Starting our 3rd season out strong with John Banczak, Chief Strategy Officer at Vacasa with what we think is the first podcast anyone has done since their IPO!

Airlines, Distribution, Bed & Breakfasts, HomeAway Software, Hotels, Investment, and Property Management… what do all of these have in common? The answer is JB.

In April 2021 Vacasa acquired John’s company TurnKey Vacation Rentals, which was operating in more than 80 destinations across the U.S.

Vacasa started with just 8 doors and has now grown to over 37,000 worldwide, with John who was recently promoted to Chief Stagey Officer helping to lead the charge!

Some of the many questions we dive into in this episode:

• What about the Vacasa brand does the industry get wrong or misunderstand?
• Vacasa’s acquisition game is strong and you’re snagging up some pretty amazing established brands in key markets… why are so many property managers entertaining and following through with getting acquired by Vacasa?
• Would you be willing to address Steve Milo calling Vacasa (and Sonder) out in social media articles?

You don’t want to miss this episode!

A special thanks to John for coming onto our show and giving us access to an amazing conversation!

…and if you didn’t know, “the no BS podcast is one of the five regular podcasts I listen to” – John Banczak*

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Technology Driven Hospitality With John Banczak

Mateo, How are you?

John, I am fantastic. How are you?

This is a big episode. It’s season three. It has potential. I don’t want to go ahead and say it’s going to be a big episode. We’re excited about our guests. I don’t want to spend too much time with this super long-winded intro, but do your due diligence for those of you reading. Give a like on YouTube. If you’re on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, go ahead and leave a review. Give us five stars if you’re learning, and share the love with us. Without further ado, I want to go ahead and introduce our first guest and this episode’s guest. The CSO, Chief Strategy Officer, JB Banczak with Vacasa. How are you, John?

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. You guys are giving this way too much credit. Everyone knows I’m a totally boring guy. Hopefully, this doesn’t cause your viewership to decline rapidly.

It’s not even close. Don’t even try that.

When I talk to people about Vacasa and I talk to people about who you are, everyone I speak with is nothing but admiration and positive things to say about what you’ve done throughout your career, which we want to go ahead and dive into. The transition from getting into the space or your origin story, if you will. Talking to some pretty smart people I have that I look up to in this space and say that you are the right guy for the role that you have right now with Vacasa. Not one, not two, but multiple people are saying that you are in the right place at the right time.

I appreciate that. That makes me feel good.

Let’s talk about it. You’re the newly appointed Chief Strategy Officer with Vacasa. You’re with TurnKey. You’re a Cofounder and CEO of TurnKey. Prior to that, you were with HomeAway under Carl Shepherd’s leadership. Please correct me if I’m saying anything incorrectly. Everyone has stumbled into the story of this space. How does John come into vacation rentals?

We talked about this before we started recording, but I had really wanted to move to Portland to do something outdoors coming out of college. I didn’t get a job out there, but I interviewed with Northwest Airlines and I got a job there. I entered the travel industry doing revenue management without knowing a whole heck of lot about it. You can imagine working for an airline was pretty entertaining.

I got to know the space and stuck with it. I slowly migrated to the lodging side of things back in the early 2000s. The airline business is tough and the airline distribution business is as difficult. I tried to take what I learned at the airlines and start to apply them to lodging. First on the hotel side and then I’m more on the BNB and boutique hotel side. That’s what led me to HomeAway. HomeAway acquired our company BedAndBreakfast.com, and I quickly joined the team that acquired Instant and Escapia because I had a pretty deep knowledge of property management systems

That’s how I got more entrenched in the VR space. I’ve owned a VR. My first one was in 2006. A similar story to a lot of people who read this. I did it through Vrbo. I did it on my own, and you learn the ropes that way. I had a sense of what it took to do it, but it was moving into the role. After the Instant and Escapia deals, it got me entrenched in it for a few years. Turnkey was a result of that. This is 2011 and ’12, and there wasn’t a whole lot of automation out there. The property management system space was still pretty limited. There were a few, but they weren’t prolific. We saw the opportunity to have more of a technology-driven focus on the actual management side. That’s how TurnKey was born.

With Turnkey, you mentioned it. It focused on tech and we’ll dive into it. Vacasa is a huge focus on tech. Do you think the tech and the tech package are what made that so successful for you?

