Discover how you can make your home available for rent with Ember Flex
There are two main differences between Ember Flex designated homes and Ember Limited designated homes: (1) Who gets to stay in the home and (2) How time in the home divvied up.
With Ember Limited, homes are exclusive to just their co-owners and invited guests. Scheduling is more fluid with co-owners able to hold up to six planned stays at a time. Ember Limited co-owners can book stays as long as fourteen days and from two years in advance down to the day before.
With Ember Flex, owners can choose to stay personally in the home AND rent out their unused nights. Owners draft 6+ weeks per year and then designate how they want to use their time. As an owner, you can swap weeks with other owners.
Ember Limited is ideal for people who’ve always wanted to own a vacation home to share just with friends and family, at a price that makes sense. Ember Flex is perfect for people who want to own a vacation home that they can use personally, but can also rent out the nights they don’t use to help offset costs.
Ember creates a property-specific, manager-managed limited liability company (LLC) for each Ember Flex home. The LLC has its own bank account and tax identification number. It also holds title to the residence. The owners hold all the ownership interests in the LLC.
With Ember Flex homes, you can use your weeks for whatever mix of personal or rental use you desire. Because usage preferences may change over time, you can adjust your usage pattern at any time to fit your lifestyle.
Before nights are made available for rent, Ember Owners draft their weeks for a given year (or partial year if the home is just being made available). Each 1/8th Ownership entitles its owner to six weeks throughout the year.
We would be happy to put you in touch with our sister company, Ember Stays to answer any questions regarding the rental of the home. You may also consult with any third-party rental agent of your choice.
Yes, you may use any third-party rental agent or Ember Stays to market and rent your nights. As a third option, you may choose not to engage any third-party rental agent and instead personally rent out your nights. For the protection of all co-owners, any owner or rental agent must be licensed and insured to market and rent the property.
Please consult your tax advisor regarding your particular tax situation.
Yes, although offers and availability vary by geography.
Not at this time.
The goal is to protect the affected owners in the event of home damage that displaces their stay plans or ability to rent the home. The owner responsible for the damage must cover the costs of repairs, as well as lodging costs for the affected owner’s stay and any forgone profit if the displaced owner already had a confirmed rental reservation for that week.
No. With Ember Flex, owners draft (and swap) specific weeks for a given year and choose to rent those weeks or use the property personally. When you choose to rent your weeks (or any portion of your week), the rental revenue from those nights is attributed to you and none of the other co-owners have any claim to it.
Yes. Rental revenue is offset against your portion of any operating or other costs of the home and any management fees. Any excess rental revenue is distributed to you quarterly.
Ember co-owners are responsible for sharing all regular operating costs like insurance, utilities, and property taxes. In addition, owners are responsible to cover operation management fees for the home as follows:
Yes. When an owner chooses to sell his or her share(s), the acquiring owner must agree to honor ANY existing nightly rental reservation.
Yes. However, if it's less than 60 days before the check-in date of either week to be swapped, swaps will require explicit confirmation by both owners in the swap.
Owners draft their weeks each October for the calendar year starting fifteen months from the time of the draft. For instance, in October 2023, owners will draft weeks for calendar year 2025. The objective is to allow ample time for an owner’s nights to be listed on short-term rental aggregators such as AirBnB and VRBO.
High-demand weekends for nightly rental bookings often extend into a Monday (e.g., President’s Day, MLK Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc). Weeks go from Tuesday to Tuesday in an effort to maximize the likelihood of renting these three-day holiday weekends for our owners.
The annual draft only takes a few minutes, one time each year. When it’s your turn as an owner in the draft order, you do not have to wait for other owners to select their weeks for the year. Ember’s proprietary algorithm ranks all available weeks in order of desirability (1 to 52) and exposes these rankings to the owners. To ensure equitable access to prime dates, as a given owner drafts, Ember’s SmartDraft™ algorithm reserves other desirable weeks on behalf of owners who are lower in the draft order (and on behalf of future owners if all eight shares are not yet sold). This ensures that even if an owner is picking in a lower priority of the draft that year, there will still be plenty of attractive dates available for their picks. To learn more about the mechanics of the draft, click here.
Ember Flex is for individuals and families who are looking to buy their dream vacation home and have the opportunity to use the home as a short-term rental to offset the costs of ownership.
Each Ember Flex home is located in an area zoned by local municipalities for short-term rentals. Look for the indicator below when browsing Ember listings.
