Why Chris and Marcee Mygatt’s hospitality company is rewriting what guests, and owners, should expect from a Delray Beach vacation rental.
The foundation of Delray Nightly Vacation Rentals wasn’t laid in a boardroom. It was built somewhere over the Atlantic, in airport lounges from Stockholm to Vietnam, and in the long ledger of hotels Chris and Marcee Mygatt checked into across decades of extensive travel.
“We’ve always loved exploring,” Chris says. “But over the years of many trips, we never once booked a short-term rental. Not an Airbnb, not a VRBO, not a single one. The quality was inconsistent. The cleanliness was a coin flip. The accountability didn’t exist. So, we did what skeptical travelers do. We stayed in hotels we trusted.”
That skepticism became the blueprint for a business. When the Mygatts left Denver for Delray Beach in 2022, they entered the vacation rental industry as two of its harshest critics.
“We thought it would be fun to make a difference,” Marcee says. “To stop solving these problems for ourselves as travelers and start solving them for everyone else.”
What they built was deliberately small, deliberately careful, and deliberately different: a boutique vacation rental company designed around what actually matters when a guest opens the front door for the first time.
BOUTIQUE IS A CHOICE, NOT AN ACCIDENT
Today, Delray Nightly manages a tightly curated portfolio: properties the Mygatts own outright alongside a hand-picked selection of homes belonging to investors who share their standards. Every property sits east of I-95 in Delray Beach.
“We’re not chasing scale”, Chris says. “We’re chasing a guest experience that only exists east of the 95. The walkable streets, the beach minutes away, downtown around the corner, maybe a waterfront experience. If a home isn’t there, it isn’t us.”
By saying no to most properties, the Mygatts can resource the ones that fit, staff them locally, and obsess over them in a way high-volume operators simply can’t. Every home gets the full force of the same playbook: the same standards on linens, the same cleaning team, the same response protocols, the same pricing intelligence, the same nightly attention to detail.
THE OWNER’S PERSPECTIVE
Most vacation rental management companies don’t own the homes they manage. The Mygatts do, and that changes everything.
“When you’ve signed your name to the mortgage on a vacation property, you don’t squander the asset,” Chris says. “We treat every home in our portfolio, whether we own it or an investor does, exactly the way we treat our own. That’s just the only way we know how to do this.”
Behind the curtain runs a serious operations platform: dynamic pricing, channel management across Airbnb and VRBO, and a proprietary linen system the Mygatts developed with their local cleaning team. But the technology only works because of the dedicated people on the ground who actually care. The kind who can be at a property in fifteen minutes when something needs attention.
The results show up in the data: hundreds of five-star reviews, occupancy rates that consistently beat comparable homes, and an owner-satisfaction record quietly attracting referrals.
THE QUESTION THEY’RE ASKED MOST
One question comes up almost every time: who should I work with to find the right short-term rental property in Delray?
“Lindsey and Curtis Bennett at Coldwell Banker,” Chris says. “They happen to be family. Lindsey is our daughter, Curtis our son-in-law. But that’s not why we work with them. They’re the top agents at Coldwell Banker in Delray Beach, and they understand what it takes to curate a property that actually performs as a short-term rental, not just one that photographs well. Those are very different things. We use them exclusively for all of our acquisitions. We wouldn’t trust anyone else with this market.”
IN AN OWNER’S WORDS
“I’ve worked with property managers before, and this doesn’t compare. The bookings are strong, the reviews are consistent, and the level of care on every turnover is exactly what you’d want. Being in a small, carefully curated portfolio rather than lost in a stack of hundreds of listings is the whole difference. As an owner, that’s the peace of mind you’re actually paying for.” – Fran V., Swinton Palms House
For Chris and Marcee, those words are the whole project, distilled. After twenty years of being the guests, they finally became the kind of hosts, and the kind of partners they always wished existed. If you own a vacation rental in Delray and you’re looking for a fresh approach and higher returns, give them a call today.
DELRAY NIGHTLY VACATION RENTALS
(303) 880-5020
chris@delraynightly.com
www.delraynightly.com