Yes and no. If you look at what we did at TurnKey and how we evolved that business, we launched a lot of cool things there. We put matching photo inspections out back in 2013. We designed these in-home tablets that we had all the way back then. We launched noise monitoring live in 2014. We were building a lot of cool stuff, but there was a reason behind building that cool stuff. If you look at the space the way we looked at it, most property managers consider themselves in the hospitality business. We were in that business as well, but we challenged ourselves to question what makes hospitality work. TJ and I would spend a ton of time sitting in a home watching housekeepers clean the home.

We found good ones that give us great feedback, and I’m still in touch with a bunch. We launched a new release on some of our housekeeping stuff a few weeks ago. I’m getting texts from one of our Austin-based housekeepers who work at our Loom location, giving me instant feedback on what’s working and what’s not. We’ve modified it twice based on getting texts from this friend who’s still cleaning 60 units for us.

We found it pretty important to get down to details. We did a little digging, which I think will either be interesting for people listening to this or controversial. When you look up the definition of hospitality in the Oxford dictionary, it says, “The friendly and generous reception in the entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.” That definition works well at a hotel where all your rooms are together. You got one front desk. You have a GM on site.

If you have a bunch of good people there, you can make it all work. We felt it didn’t apply to vacation rentals directly and with the homes, we had spread out over Austin because when we started, we managed in Austin only for the first nine months. What we realized was we’re in a logistics business. When you look up the definition of logistics, I’m going to read it from you from the same source. The detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, and supplies. Doesn’t that sound a lot more like a vacation rental business than the hotel definition?

[bctt tweet=”We’re actually in the logistics business. When you look up the definition of logistics, it sounds more suited to vacation rentals the definition of hospitality. ” via=”no”]

I think I agree with you for sure. It’s almost like a meld of the two. Looking at it, it could be very cold without being hospitable doing your logistics.

We started down that path. What we found is guests were all booking online. They wanted to. They wanted contactless check-in. They hated having to deal with a key in the person. Even back then, “Give me an easy way to get in.” We had nobody on site. We realized that if we wanted to provide good hospitality, we first had to provide great logistics.

If you had bad logistics and you weren’t on site to greet them, then it was all going to fall apart. We decided, “Let’s make sure our logistics are in order.” We dove deeper. If you look at how great logistics companies succeed, they all build great technology for their operations. A foundational piece of that is to be able to track everything. We quickly started building a system in place based primarily on Six Sigma and in reality, more or less the Kaizen strategy.

We do logistics in a way that supported hospitality. There are a bunch of companies like this out there that realized they were in a different business like Amazon. Visas, credits, and eagerness to invent as part of the main tenets of their success. He talks about how Amazon loves to pioneer and whenever they tried to copy something someone else was doing, they already started to fail at it. We had a similar mindset. How do we build a platform that allows us to effectively manage these logistics and then base hospitality on that?

Our ambitions were big. We didn’t want to be a one-location PM and I think a smaller local PM can think of themselves as a hospitality business and not only because they won’t have the resources to go build their own platform that they’ve got to use some of the great software that’s available, but we did. We realized that we were going to fail at hospitality if we did not build great logistics, assuming we wanted to be in hundreds of locations.

It’s a different thing. You see this mental shift happen at a lot of companies. Look at Expedia versus Travelocity. In my opinion, one of the reasons Expedia eventually dominated Travelocity and bought them for a very low price was that Travelocity was a travel agent that thought, “Let’s take our business online.” Expedia was started by a Microsoft guy who realized they were a technology company trying to reinvent travel.

There is a long list of this. Amazon, the reason Amazon’s so successful is they unlocked two-day delivery. They were an online realtor or retailer, but they realized logistics was the key to their success. How do we unlock getting something to someone quickly, anywhere, and reliably? It’s not retail at all. It’s not eyeballs. It’s not a conversion rate. It’s not a user interface. Logistics was the key to their success.

Look at Netflix. Netflix is the same deal. We’ve had a Netflix subscription for so long. It was when we were getting the DVDs mailed in the mail. They figured out the logistics and then they went over to the streaming. This makes a ton of sense as logistics as a foundation. Without that hospitality on top of it, it’s still just logistics.

