Family-run holiday home management around the Wakatipu, with someone on call for the whole of your stay.
Stay Here look after holiday homes around the Wakatipu and rent them out to visitors — apartments in town and out by the marina, larger houses up on Queenstown Hill and across the water at Kelvin Heights. It is a family business rather than a booking site: a mother-and-daughter operation, Vicky Taylor and Cindy Katene, and between them they are who answers the enquiry and who takes the call when something goes wrong.
Vicky came at it from the cleaning side, running a Queenstown cleaning company before setting Stay Here up in 2010 — a useful order to do things in, given the difference between a good holiday house and a bad one usually comes down to whether someone checked it properly before you arrived. Her husband Dean is a builder, and picks up a good deal of the repairs and maintenance across the houses.
What renting one is like
The homes are fully furnished and self-catered, linen is supplied, and the end-of-stay clean is in the price rather than added at checkout. Someone is on call for the whole of your stay, which is the practical difference between a managed home and a listing you found online — if the heat pump gives up on a Sunday night, there is a local number to ring.
Minimum stays vary by property: some take a single night, most want three, and five nights is the minimum between 20 December and 5 January. Rates are set per house and move with the season, so the ski months and the fortnight either side of New Year cost a good deal more than a week in May.
The homes
The portfolio runs from studio and one-bedroom apartments up to four-bedroom houses that sleep eight — which is the point at which a holiday home starts to beat a row of hotel rooms on both price and sanity. Several of them have their own pages here:
- Aqua Nova — three bedrooms on Queenstown Hill, with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the lake and the mountains
- Terrace Apartment 17 — two bedrooms on Panorama Terrace, ten minutes' walk down into town
- Lakefront Marina Apartment — two bedrooms by the Frankton marina, on the Frankton Track and a short walk from Altitude Brewing
The rest are on Stay Here's own site, which is also where current rates and availability live. More Queenstown holiday homes here.
If you own a house here
Stay Here take on new properties to manage, including homes already listed with another agency, and will do a short-term rental appraisal at no charge for real estate agents who want one to help sell a house. The office is open 8.30am to 5pm on weekdays — get in touch to talk it over.
Details checked August 2026.
