HomeAway, the world’s largest vacation rental website with more than 540,000 vacation rental listings in 120 countries is starting the process officially going public. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Homeaway is said to be choosing bankers to handle an IPO.
The SummitDaily.com reports that the Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST) has delayed their plans for cracking down on vacation rental owners who aren’t paying lodging taxes or paying necessary business license fees.
As we are almost through the first month of the new year and start looking ahead, we can see show season coming up. At Barefoot we enjoy going to these shows and conferences, since it provides us with the opportunity to meet up with existing clients, as well as meet other members of our industry. We believe these conferences play a huge part in the development of the vacation rental industry.
At Barefoot we develop vacation rental software, and are obviously an advocate for the vacation rental industry. We have said it before and we will say it again: We think the vacation rental industry will grow from 9% to 25% in the next 10 years. We also believe that those who will be successful will need to niche or segment. In an earlier blog post we discussed some of the recent changes to the vacation rental industry, and how it will affect all involved in the long run.
If we want the vacation rental industry to grow that growth needs to come from somewhere. While lodging continues to have an annual long-term growth rate at 3.5%, obviously the hotel sector is by far the easiest and smartest segment we should be challenging. To do so, we really need to think more like hotels in a number of ways. The first and most important is hotels know their niche. A Motel 6 and a Marriott target very different consumers. In fact Marriott has many brands all within their name to focus on segments of the lodging opportunity from short term business, to long term business to tradeshow to vacation. It has done this to survive in a very competitive market. For vacation rental you must also understand your niche and target that segment. Once they understand their niche, the hotels that fit that niche are an ideal case study of services that need to be offered to compete against them.