That’s what I was going to say. The middle ground is where success lies because one absent of the other doesn’t necessarily get you where you need to go. One of the things I like that you’ve said, you were coming up with the formula of how to scale because none of this matters if you’re not successful in what you do at the end of the day, in one of those areas. What are we always talking about in our industry? How big do you want to get? In scaling and how do you get there and who does it right?

Looking at those analogies, fast forward to 5 to 10 years, who are we going to be talking about? Are we going to be talking about those who innovated and didn’t lose the scope of what we’re doing? That part is where a lot of people get stuck around their definition of hospitality and the human component and dealing with families. It’s traditionally right with the vacation rental side of the business, not just the art of lodging, because it truly is. It’s a bit of science. It’s a bit of creativity. It’s all of these things, but at the end of the day, it’s figuring out what works. Because if feet aren’t through the door and heads aren’t in beds, it’s all theoretical.

You can’t ignore hospitality. If you are in one location, maybe your only focus is the hospitality side. If you’re not tight on logistics, you’ll never succeed at hospitality. Ultimately, you’ve got to get back to that measure everything comment. You’ve got to measure everything. You’ve got to measure your satisfaction first and foremost. We’re maniacal about that in every context. Satisfaction with the cleaning, satisfaction with someone dealing with our people on the phone, satisfaction with the check-in process, guest and owner NPS. We’re pretty comfortable that we are among the best in the business at all of those but if you’re ignoring that, then your logistics have failed as well.

Do you think that with your focus, as in TurnKey’s focus on these things, is that what made, and let’s not take away like how big you’ve gotten as far as acquisitions go or M&A goes, is that where you think made you so tasty for Vacasa? When that came out, it was pretty big news. When you were acquired by Vacasa and you came over, how much inventory did you have at that time, and what did that bring Vacasa’s inventory to?

I forget the exact numbers, but we were near 6,000. I forget where they were, but I think they were around 20, 22, 23, or something like that.

It’s a quarter, again, adding 25% on top with one deal, but it’s not only the inventory. It’s the tech. Everything that was written about it is what you had built. You built these logistics, and your foundation on top of the inventory was a lot of what Vacasa was interested in.

I think there was mutual interest across the board. They had a very similar internal mindset on growth. They’ve got a great career track for people benefits. They had just as good of metrics as we had on satisfaction, the owner sat, guest sat, and reviews. We were very similar businesses in a lot of ways. Bringing their scale with a lot of the concepts that we built was a great fit, and it is to this day. We reported this a month ago, but 93% of all people in the field are still working for Vacasa a few months later, which is pretty amazing. Folks have blended in there well, and it’s a great success story.

It seems like it was a great marriage of the mindset, too, because if you look at Scott, Eric, and Cliff, what they built within Vacasa was something new and pioneering going back to what we were talking about before. It rubbed some people the wrong way. When you do new things, it’s always going to do that. They’re some of the smartest people I know straight up and their ideas around revenue and management building in their internal systems, not buying off the shelf and doing these things and taking this approach. When I look at them, I look at them as trailblazers for real.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for them and what they did because look at the change that it brought and how it shook the industry. Look at how it brought technology and innovation to the forefront. Heavy is the head. Where’s the crown? People are going to take shots at, “Why did you do this? Why did you do that?” It’s also forgetting that this is all new. These are all new things we’re learning, and not everything is always successful. Not everything is the perfect shining star all the time but look at the impact.

It’s a great example of blending what I would call industry outsiders and insiders. Getting Bob helped to enable their success. They were smart enough to realize, “We need a real hospitality veteran in here,” but when you look at a lot of the companies that we talk about now as household names and travel, and you think about how many of them were started by someone who was never in travel before, it’s nuts. Look at Vrbo. Brian and Carl had never done a travel business before. Also, Brian Chesky of Airbnb.

Rich Barton started Expedia. He was at Microsoft. He had nothing to do with travel. Also, Jay Walker of Priceline. The list goes on and on of folks who have kind of come in and said, “Let’s think about a new way.” That’s Eric Breon. He brought in a lot of great people from the industry to help him out, but he had a vision that was not necessarily developed by decades of being in that space. It’s ended up being a good combination, but anyone will realize that you don’t get there unless you have some industry people, like Bob and the team. For the most part, TurnKey is the same way. We hired people out of Lodging like crazy to help us with that aspect of the business.

