Compliance, tax, and product questions from short-term rental owners.
IRC §469 governs whether rental losses can offset your other (non-passive) income, like W-2 or business income. Short-term rentals (average guest stay of 7 days or less) can qualify for an exception to the passive-activity rules if you materially participate in operating them — most commonly by meeting the 500-hour test, where you personally spend at least 500 hours during the year on qualifying activities like guest communication, cleaning coordination, maintenance, and bookkeeping. Stratos tracks these hours and generates audit-ready documentation, but whether your specific situation qualifies is a determination for you and your CPA.
Generally: guest communication and screening, coordinating cleaning and turnover, property inspections and maintenance, managing bookings and pricing, and bookkeeping directly tied to the activity. Time spent by a property manager or other non-owner generally doesn't count toward your own hours unless you're also personally doing the work. Stratos's participation log lets you record hours by category as you go, rather than reconstructing a year of activity from memory at tax time.
No. Stratos calculates the correct combined lodging tax rate for each property's exact jurisdiction (state, county, and city taxes can all stack, and the rules differ almost everywhere) and adds it to each booking automatically, then keeps clean, audit-ready records of what was collected. Filing and remitting that tax to the relevant jurisdictions is still a manual step — either you or your CPA handle that part today.
Airbnb and VRBO are booking marketplaces, not compliance or accounting tools — they don't track §469 material participation hours, calculate combined multi-jurisdiction lodging tax, or give your CPA a clean audit trail. Stratos also offers a direct-booking channel at a 3% platform fee, compared to 15%+ in host fees on Airbnb/VRBO, with guest payments split automatically at checkout straight to your own connected bank account — Stratos never holds your money.
Stratos was built by an accounting firm in New Hampshire that needed this exact tool for its own short-term rental clients and couldn't find one that handled §469 tracking and multi-jurisdiction lodging tax correctly. It's built by the CPAs who needed it, not a general booking-software company that added tax features later.
Yes. Owners can invite their CPA to a read-only portal that shows participation logs, financial records, and tax accrual data across all of the owner's properties — no separate spreadsheet exports or year-end data requests.