Is Vacasa a good idea?

[Jeffrey Schratz]

I have four STR's and manage them all differently. Some with property managers, some without. Thinking of using Vacasa for one in Maine. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

[Shane M ONeal]

Jeffrey, in my opinion, there is usually a better option than Vacasa. Vacasa grows by raising capitola and acquiring competitors. They do not focus their business on great management. Im sure they do ok in some markets, maybe Portland where they started, but I have not been impressed by them. We are a professional STR manager in Santa Cruz, CA and Phoenix/Scottsdale, AZ and we are snatching up their top properties that they essentially got by Acquiring TurnKey, who actually did a decent job. Now almost all of the clients we talk to that are managed by Vacasa are moving to us due to their dissatisfaction with Vacasa. A great resource that AirDNA recently added was pulling together Property Manager data in all major cities. Id would got to AirDNA.co and check your city. You have to pay for the full report, but in the free section, you can scroll down to the section "Top Property Managers" and check out all of the top options. Guest reviews tell a lot about the manager. Good managers find ways to get good reviews because they focus on performance. Of course, there is more than to it than good guest reviews to the real estate investor... can they produce the best financial results? Again, a manager focused on good reviews, should return great search results on the channel algorithms, like AirBNB and VRBO, to rank the properties higher in searches, and thus get the earlier bookings are higher rates. Id also make sure your manager uses data driven pricing tools (not the internal Airbnb pricing tool which is no good), but some other SW to pull data and dynamically adjust price. the other flaw i see in managers is they use flat or weekend/week day pricing. This costs owners in my market tens of thousands in annual rents. So its a key factor to check for with your manager. Id start with AirDNA to find the top managers and interview a few of them. You should get a good feel for who seems like they really know what they are doing. Do they (the managers) also invest in real estate? We do and we have learned a lot by doing so and have that passion to perform better than any other managers because my own investments also rely on the top performance. So those are a few of my thoughts on Vacasa and STR managers in general. I hope that helps!

Shane