It’s interesting, “Where’s theirs too?” You’re building, but you’re building with this kind of, “How do you scale?” I don’t think they were building with the intent of they knew exactly what they wanted their in-state to be. They were hitting more metrics of, “How can we improve this? How can we scale?” They started with eight homes. Think about that. Of the people that we talked to on this show, some have built incredible businesses and thousands of units. They started with eight. Look at how long it took for them to get from eight to one of the premier companies within the industry that everyone’s looking at talking about scrutinizing.

From 8 to 37,000 now? I’m sure you’re more because I talked to someone that sold to you, so that’s a few more, but it is added at about 37,000 or 38,000.

I think that’s what we reported the last time. It was 37,000.

That’s pretty phenomenal. You’re the largest property management company in the world from eight to that. You’ve gone public, and we’ve seen both sides of that. We’ve seen both positive things about that. There’s a lot of hype about it and there are more recent things in the news that aren’t as cherry. I wanted to ask a question and if we’re okay to start talking about. Can we talk about the decision to go public? If there was a transition and mindset that you had to do. My assumption is that as a goal and as a company, it’s still logistics and hospitality first.

No matter how the money’s coming in, that’s always your goal. You want to give a great experience from start to finish for your guests. For any company, that’s pre-IPO and going to IPO. Ultimately, you don’t want to change anything. You know you have to change some things because there are different people. You have to please, but ultimately, the goal is, “How do we make this bigger and better?” It’s not only about a money grab. It’s about continuing to scale. That’s why you go public because you want to keep scaling.

In the news, we saw that we are currently sitting at 37,000 doors and citing profitability for the full year in 2023. Next year, you’re citing profitability. How many doors do you expect to add between now and then to reach that milestone? In addition, besides acquiring more inventory, what do you have to do to go ahead and get there in your role as Chief Strategy Officer?

We don’t share a forward projection on home count for a bunch of reasons, but we did share in our earnings announcement how we focus and how we try to strike that balance between growth and profitability. Ultimately, we’re focused on individual unit growth and signing up individual homeowners. We do most of our growth now. It’s a traditional organic one-on-one sale and that’s working well. I think we added two and a half times at a greater speed than we did.

It’s because we’ve added a lot of salespeople. We’ve got hundreds of folks out there that we hired in 2021 who are now tenured and trained. They follow a pretty predictable sales approach. What we’re trying to do is grow that unit account. When you’re growing that, it requires funding. That’s part of the justification to go public if it’s a funding event.

[bctt tweet=”When you’re growing, it requires funding. That’s part of the justification to go public. It’s a funding event. It’s a way to get out there and raise some money.” via=”no”]

It’s a way to get out there and raise some money. As you mentioned, I don’t know who you talked to, but we still do a lot of portfolio additions. We’re still an active acquirer, as you’ve seen. We don’t announce them individually anymore primarily because you got to be a little careful on the whole public company announced a follow-up a path format

That’s why I didn’t bring it up by name here on the show too.

The stuff gets out eventually, but we’re not in the business of naming everyone that we do these days.

I wanted to continue on that. We’re talking about Vacasa or TurnKey back in the day as a big player in this space. There are two camps where a property manager is in a community and if Vacasa is coming into the community. They’re a new player in said community that is an established, short-term rental/vacation rental area. Camp One is pissed off because Vacasa can’t bring the local touch that our regional travelers want. However, with Camp Two, we’re property managers.

They’re like, “This isn’t a bad thing. Vacasa is going to make some of these homeowners a little disappointed. There’s going to be churn and we can go in and acquire pickups that churn in and add to our own inventory. What are your thoughts on this? There is truth in these because these are the feelings of these property managers, but what are your thoughts on this?

We get along pretty well with the overwhelming majority of local PMs. We have a lot of people that go to a lot of conferences, and it’s a pretty congenial bunch of folks. I don’t think we would be able to acquire the hundreds of small PMs if we didn’t get along with them. Certainly, we get it. There are a few folks that don’t seem to like us, but for the most part, that to us is a lot of noise.

As for Camp One, we may not have founded our business in each local market, but we’re dedicated to keeping the local staff we bring on. We always have been. When we’re talking internally about a deal, the discussion is often around how critical it is to keep the staff and name by name, which we can try to keep and trust they’re going to stay. We try to do that and give them better benefits and so on.

It’s pretty important that we are local. And, you know, I think that’s one of the misconceptions. We’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of local employees out there. In every single market, there’s a whole staff. We want a home if there’s someone not nearby. I hear that about Camp One, but I don’t know that there’s a lot of truth to that. As for Camp Two, I talked about this before. We measure everything. The truth is that owners are incredibly happy with the service we provide.

If anyone tells you that they’re grabbing Vacasa homeowners in droves, they’re flat-out wrong. It’s not happening. We monitor every time someone signs up, leaves, and what they do when they leave. We are monitoring owner satisfaction. I don’t think that’s the case. I can understand why folks want to believe that, but I don’t think that’s a reality out there.

I would agree with you. I call bullshit on some of that too. I think people talk out of both sides of their mouths. They are 100% honest sometimes because I think people get caught up in the, “This isn’t good. This isn’t traditional. This is different. What are they doing to our market?” I’ve had conversations with some of those people who turned around and sold to Vacasa at the same time, whether they gave up their hands and were just like, “Forget it.” It’s interesting because you do hear the rumblings, but you also see the actions. I’m about the actions at the end of the day because you can tell me whatever you want, but what are you doing at the end of the day, and what’s being done?

Looking at how companies scale, people might not like it, but at the end of the day, there’s no perfect manual for how to do it. Again, are we having expectations of a perfect practice that hasn’t been invented? There are positives and negatives with everything and depending on how you look at it. If you look at the end of the day what’s been done, who’s who it’s been done with, and how it’s been done. Are those narratives true? I think it’s a smaller percentage. I think it’s a vocal percentage, but I do think it’s a smaller percentage of people that think this is a bad thing at the end of the day. I think a lot of people on the other side of this don’t know and don’t have the answer.

We’re looking at these things in real-time. We’re looking at these things as these entities are growing and scaling. We’re going to see the effects of what it has on the market. We’re going to see the effects of what it’s doing to the local economy and the people that are being hired. As you said, you have the numbers, and the numbers will be there and we will also see the results which I think will put things into perspective and hopefully, drive a conversation that’s built on that and not based on fear. I feel like a lot of the Vacasa con conversations have come up around fear versus fact.

That’s a great way to put it.

JB, you talked about that in Camp Two. Do you think that some of that is wrong and it’s inaccurate? What about that or other things about the Vacasa brand does the industry? We’re big brand people on the show. We’re big on talking about brands and what brands can do for the space both positively and negatively. What does the general public get wrong or misunderstand with the brand Vacasa?

First, you have to define the general public. The guests don’t know any of this inside baseball industry stuff. They want to have a great stay. They want the home to be what you said it would be, clean, and so on. We’re focused on that, especially right now, with summer being so busy. I think there are homeowners and I would argue that they also are not as privy to the inside baseball stuff. Maybe they are more so than the guests, but they want their home taken care of. They want it to make some money. They want to make sure it’s in great shape. They want to be able to use it. Those two constituents are the folks we focus on.

On the property management side, I think there are a couple of misperceptions. The first one is the local thing. We hear that all the time. What we do not do locally is all the stuff that would be highly inefficient to do locally, like accounting, finance, HR, and software, especially after-hours support. It’s interesting cause if you think about how many local PMs use Novice or a Real Voice instead of local folks on the phone. They get a website produced and maintained by a national firm that’s not actually in their market, or they use Guest Hook.

It is a great company that writes listings or even a property management system that’s run by Inhabit IQ or, uh, you know, Escapia, Vrbo, or they’re using pricing support from beyond or even like a concierge product. , these are all fantastic local PMs, but none of These functions are local PMs, but none of those functions are local to them. Our business isn’t that dissimilar. We’ve got a team of people that’s dealing with hospitality and then a lot of that stuff you got to do offsite. I do think that’s where we excel. I’ll use a story about my most recent trip. I got back from going to a wedding with my family in Hawaii. It was fun. It was my daughter’s first ever been to a wedding, so they thought it was cool. We stayed in vacation rentals at Vacasa properties. We stayed in a Marriott hotel for a couple of nights too, which was great.

