Public records tell you exactly which homes earn the most in your market — build the sub-100 whale list from permits and lodging-tax rolls, then court those owners like the seven-figure accounts they are.
File public-records requests (your state’s equivalent of FOIA) with the permitting or business-license office for active STR permits and registrations — address, permit number, issue date. Those lists are usually releasable. Individual lodging-tax returns usually are not: several states make them confidential by law, so ask the tax office only for what’s public (registrations, aggregate totals) and don’t build the plan on per-property tax data. Where records are thin, market-data tools give a directionally-right revenue ranking instead.
Lodging tax paid is a proxy for gross revenue — sort descending and the market’s whales surface immediately. One large home can out-earn ten small ones, which means one signed whale can out-earn your entire small-property pipeline.
Cross-reference tax rolls for owner names and mailing addresses (absentee owners jump out where mailing ≠ property address), append contact data, and note what you can see: current manager or self-managed, listing quality, review velocity. Now it’s a target file, not a list.
These owners get the treatment volume mail can’t give: a framed watercolor-style portrait of their actual home with a handwritten note — mailed unsolicited, purely to earn the meeting. A favorite-team jersey when research surfaces the affinity. A FedEx envelope for the letter — overnight envelopes get opened at rates plain mail dreams of. An 8-page custom analysis with their home’s photo on the cover for the true A-list. One regional sales team reports the gift wedge as their #1 source of new high-value owner relationships — the per-piece cost pencils because one whale out-earns several average properties.
Each whale gets a touch every 6–8 weeks, rotating format: the gift, the letter, the market report, the invitation to lunch when they’re in town. Log every touch. The teardown play (27) makes a natural second touch for the self-managed ones.
The power move is refusing to dilute: one operator mails fewer than a hundred lakefront owners — nothing else — and keeps signing homes from that list year after year. Density of attention on a qualified list beats reach every time.
File the records request with your county this week — it costs little and takes ten minutes. While you wait, write the names of the ten homes you’d most love to manage; they’re probably already on the list you’re about to receive.
This is the exact kind of work we do for vacation rental brands every day. Bring us the property mix and the market — we’ll bring the system.
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