HomeAway, the leading Vacation Rental services rollup has recently hired two key silicon valley executives and may be vying a 2011 IPO. The company was valued at $1.4 Billion USD just a year and a half ago with revenues of $150 Million. Current revenus is now around $200m a year with some estimated $70m a year in pure profit.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/14/homeaway-ramps-towards-ipo-with-two-key-hires/
Folks, forgive me for being abrasive, but…… WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE????????
Vacation Rental Listing website FlipKey.com just raised their yearly listing rates by 1000%! Imagine if you joined them, and added your property, uploaded picture after picture, adding captions, adding features, amenities, facilities, description etc.. and then in less than 1 year, they send you an e-mail telling you that your MINIMUM yearly fee has just increased 1000%, and oh by the way, if you want to have a premium listing, then they raise your rates by 1400%.
I guess the reason they are called “FLIPKEY”, is because they flip the key on you, then stick it up your ass!
What makes it so insulting is how they present it to you, that they are raising your rates by over 1000%, here is how they present it:
We’re happy to inform you that we’ve made significant progress in delivering more qualified inquiries and bookings over the past two months. We’ve also introduced an annual subscription plan with a special low rate to provide our early owners with a great value.
So, they have introduced a subscription plan with a “special low rate” to provide you with great value… and what exactly is that “special low rate”???? Ahhh, I’m glad you asked, it’s a 1400% INCREASE FROM YOUR PREVIOUS RATE… buaaaa haaa haa haa haaa.. haaa haa haa haaa…
There’s more, they go on to say this… I am not making this up, this is an actual copy and paste from an e-mail they put out to all the vacation rental owners that already signed up with them:
This special low rate is only available for our early owners as a thank you for your loyalty.
So folks, if you are a current FlipKey customer, their special LOW RATE, of increasing your rate over 1000% is special… just for you, oh, you should feel so special, shouldn’t you?
Folks…. The FlipKey team wants $240 USD per year to list your rental with them. I say, Flip the key to them, and spend HALF that much with Free-Rentals.com, and we will spend 80% of that money paying for ads, driving targeted traffic directly to your vacation rental listing.
The number one free vacation rental website keeps getting bigger. Free-Rentals.com just crossed the 300k mark in terms of Alexa traffic rank, making it the largest free vacation rental website online. Thank you to everyone for your participation, it’s only with the help of vacation rental home owners that we can take this industry back and put it into the hands of the vacation rental home owners.
We are pleased to announce that free-rentals.com now has 7000 Vacation Rental listings worldwide. Free-Rentals.com is now the largest vacation rental directory website offering owners a 100% free to advertise opportunity.
Free-Rentals.com just broke 2 major trendlines today. For the first time, Free-Rentals.com dropped below the 400k mark… meaning, it’s roughly the 400 thousandth most popular website on the internet.
And secondly, Free-Rentals.com has doubled the amount of time each visitor spends on time reviewing vacation rental listings while tripling the number of inquiries sent to vacation home owners each day. Currently, over 350 inquiries are made to vacation home rental owners each day via the Free-Rentals.com wesite.
The Free-Rentals.com business model is to put the vacation rental industry back into the hands of individual vacation home owners. What that means to the average vacation home owner is this… Free-Rentals.com offers you tools and services to actively market and promote your vacation rental.
In contrast, the big stalwart companies that currently control the Vacation Rental industry do so simply because… they got there first. So before you pay $150 USD PER YEAR just to have your vacation rental property listed at one of these corporate websites, ask yourself… what are they DOING with that money to actively promote MY rental unit?
My guess is that they using your money to fly themselves around business class to attend various internal meetings.
At Free-Rentals.com, we DO NOT require a payment to host your vacation rental unit. We simply ask members to consider a donation. In return for their donation, we offer services to actively market and promote their rental unit. Specifically:
1.) 80% of the money you donate is spent to purchase Google Ads, directed at your specific property listing. Here is a how a sample ad appears. These ads run on Google Search Results and Google Partner websites.
2.) We publish your listing to our dedicated regional sister website. While Free-Rentals.com attracts an international clientele, our dedicated sister websites are 100% laser focused on a given regional area. Here for example is our dedicated Costa Rica website: http://www.rentals-costa-rica.com/
3.) We publish your listing to Vast.com, Twitter.com/freerentals, RSS and other affiliate websites that accept our feed.
4.) We publish your listing on free classified ads websites such as craiglist.org, kijiji.com and several other such sites.
5.) We have a few other tactics concerning how we drive targeted traffic to your listing but we need to keep that information confidential, as we have not yet found any other vacation rental company deploying the same tactics.
So in summary, if you want a team on your side to do the heavy lifting for you in marketing and promoting your vacation rental, give us a try at Free-Rentals.com
The blogger HomeExchanger has announced a full boycott on VRBO and is trying to round the troups. Her first grip is that websites such as VRBO that allow people “to list a swap home for rent introduces commercialism into the equation. It also puts a price tag on individual homes which further erodes home exchange’s egalitarian ethos.”
HomeExchanger goes on to say:
What really annoys me about VRBO’s bigoted owner is his disingenuous claim that he is only discriminating against “unmarried” people. He knows full well that gay Americans CANNOT legally marry in the USA. I am against VRBO because I am annoyed by hypocrisy. Boycott VRBO.
We don’t have any strong opinions about the dispute, but as a general rule of thumb, we take sides with the more tolerant of sides in most disputes.
Our sister site Homewelcome which offers Home Exchanges as well as Free-Rentals.com certainly does not discriminate against any group wanting to rent or exchange their home. Furthermore, both websites do not allow it’s users to post discriminatory descriptions regarding who they seek to rent the hourse to or exchange the house with.
Free-Rentals.com experiences a spike in traffic thanks to the recent donations from several members. Their money has been used in advertising and promoting the website, which has driven a lot of traffic to all vacation rental listings.
Free-Rentals.com demonstrates that democracy on the web does indeed work, and that a smart pooling of resources helps everyone involved.
New start up ShopCabins.com allows you to find a cabin to rent. But for whatever reason, they also list condos and hotels. At time of this post, they have 63 cabin listings.
Hotpads began by focusing on long term real estate rental heat maps, allowing you to view real estate listings primarily through a map front end interface. It then added a “Buy vs. Rent” search feature allowing users to search homes either for sale or rent while comparing their monthly costs.
Their latest addition is to offer vacation rentals across the U.S.A. Search results can be sorted by price and availability, which show up when you hover your mouse over any given house icon.
Hotpads, launched in 2005, originally covered only rentals. It added for sale listings in late 2007. The site now lists 3 million homes for sale and 300,000 rentals.