Vacasa properties were all booked. We used another full-service prepared PM. I have always strongly preferred PMs. I like the consistency. I usually pick one, preferably a VRMA member, and book with them. We got there and the AC was out. It happens. I get it. They had come and they put in a temporary AC in one of the bedrooms, but not the other. The second bedroom was really hot and this was 6:00. I called him and it was an answering service after hours. I understand answer services. There’s nothing I can do. They don’t get in tomorrow until 10:00.

I thought, “Here’s a local PM. They’re supposed to be this great hospitality business. They don’t have anybody answering the phone who can do anything. They could take notes and tell me they were going to call back the next day. Would that PM have been better off having an on-call person locally who’s maintenance? Yeah. Would they have been better off having someone who knew to call that on-call person and get an emergency AC vendor in there? Yeah. We dealt with one night where the room was 80 degrees and that’s a bummer, but that’s not Picasso. We have a team ready to back that stuff up and ready to answer the phone 24/7. We have the local people who are fully on-call. It’s not like we fix everything. Sometimes you can’t.

Shit happens and you can’t do it all the time.

Yeah. You sure try, but the point is that it’s the type of stuff I think that we can do outside of the local market, and many PMs do that. I think ultimately we’re not that different and that is a misconception that people have out there. I think there are a few others. If you look at advocacy, a big misconception is, “Vacasa’s not as involved.” The truth is, we are. We’re the largest donor to it.

[bctt tweet=”There is a big misconception that Vacasa is not as involved in advocacy. That’s not true. In fact, it is the largest donor to it.” via=”no”]

I’ve seen Bob write some checks at VRMA Advocacy which is pretty fantastic. You are up there with everybody. That is a misconception for sure.

I have to speak to that too. Atlanta’s not traditionally even been a market for you guys and you supported the local effort here through AMSTRA, which I’m on the board of, which caught me by surprise. I was like, “Wow,” but it was a huge help and continues to be a huge help in our lobbying efforts there. I want to make sure that’s put out there because it is. That’s something the whole industry should be unifying around.

There is a lot of behind-the-scenes work. We tend not to parade around these efforts, but if you look at the local action stuff we’ve done in multiple markets, it’s pretty impressive and has had incredible results. It’s a different way of doing it. We learned at turnkey years ago when we got involved in some of the Austin advocacy and some of the California markets that direct action with local advocacy groups was highly effective and was the way to go.

We’re big on advocacy here on the show and have some touchy subjects coming up regarding advocacy and understanding regulations and stuff like that. We appreciate Vacasa ponying up. That’s the point. It’s about action. It’s not about getting your name in front of it and saying, “We did this.” It’s important that the results are there and that’s the whole point of everything. I do want to bring up the Vacasa name. We all know that there have been some things in the works between our friends Steve Milo and Carl Shepherd and the Vacasa and Sonder names.

There was an article that went out a little bit ago that Steve Milo wrote that was called Bad For Business: Two Tycoons Face Scrutiny. In all actuality, Milo, whom we have a ton of respect for, his mind, what he’s doing, and his business model, shits on Vacasa, Sonder, and the business model. Do you care to talk about that a little bit as a recap?

For starters, we’re a vastly different business model than Sonder in almost every way, shape, or form. I’m sure you guys understand that. We can go into more detail if you want, but I think the two are very different. As far as the commentary in general, I’ll use another Bezos quote. If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, then ultimately, we’ll turn out all right.

[bctt tweet=”If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, then ultimately we’ll turn out all right.” via=”no”]

What we do is try not to let the noise bother us too much. We’re focused on delivering the best service for our customers. We think we’re executing well there. You can find similar mantras from a ton of leaders who almost universally teach management best practices. I like to read a great leadership blog out there called Heartfelt Leadership. Have you guys heard of this before?

I have not, but I’m writing it down.

You should go check it out. There are a couple of people who write it, but Deb Boelkes is one of the founders. They’ve been blogging for many years. You literally can see their leadership posts back to 2012, ’13, or something like that. There are all these snippets of how to be a great leader and founder. I’m going to quote from her as well because she has a lot of stuff on how you deal with competition.