Each home is insured with a homeowners insurance policy appropriate for the use of the home. For Ember Flex homes, the homeowners insurance includes coverage for short-term rentals.
Ember owners respect and obey all local zoning ordinances. Only homes located in short-term rental zoning may be used for nightly rentals. If a home is not zoned for nightly rental, nightly rentals are strictly forbidden and only owners and their guests may use the home.
Ember owners draft their weeks for a given year (or partial year if the home is just being made available). The draft accounts for highly desirable weeks and ensures equitable access to those weeks for each owner. Each 1/8th share entitles its owner to six weeks throughout the year. Owners receive a seventh week every other year. Learn more about SmartDraft™ here
With Ember Flex homes, each 1/8th share guarantees its owner six weeks per year to use the home personally or potentially rent it out. You select your desired weeks via Ember’s SmartDraft™ process which guarantees equitable access to desirable dates and easy swapping of dates with other owners. With Ember Flex, you simply designate in Ember’s mobile app which of your nights across your six weeks you want to use personally and which you choose to make available to rent out. There is absolute flexibility to you as an owner to use your nights however you choose.
No. Your participation in any rental program is optional and voluntary. You may use all of your nights for personal use, or all of your nights for short-term rental use, or a combination of rental and personal use. It is entirely up to you as the owner.
Yes, all Ember Flex owners agree to use Ember or its affiliate as the operations manager and sole responsible party for maintenance and cleaning of the home. This avoids the potential confusion and headache of multiple property management companies having to coordinate on the various aspects of the home’s care (e.g., regular painting and conditioning of the home exterior, deep cleaning of carpets and interiors, window cleaning, seasonal winterization and summer readiness, etc).
If the home is damaged while being personally used (or rented) by one of the co-owners, it is the responsibility of that co-owner to cover the damages. In the case of damage specifically caused by renters, the co-owner may choose to work through their property management firm to seek recompense from the renters. Every effort will be made to rapidly repair any damage so as to not affect the next owner’s stay.
Ember Flex homes feature elegant and inviting design. Given that the home will be partially used for nightly rental purposes, the Ember Design team focuses on high quality pieces and materials made to strike the unique balance of stylish comfort and solid durability. Ember Flex homes are furnished with hospitality quality furnishings and should feel stylish and fresh for many years to come.
Regardless of whether an Ember home is eligible to be rented or not, Ember owners pay their home operating costs monthly. These costs are NOT marked up by Ember and cover items such as property tax, insurance, utilities, repair reserve, HOA, landscaping and pool maintenance, etc.
Yes, but owners would need to allow sufficient time between the two stays to allow for proper cleaning for the property before the second stay (usually 6 hours).
Yes
Yes. Owners can swap weeks from both the current and following year. However, if there is already an active nightly rental reservation on a given week, that week cannot be swapped.
There are two modes of swapping, both are designed to be simple and beneficial for all owners:
Wish List Swaps: At the time of the draft and any time thereafter, owners can select up to three specific “Wish List” weeks that they desire but were drafted by other owners. As an owner, you indicate which of your already drafted weeks you are willing to relinquish in a swap for the week you want. If the owner who owns the desired week is amenable to the swap, the weeks are automatically swapped.
Auto-Upgrade Swaps: Owners can also designate any of their weeks as eligible for “Auto Upgrade”. In this case, if Owner A wants one of Owner B’s weeks and Owner B has previously designated that particular week as “Auto-Upgrade”, the swap can be executed at any time as long as Owner A is willing to swap a better week for Owner B’s week. A given week is deemed as “better” by Ember’s proprietary SmartDraft™ algorithm. This works out great for both owners: Owner A gets the specific date they wanted and Owner B gets a more desirable date, which is especially preferable if Owner B is planning to rent it out. Note that auto-upgrade swaps within 60 days of the check-in date of either of the swapped weeks require explicit confirmation from both owners via Ember’s mobile app.
Ember uses its proprietary SmartDraft™ algorithm to guarantee equitable and flexible allocation of the best weeks on the calendar. The eight owners draft in a “snake” format (see below). Draft order randomly changes each year, with owners who picked in positions #5, #6, #7, and #8 in a previous year guaranteed to have one of the top four picks in the following year. After the first 48 weeks are drafted, owners who picked in positions #5-8 will draft the last four remaining undrafted weeks (and thus have 7 weeks in a given year).
See table below for sample draft in a given year: