HomeAway is in the process of rolling out tiered payments for vacation rental owners, enabling them to pay higher fees to see their listings climb higher on the page.
Performance-based tiered listings already exist on HomeAway's VRBO site and they are in beta on HomeAway.com, says Brian Sharples, HomeAway cofounder and CEO.
Sharples says vacation rental owners generally would have to pay triple the normal fees to get their listing to the top of the page.
The plan is to roll out the feature to HomeAway sites globally, although Sharples acknowledged that this will "take some time."
In other new wrinkles, Sharples says HomeAway has leveraged its acquisition of Second Porch to enable vacation rental owners to launch an app from their owners' dashboards which places a slideshow about their properties on their Facebook pages.
The slideshows link back to HomeAway and they will generate more traffic and customers, Sharples says.
"It's just another distribution platform and another channel for us," Sharples says.
And, in a bid to slowly transition to online booking instead of reliance on offline check payments, HomeAway has introduced ReservationManager on HomeAway.com and VRBO, Sharples says.
With ReservationManager, vacation rental owners pay 2.5 percent fees for Visa, MasterCard and Discover card processing and 1 percent fees for eCheck processing.
HomeAway has been built around listings' fees, but Sharples says new business models are under discussion which may see some vacation rental owners paying a percentage of revenue for using ReservationManager.
He says revenue-based model might be especially appropriate for vacation rental owners who may wish to advertise their properties for several weeks only.
In other tweaks, HomeAway intends to expand its product base with insurance and property damage protection products, Sharples says.
His comments came today during HomeAway's second quarter earnings call, its first since its IPO and becoming a public company.
For the second quarter, HomeAway's net income fell 98% to nearly $2.2 million on almost $58.7 million in revenue, a nearly 41% jump.
HomeAway's costs and expenses have risen sharply since the second quarter of 2010 as it invests in new products, increases sales and marketing, and continues a hiring binge.
During the conference call, HomeAway officials were especially exuberant about the company's acquisition of realholidays.com.au.
The acquisition added a bevy of listings to the HomeAway portfolio and the Australia site's lineup now has six times the number of listings as its closest competitor, Sharples says.