Two families stand behind this: the Smiths and the Silvas. The Smiths have been on Amelia Island four generations. The Silvas and Lanes have been here five. Between them that is nine generations on one island, which is less a marketing line than the reason this company exists in the shape it does. We keep the names off the website and save them for the first conversation, because you should hear who you are dealing with from a person rather than a web page.
We started Eight Flags Collective because of a gap we kept noticing. There are good managers on this island. There are also a lot of houses being run from a call center in another state, and a lot of owners who found out about the tourist tax filing requirement eighteen months late. The people who suffer for that are the guests, and then the owner's reviews, and then the owner.
What we are, and what we are not
We are not a rental company. We do not take your house onto our books, we do not list it under a company profile and we never touch your money. Your Airbnb listing stays in your account, guests book with you, and Airbnb pays you directly on its usual schedule. We run the listing, we look after the guests, and we do the work at the house. Then we invoice you for it.
That arrangement is deliberate. It means you can open your own account any day of the week and see exactly what your house earned, without waiting for a statement from us and without taking our word for anything.
Why we cap the number of homes
A manager with two hundred and thirty properties cannot know your house. They cannot tell you that the second bathroom fan has been loud since March, or that three separate guests mentioned the mattress in the back bedroom. We would rather look after a small number of homes properly than a large number adequately, so we set a limit and we hold to it.
Why the cleaning team is ours
Cleaning is the single most common thing guests complain about, and it is the first thing most management companies subcontract. We select, train and manage our own team. When a turnover goes wrong it is our problem to fix, not a vendor's problem to explain.
Why your home gets its own website
Our sister company, Eight Flags Digital, builds websites for local businesses here on the island. So every home we look after gets its own web address, its own name and its own photographs, registered in the owner's name, with every Book now button pointing at that owner's Airbnb listing. If you ever leave us, you take it with you. Someone unwilling to give you a portable asset is telling you something about how confident they are in the service.
The other half of the family business
Eight Flags Digital builds websites for local businesses here on the island: a pharmacy on 14th Street, a roofer, a riverfront event hall. That is why the website your home gets is not a template someone bought. It is built by people who do this for a living, a few miles away, and it is registered in your name rather than ours.
Where the name comes from
Eight flags have flown over Amelia Island: France, Spain, Great Britain, Spain again, the Patriots of Amelia Island, the Green Cross of Florida, Mexico, and the United States. It is the only place in the country that can say that. Eight Flags Collective is part of Eight Flags Enterprises, alongside Eight Flags Digital.