Anyone purchased a HomeAway/VRBO property?

[Ryan M.]

Hey folks. I'm closing soon on a cabin in western NC that has a good HomeAway rental history. Unfortunately, their official policy is that you are not alllowed to transfer a listing to a new owner. The current owner is willing to just give me his login info and let me impersonate him, but I'm not sure that's a great idea. 

There are a lot of future bookings in place that I hate to have to cancel. Plus, he has about 40 five star reviews which I also hate losing. I could start my own listing but I'm worried I'll have to cancel the current owner's listing first, losing all the future bookings. Anyone have experience with this? Any ideas?

[Henry Decoo]

I purchased a vacation rental that was in the same situation being listed on homeaway with a ton of reviews and bookings. Basically I just ended up creating a new listing and the previous owner just sent me the contact info for the future bookings. I just emailed them to let them know I bought the house and would honor their bookings. At that point I just updated the new calendar to match the bookings I took over and when it came time for the final deposits to be paid, I just invoices them through PayPal. So far so good. All bookings transferred and I'm up to about 10 5 star reviews so we are getting there. It's always better to just bite the bullet and make your own listing because it becomes a real pain to change the banking info for payments and homeaway does not want people transferring the listings.