Yes. Nothing in IRC §469 or Treas. Reg. §1.469-5T requires the owner to live near the property, and much of the work of running a short-term rental is done from a phone and a laptop wherever the owner happens to be. What distance changes is the shape of the log. Remote owners can claim the communication, pricing, listing and vendor-management hours they genuinely perform; they cannot claim the on-site work they delegated, and the people they delegated it to count against them in the "more than anyone else" comparison. The evidence also has to be different, because there is no neighbour who saw you mowing the lawn.
What remote hosts actually do
A well-run remote listing generates a surprising amount of owner work. In a typical week the owner answers inquiries, sends check-in details, adjusts pricing against the local calendar, confirms the cleaner for Saturday, chases a late linen delivery, reviews the checkout photos, approves a repair quote, and writes a review. None of that requires being in the same state. All of it is participation under §1.469-5T(f)(1) if the owner does it personally.
The mistake remote owners make is assuming distance disqualifies them and not logging at all, or the opposite: assuming that because they "manage" the property, every hour of every stay is theirs. Neither is right. The 100-hour test guide sets out the threshold; this post is about which hours a remote owner can put toward it.
Hours that travel well
These categories are location-independent and, logged by event, hold up well:
- Guest communication. Every inquiry, confirmation, mid-stay message and review reply, with the platform timestamp behind it.
- Pricing and calendar management. Seasonal rate changes, minimum-stay rules, gap-night pricing, blocking dates for maintenance.
- Listing work. Rewriting the description, updating photos after a refresh, responding to platform requests.
- Vendor management. Finding, vetting and scheduling cleaners, handymen, lawn and snow services; reviewing and approving quotes; resolving a no-show.
- Supplies and inventory. Ordering consumables and replacements to the property; tracking what the cleaner reports as low.
- Problem handling. The Wi-Fi outage, the lock that will not open, the neighbour's noise complaint, handled by phone with the guest and the vendor.
- Operational bookkeeping. Reconciling payouts and expenses for the operation. Keep this distinct from reviewing the investment's performance, which §1.469-5T(f)(2)(ii)(B) excludes as investor activity.
A remote owner who does all of this personally for an active listing can log 80 to 120 hours a year without setting foot in the state. The number is specific to the listing; a slow property with a dozen stays generates far less.
Hours that do not
The on-site work is done by someone else, and it is theirs. Turnovers, restocking, lawn care, the plumber's visit, the handyman's repair: none of it is the owner's participation, however closely the owner supervised it by text. What the owner can log is the supervising itself, which is usually a fraction of the task. A three-hour turnover the owner coordinated in two messages and a photo review is a fifteen-minute entry for the owner and a three-hour entry for the cleaner.
Logging delegated work as your own is the fastest way to lose the whole log. The Tax Court in Mirch v. Commissioner (T.C. Memo 2025-128) rejected 168 hours of claimed cleaning where the owners' own return deducted professional cleaning fees, and the inconsistency cost the credibility of everything else.
Visits: travel rules and the work on arrival
Most remote owners visit once to several times a year. The visit itself is where the best evidence comes from, and also where the most contestable hours sit.
Travel time is unsettled. The Tax Court has accepted travel between properties by an owner who was plainly running them and has struck travel that looked like a commute to an investment; there is no rule that says a flight counts or does not. Does Travel Time Count Toward Material Participation? covers the cases. The practical approach is to log the travel as its own entries, with a stated purpose, and to log the work on arrival separately with its own durations and evidence. Then the work stands even if the travel is disallowed.
Make the visit a working visit. A list of tasks written before the trip, receipts from the hardware store, photos of what was fixed, a meeting with the cleaner or handyman with a time and a topic, and an inspection checklist completed on the last day. A three-day visit with twelve logged hours of specific work looks like operations. A three-day visit with "checked on property, 24 hours" looks like a vacation.
Keep personal use out of the log entirely. Days you stayed at the property for your own enjoyment have their own tax consequences and mixing them with work hours invites the argument that the whole trip was personal.
The property manager and cleaner comparison
The second half of §1.469-5T(a)(3) requires that your participation be at least as much as any other individual's. For a remote owner this is the hard part, because someone on the ground is doing the physical work, and their hours are real.
A cleaner doing 40 turnovers at three hours each has 120 hours. A local co-host handling communication and turnovers has more. A full-service manager who handles everything has more still, and usually leaves the owner with only investor-type review time, which does not count. The owner who wants to pass the comparison has to keep enough of the operational work in-house, and has to know what the other participants' hours are. STR Tracker's other-participants tracker lets you record the cleaner's and any co-host's hours on the property next to your own, so the comparison is a running number rather than a March surprise.
Practical ways to keep the comparison in your favour: do all communication and pricing yourself, use a cleaner rather than a manager, spread physical work across several vendors rather than one person, and do a few turnovers or the deep clean during visits. Several individuals with 40 hours each are easier to exceed than one with 150.
Evidence for remote work
Remote work leaves a digital trail, and the log should point to it:
| Work | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Guest communication | Platform thread timestamps, screenshots |
| Vendor calls and texts | Phone call log, message threads |
| Pricing and calendar changes | Platform change history, screenshots of the calendar |
| Supply orders | Order confirmations with dates and delivery address |
| Approving repairs | Quote emails, invoices, payment records |
| Visit work | Flight and fuel receipts, hardware receipts, dated photos, task list |
Each entry should reference the item that supports it. An examiner faced with a remote owner's log will ask how the owner could know what happened 900 miles away; the answer is the thread, the invoice and the photo.
Example: 118 hours from 900 miles away
One property, 44 stays, cleaner on contract, owner in another state. A plausible year:
| Category | Hours |
|---|---|
| Guest communication, logged by event | 48 |
| Pricing, calendar and listing work | 14 |
| Vendor scheduling, quotes and problem handling | 18 |
| Supplies and inventory | 6 |
| Operational bookkeeping and log upkeep | 6 |
| Two working visits, on-site work only (travel logged separately) | 26 |
| Owner total | 118 |
| Cleaner, 44 turnovers at about 2.5 hours | 110 |
The owner clears 100 and exceeds the cleaner. Remove one visit and hand the messaging to a co-host, and both halves of the test fail. The margin is the owner's choices, not the distance.
What to write down
For remote work: the task, the minutes, the date, and the thread or document that shows it. For visits: travel as its own entry with purpose, then each task on site with duration and evidence. For everyone else who works on the property: their hours, in the log, all year. If you are not keeping that record yet, you can start a free trial and log from wherever you are.