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Why Some Short-Term Rental Tech Vendors Are Turning Away from Independent Hosts

Wouter Geerts and Sean O'Neill
vtrips vacation rental Palm Coast Florida short-term rental source vtrips

Photo Credit: This photo shows a property in Palm Coast, Florida, that's managed by Vtrips, a U.S. property management company. Companies like Vtrips are increasingly being courted by startups and other travel tech vendors rather than independent Airbnb hosts. Vtrips

Skift Take

Short-term rental tech vendors are increasingly forced to pick a side: Focus on professional property managers or focus on the long tail of independent hosts. There's business in both, but understanding customer needs is paramount.

Blame it on economies of scale or other factors. But some startups that offer tech services to the short-term rental sector are doing more and more to woo professionals that manage multiple units. The vendors are losing interest in independent hosts because the so-called "long-tail" customers often turn out to be tougher sells. We can define the long tail as consisting of independent hosts who tend to be hobbyists, owners of second homes, or small property managers. They present their properties on limited online channels — often only one, like Airbnb. Each host tends to run their property themselves without much outsourcing to operational providers like cleaning services or tech vendors like channel or yield managers. At first sight, spurning independent hosts may not make sense. A commonly used figure by the sector's insiders is that independent hosts manage 60 percent of short-term rental property units. That's a big market. The advent of Airbnb has made hosting first or second homes without any professional help easier for amateur hosts and hobbyists.

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But despite having a proportionally smaller market by one measure, professional managers may often be more motivated to buy digital tools than independents. They may also have bigger budgets, too. Survey data from Transparent, a data provider for the short-term rental sector, and the Vacation Rental Management Association, supports this, showing how the uptake of third-party property management systems and channel managers increases as the size of the managed portfolio increases. The ever-expanding ecosystem In a recent report, Skift Research highlighted the ever-expanding ecosystem that is forming around platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo. As we look at this ecosystem, we see the prospects vary by the business model. For property management companies, independent hosts offer clear potential to increase supply and expand into new markets, but for tech provider

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