One of the things she says is, “Great companies, highly respected professionals, and heartfelt leaders never disparage their competition. They keep the conversation positive and complimentary by focusing on their own ability to uniquely help stakeholders improve their lives and achieve their objectives.” That’s more or less the approach that I’ve always taken in my career and that I’ve seen from leadership in my career, whether I was at Northwest and KLM or Accenture or Expedia or the Vrbo. I suspect you’ll see a similar approach from 99% of the Fortune 500 or the Inc. 5,000 companies out there.

That’s also the one you see from Vacasa. We try to keep it positive. Ultimately, we want everyone in this business to be successful. We want owners and guests who stay with us or stay with someone else to have a good experience. They keep coming back to the business. I do think and we’ve seen this over the past decade. The rising tide in this space has helped us all. We wish the best to everyone, including VTrips. It’s our mantra. You’re not going to see us get into a negative thing. We’re pretty proud of how we’re dealing with our homeowners.

Milo, this article mentions bankruptcy. If either Sonder or Vacasa are continuing down this path, they are on a path to bankruptcy. What are your thoughts on that? I know you’re not going ahead and going blow for the blast. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, “Is there any truth in what he’s saying that you’re on the path to bankruptcy?”

Certainly, not Vacasa. For Sonder, I can’t speak for them. We’ve never gotten into that business model for a bunch of reasons. It’s very different. I don’t love that business, as people have heard me say time and time again, more from the aspect of I don’t like the ratio of revenues to cost, but I love our business model. I think nothing could be farther than the realm of possibility.

Thank you.

It goes back to logistics. I want to say this because I am all for dialogue. I think an open, honest, intelligent dialogue, or talking strategy, but what are we doing? We’re talking. We’re speculating. Companies are operating. We don’t have a magic wand. I could sit up here right now, do a bunch of research, and forecast what your business is doing. I could do that. I could post blogs. Whatever my reasoning may be, I could do that. I think we have to take a step back and look at the rhetoric. Look at how things are being talked about and one of the things we said even prior to the call is to be cognizant of the conversation and how the conversations are being had.

It’s because I believe healthy dialogue is good. I believe when it takes and veers left, then we suffer because this is happening in a public forum. These are people’s lives, these are people’s jobs and these are people’s companies. This is people’s livelihood. It’s a personal call for me to be like, “Let’s have these conversations for sure, but let’s keep it about the business and keep it there.” Not everybody’s going to agree with your business model. It’s an awesome and beautiful thing that we can debate all day long, but leave it there. We’re going to do some things to help promote that, but we appreciate you coming on and talking to us about that and giving your opinion in the space. Thank you.

We’ve got a great team of people at Vacasa. No one would be there if we didn’t think this business had a great future in front of it. We’re focused on the metrics. Our employees are really happy. Our guests and owners are happy. We’re growing well. We’re getting better every day. We maniacally pursue improvements. We talked about the housekeeping improvement. That’s a small one, but that’s how we run our business. We focus on how we can continue to improve and make things better.

I love where you’re going. Again, I love your role as CSO for the company. We have a few more minutes if you do. I wanted to ask, what is one thing you’d like our listeners to know about you and maybe about where you’re trying to or, as Chief Strategy Officer, where you’re going and trying to drive and strategize for Vacasa? What might our readers not know about you and the direction that you’re trying to take Vacasa?

You probably don’t know personally that I own a 20-room BNB and I have for years now. I’ve got this like side business going on that I used to be involved in in the early days. Mateo, I think you mentioned your mom had a property. You know that it’s a grind. It’s got a restaurant. It’s got a small spa. It was interesting learning there. Ours is South of Austin, about 45 minutes.

Is it a boutique hotel or do you rent it as a short-term rental?

No, it’s more of a boutique hotel. It’s called Sage Hill. You can go check it out online. That’s a true deep dive into hospitality. When people show up there, they are expecting a great meal. They’re expecting the nicest linens they’ve ever seen. They’re expecting a spa treatment. We got a lot of employees and you do learn firsthand what hospitality looks like. I’ve owned that along with one of my good friends and longtime business partners Eric Golder. I was also involved with TurnKey. Thankfully, we’ve had a great GM there for a while, so I don’t have to get very involved. Thank goodness, but that is an interesting thing to be an in-keeper on the one hand and a technology hospitality guy on the other.

