Expanding Guesty’s Owners Portal: Supporting Fractional Ownership and IRS Compliance
Guesty, a leading property management platform and our long-term partner, aimed to improve and expand its Owners Portal. Our team supported this initiative by migrating the portal from a legacy system to a separate codebase. We also introduced support for fractional ownership and ensured compliance with IRS 10/99 tax reporting requirements. As a result, the portal became easier to manage and better aligned with owner needs.
Key results:
2 major features added
50% improvement in data visibility
100% IRS 10/99 compliance
Image source: guesty.com
Context and Challenge
Guesty’s Owners Portal is a separate, mobile-friendly website where property owners can log in to view their listings, track earnings, manage reservations, and access analytics. While the portal was functional, it needed improvements to meet the growing needs of owners. Guesty wanted to add more features, improve scalability, and support new ownership models. This brought several challenges:- Scalability issues: The Owners Portal was part of Guesty’s legacy monolithic system. So, it was difficult to scale and update it.
- Limited support for shared ownership: Many listings had multiple owners with revenue split between them. But the system couldn’t handle these cases well.
- Missing key features: Guesty could not offer such an option as owner-specific reservations.
- Compliance requirements: The system needed to support U.S. tax reporting (Form 1099) and ensure secure handling of financial data.
Client’s Objectives
To upgrade and ensure compliance of the Owners Portal, Guesty pursued the following goals:- Make the system more flexible and scalable by moving the Owners Portal out of the monolithic system into a separate service.
- Support fractional ownership, allowing multiple owners to share a property and divide earnings based on ownership percentage.
- Enable IRS-compliant tax reporting (Form 1099) to meet U.S. regulatory requirements.
- Improve performance and user experience without disrupting property managers or existing operations.
How We Approached the Project
To meet Guesty’s goals, we followed a step-by-step development process:- Analyzed the existing system: We reviewed how the current Owners Portal worked, including its connection to Guesty’s monolithic infrastructure.
- Extracted the Owners Portal into a separate repository: This allowed us to improve flexibility, reduce system load, and make future updates easier.
- Worked closely with other teams: We teamed up with Guesty’s finance and reservations teams to make sure everything matched their business needs.
- Added new features one by one: We built-in features like fractional ownership and 1099 tax reports one step at a time.
- Improved system performance: While building new things, we also fixed bugs and made sure the portal ran smoothly.
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Solution Overview
Guesty needed to modernize its Owner Portal with new features. Here’s how we helped them achieve that:- Separated the Owners Portal from the monolith: We moved the Owner Portal into a separate repository. This made the system more flexible, easier to maintain, and faster to develop in the future.
- Implemented fractional ownership: Many properties on Guesty are co-owned by several people. We built a system that allows property managers to assign ownership percentages and calculate each owner’s share of revenue automatically.
- Enabled 1099 tax reporting: We developed a secure and compliant way for Guesty to collect tax data and generate IRS-compliant Form 1099 PDFs for U.S.-based owners.
- Fixed bugs and improved performance: During the project, we resolved several issues in the Owners Portal and optimized its performance to improve speed and reliability for users.
- Started building an advanced owner dashboard: Now, we’re creating a new dashboard where owners can view property calendars, earnings, occupancy, booking trends, and more, all in one place.
Result and Impact
Qualitative results:- Smooth system upgrade: We moved the Owners Portal out of the legacy monolith into a separate service.
- Improved support for shared ownership: Property managers can now define fractional ownership percentages and see accurate revenue splits.
- Stronger compliance: The portal now fully supports IRS 1099 reporting, making it easier for U.S.-based owners to stay tax-compliant.
- Greater flexibility and scalability: With a modular structure, Guesty can now add new features faster and support more complex ownership models.
Key Takeaways and Lessons Learnt
Success factors:- Deep understanding of the system: Our team quickly learned how owners, listings, and reservations work in Guesty, and what information each user should see.
- Cooperation with other departments: We worked closely with the finance and reservation teams to make sure everything we built matched real business needs.
- Easy-to-use experience: We focused on making the system simple for property managers and owners, from setting rights to viewing dashboards and reservations.
- Following legal rules: We worked with legal and finance experts to build correct and secure 10/99 tax reporting for U.S. owners.
- Legacy system structure: Guesty’s owner portal was a part of legacy system, making it hard to update or add new features. We had to separate them into a new, independent service.
- Multiple team dependencies: Our work depended on input and coordination with several teams, which required regular communication and alignment.
- Complex ownership models: Supporting fractional ownership and making sure revenue and rights were calculated correctly added extra complexity.
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