the income is taxed, materially changes the net figure. Check the current position with BCP Council and GOV.UK, and take the tax question to a qualified accountant. Nothing on this page is advice.
Then keep two columns in a spreadsheet from day one: what the model said, and what actually happened. Check them against each other every month. Within a season you will know your real rate, your real occupancy and your real cost per changeover, and at that point you can stop borrowing anyone else’s assumptions and start using your own. That is the only number that was ever going to be true.