A villa in Cannes, Beaulieu-sur-Mer or Menton, occupied six or eight weeks a year, does not look after itself. Between two of the owner’s stays, someone has to keep the house running: pay the gardener, chase the pool technician, check that the alarm still talks to the monitoring centre, renew the insurance policy before it lapses, and find a hostess for August when last year’s is not coming back. When nobody is appointed to do it, the owner does it — by phone, from London or Geneva, at hours they do not have.
This article sets out what an absent owner has to organise, item by item, and what a villa manager takes on when mandated. The parallel with a yacht is not a figure of speech: the questions are exactly the same.
Household staff: recruit, supervise, replace
The first item, in money as in attention, is staff. Chef, hostess or butler, housekeeping, driver, gardener: a seaside villa running through the season easily employs five to eight people, permanent or seasonal. Each has a contract, a schedule, leave, a trial period, and the ability to walk out at the worst possible moment.
Recruitment is the most visible part, but not the hardest. Finding a chef for July can be done; finding a chef who lasts until the end of August, gets on with the hostess and accepts the presence of a demanding owner is another matter. It takes references that are actually checked, a structured trial period, and someone on site to correct course in the first week if needed.
The second part is day-to-day supervision. Household staff with no designated point of contact organise themselves, and not always in the owner’s interest. A villa manager holds that role: sets priorities, settles small frictions before they become resignations, and fills a vacant post without the owner ever noticing.
Contractors: one point of contact, invoices checked
A modern villa accumulates technical contractors. Garden, pool, plumbing, electrics, air conditioning, internet, IT, home automation, alarm, gate, sometimes a lift: every system has its own contractor, maintenance contract, annual visits and breakdowns. A well-equipped property easily deals with fifteen different firms.
An owner managing it alone therefore has fifteen counterparts, fifteen quotes they cannot judge, and fifteen invoices they pay without knowing whether the work was done. The drift is mechanical: a quote is never put out to competition, a billed visit is never verified, a maintenance contract renews by tacit agreement for ten years.
The manager changes the relationship. They obtain competing quotes from a portfolio of firms they know, schedule the visits, inspect the work before approving the invoice, and keep a record of every intervention. The owner no longer takes fifteen calls; they take one, with a summary.
Insurance and rental: the two files nobody revisits
A villa’s insurance is rarely reviewed. The policy was taken out at purchase, on a property value and an inventory of contents that have changed since. The cover does not include the renovated pool, the wine cellar, or staff housed on site. The claim reveals the gap. A competent manager reviews the policies, aligns cover with real value, tracks renewals and follows claims through to settlement — without taking any commission from any insurer, which is what makes the recommendation credible.
Seasonal rental is the other file. Many owners want to let a few weeks a year without becoming professional landlords. The right answer is not yet another rental agency, but an introduction to serious brokerage firms, and a property prepared before each stay, with staff and contractors coordinated during the rental and the house restored afterwards. That is management work, not marketing.
The question that matters: how is the manager paid?
This is what separates two trades bearing the same name. A manager paid by commission on contractor invoices has an interest in works being numerous and expensive. A manager paid fixed fees, set by quotation after a visit, who passes contractor invoices on at cost with no margin, has only one interest to serve: the owner’s.
That is the model Cursorio applies to its villas under management between Cannes and Menton, with the method inherited from ship management: a single point of contact, a budget kept, contractors held accountable, a record of every intervention. The owner finds the house ready and knows, item by item, what was done and what it cost. The rest — attention, availability, the memory of the house — cannot be written into a contract, but it is what keeps an owner for ten years.