It’s interesting because I managed this boutique hotel in Portland from Atlanta. Technology is the only way that I can do that. There are eighteen rooms. I went from not managing any short-term rentals to managing eighteen individual rooms that I run truly as a hybrid, as we were speaking about. That’s why it resonated with me so much because I continued to see this middle ground. I continue to see these hybrids of balancing hospitality and logistics. Seeing it in real life and talking about it is theoretical, but the application of actually having to do it cements.

I feel like I’m so much better because I’m elbows deep in this, failing a lot, and learning the hard truths about what the market is looking for. What’s going to keep heads and beds and keep people happy? It’s not what someone says or not what this article said, but what I’m getting and learning in real-time is the challenge.

What’s the hybrid aspect of it? You said you run it as a hybrid.

There’s no front desk. It’s self-check-in. It’s eighteen rooms. I list them individually on short-term rental and hotel platforms. We’re operationally light, which I think is critically important, but the only reason I’m able to do that is technology. I don’t have to be there every day. I’m not manning a front desk. I don’t have a point of sale directly there that I have to cash out every night. I can control my ground operation hours. There are a lot of things I can do and technology that I can use to make that work.

Out of curiosity, what do you use as a property management system to manage that?

I use Hostfully as my property management software system. I have a manager tech stack. I use PriceLabs. I use the things that fit this hotel. I had to learn what tech stack works for this boutique hotel, which is not a vacation rental home on the Oregon Coast or a cabin up in the woods of Mount Hood. I learned so much from those managers around hospitality and looking at how other people run the operations aspects of their businesses that are similar to mine. I’ve just been a sponge and I think I’m grateful for that, but the theoretical or the theory to application part was very eye-opening and continues to be an eye-opening experience because that’s where the real learning happens for me.

It is amazing how the slight differences in the operational model from one boutique operation to another or one VR market to another vary. Thankfully, there’s usually a great software product out there for each of them now.

I think that’s the exciting part because the technology for this space is still young, and there’s so much more that will be coming up in the future. I’m looking forward to that too because I think it will make our business more professional. I think it’s going to make the guest experiences better, but again, that’s one man’s humble opinion.

[bctt tweet=”The technology for the short-term rental space is still young, and there’s so much more that will come up in the future. It’s going make our business more professional and it’s going to make the guest experience better.” via=”no”]

JB, we’re super excited about Vacasa. We’re super excited about where you’re going as a company where or personally you are going. I want to ask you one last question before we get out of here. What is the most challenging opportunity, personally or professionally, on the horizon for you?

I think it’s probably similar to anyone in this space. It’s trying to juggle a personal life on top of your professional life. Vacation rentals, arguably more so than even hotels, are a 24-hour game. There’s never an end to what you can be doing and what you can be working on, especially now that we’re working from home trying to figure out a way to back out and spend time with family and friends and get some breathing room. It’s a struggle. I think anybody who owns a property management company out there or who has done it and sold, gets this. It’s a hard job.

It takes its toll on friends and family. I had always thought that if we got out of business, I would be able to step back a little bit. That hasn’t happened with Vacasa for a bunch of reasons. One is we did the acquisition and we liked everybody there. We saw eye to eye, and the first in-person meeting we had was like we’d been working together for years.

I remember coming back to my wife and saying, “I kind of like this gang. What am I going to do with myself if I don’t have a job? I like this business. Why would I leave?” You make that decision and you’re right back into it. You’re right back into trying to juggle your personal life again. That’s probably been the most challenging part is to try to separate that stuff out. I guarantee anyone who owns a PM reading this has the same experience.

You mentioned you have girls. It was the first wedding they’d been to. I have four.

Are they all girls?

No. Girl, boy, girl, boy.

That’s a crew. That’s a big gang.

We’re all dads here. John, thank you so much. We appreciate you joining us. We appreciate the transparency. For those of you reading, again, hit like, leave a review, and keep coming. We appreciate this audience.

Thanks for having me, guys. It’s great hanging out and chatting. If you ever need anything else, let me know.

We’ll definitely have you back. Thanks.

Important Links

• YouTube – The No BS Short-term Rental Podcast
• Apple Podcasts – The No BS Short-term Rental Podcast
• Spotify – The No BS Short-term Rental Podcast
• Vacasa
• BedAndBreakfast.com
• VRMA Advocacy
• Bad For Business: Two Tycoons Face Scrutiny
• Heartfelt Leadership
• Hostfully
• PriceLabs