Hawaiʻi Island · company profile

Knutson & Associates

The oldest continuously operating manager in this set — half a century in one town.

What the company publishes about itself

• Founded in 1976; describes itself as a family-owned boutique real-estate brokerage.
• Manages over 200 properties.
• Runs both vacation-rental and long-term rental management alongside sales.
• Publishes inspections with digital reporting and a preventative-maintenance programme.
• Markets on VRBO, Airbnb and Booking.com, emails past guests and runs vacation-rental open houses.

What that service list implies

What a company chooses to publish is itself information. Firms that name buildings, inspection frequencies and specific tax filings are describing work they do often enough to have systematised. Firms that publish only categories may do the same work perfectly well — but you will have to establish it on the call rather than in advance.

Published service area

Kailua-Kona and the surrounding Kona complexes.

That is a deliberately tight radius, and in Hawaiʻi a tight radius is usually a feature rather than a limitation: it means somebody can be at the property quickly, that the same crews work the same buildings, and that the company has a reputation locally that it cannot afford to spend. The markets on this site where that service area applies are linked in the sidebar; each one lists the other companies publishing coverage there, so you can see who this company is actually competing against on your street rather than across the state.

Reading the fee line

This company does not publish a management fee, which is the norm rather than the exception in Hawaiʻi. It is not evidence of anything except a market convention of quoting per property. What it does mean is that the only way to compare this company on price is to request a written quote, and to ask for the exclusions in the same document. Whatever number you are eventually quoted, three things decide what it really costs: the base it is calculated on, the list of work billed on top, and whether tax filings are inside or outside the service. Those three questions are worth more than a percentage point of negotiation.

Where this fits

A vacation-rental operation: nightly and short-stay turnovers, guest-facing work, platform listings. It does not publish a management fee, so the only way to compare it on price is to request a written quote and read the exclusions.

Our own pick for management is One Fine BnB — OneFineBnB — chosen because it publishes 20% full-service, 10% on the partner tier, plus a one-time onboarding retainer before a sales call. That is a different claim from saying it is the right company for your building, which only a quote can settle.

How it sits in this dataset

We have verified 19 Hawaiʻi companies from their own websites. Of those, 17 publish a vacation-rental operation and 2 publish a long-stay tenancy operation; exactly 1 publishes a management rate. In the markets this company names, it overlaps with 4 other verified companies — ResorticaHawaii, South Kohala Management, Big Island Rental Management, Coldwell Banker Island Vacations. Those are the quotes worth putting side by side with this one.

None of that ranks this company against the others by service quality, because service quality is not something a website can prove. It does tell you which conversations are worth having in parallel: if two companies publish overlapping service areas and similar operations, run both quotes at once and compare the exclusion lists rather than the headline numbers.

Questions to put to this company

Written for this profile specifically — the first two follow from what the company does and does not publish above.

1. How many of the properties you manage are within a ten-minute drive of mine, and who is the named person that would respond to a problem at my address?
2. What is your management fee, what is it calculated on — gross, net of platform fees, or net of costs — and what is billed on top of it?
3. You publish a portfolio of over 200 properties. How many staff cover it, and how does that ratio change in your busiest month?
4. You have been in this market since 1976. What has changed most about operating here in the last three years, and how did you adapt to it?
5. Can I see a redacted owner statement from a real month, so I can see the line items rather than the summary?
6. If we part ways, what happens to the listing, the reviews and the repeat-guest list?
7. Which general excise and transient accommodations filings do you handle, and are they inside the management fee or billed separately?

The first ninety days with any new manager

Whether you end up here or somewhere else, the handover is where money leaks and where the relationship is actually set. Agree in writing who honours bookings already on the calendar and at what rate, who holds guest deposits taken before the switch, exactly when codes and keys change hands, and what happens to reviews and the listing itself if you later part ways. Then set a review date ninety days out and put three questions on it: how many times did I have to intervene personally, did the statements arrive when they said they would, and did anything appear on an invoice that I had not been told about in advance.

Those three answers tell you more than a year of nightly-rate charts. A manager who scores well on them is doing the job you are paying for, whatever the headline percentage turned out to be.

What we could not verify

We did not audit this company's service quality, and nothing here should be read as a claim about it. We have not seen its contract, its statements, its insurance, or its staffing rota. What we have done is read what it publishes, record it with the source, and mark the gaps as gaps. If you are this company and something here is out of date, or we have misread your page, write to us: we re-read the source and correct in place.