Skift Travel Podcast: Short-Term Rental Pendulum Swings Back Toward Homeowners

13.06.2024 - 17:07 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Seth Borko / Sarah Kopit

Can property managers successfully build national brands? Have short-term rental businesses tilted too heavily toward travelers instead of homeowners? What has been the impact of New York’s Local Law 18, which amounted to a defacto ban of most Airbnbs, on individual homeowners?

Skift recently hosted its Short-Term Rental Summit, which featured several executives addressing several these topics and more. Editor-in-Chief Sarah Kopit and Head of Research Seth Borko discuss their main takeaways from the Short-Term Rental Summit in this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast.

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Kopit: Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. I’m Sarah Kopit, Skift’s editor-in-chief, with Seth Borko, Skift’s head of research. We are here with the Weekly Travel Podcast. It has been a back-to-back couple of days for the two of us. Seth, we are tired.

Borko: We are very tired, Sarah. We are exhausted in fact.

Kopit: So we had two big events for Skift in these last couple of days. We had our Data + AI Summit and a Short-Term Rental Summit. They both were great. And Seth and I are here today to talk about what happened, what we heard, what we learned, and to kind of dissect it. Seth, what were your big highlights? What made you the most excited?

Borko: So there was a lot. Let’s start with Short-Term Rental Summit. We have got two summits, so why don’t we start with that — short-term rentals, a sector that myself and my team and Skift in general have been following for a very long time. I was really excited. It seemed like a very much more maybe realistic conference than in the past.

Like some of the shine has come off. But that’s also a good thing. I felt the people in the room and and in the audience were far more serious — far more mature — about the future of the sector.

And far more focused on profitability, which is a great thing. There was a lot of great sessions. I’ll pick one that I moderated. We had this great session with Evolve Vacation Rentals. That’s Brian Egan and Portoro — Dustin and Portoro — and they’re both branded professional property managers.

So these are the boots on the ground folks. And to me, a really, really interesting debate in this sector has been like, “Can you build a property management brand?” All the branding seems to go through Vrbo. All the branding seems to go through Airbnb. Can you build a brand like Evolve like Vacase, like Sonder? Some of them have struggled, and the hard part has been getting homeowners and building that consumer presence.

Borko: And I asked Brian Egan — Evolve is a top five property manager in the world. I asked him about this — and Dustin. But they both had some really