Vacasa is installing a suite of smart-home products to its portfolio
of more than 35,000 homes.
The vacation rental management platform, which went
public in early December at a valuation of $4.4 billion, is covering the
cost of the keyless locks, customized Wi-Fi routers and noise-monitoring systems
for each of its homes across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica and
Belize.
In March 2021, Vacasa
acquired Turnkey Vacation Rentals, which already had smart home technology
in its homes. These products have built on that system.
“Some of it was ported straight over, but a lot of it had to be tweaked in
the sense that we looked at what it would take to put this technology in 35,000
homes now and 100,000 homes a few years from now,” says John Banczak, formerly
CEO of Turnkey and now senior vice president of innovation at Vacasa.
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“We made some scalability improvements, we engineered in some greater
simplicity, easier installation technology and really took it from where Turnkey
had it and engineered it to a new level.”
The keyless locks are connected to Vacasa’s internal app and generate unique
door codes for each stay or service visit, with date and time limitations to
provide security.
For Wi-Fi, guests will be able to connected to the router through the Vacasa
guest app, without the need for a password. The system also continuously monitors
connectivity and alerts Vacasa of service disruptions.
The noise-monitoring system also automatically notifies the local Vacasa
team when it detects elevated decibel levels.
The smart-home products are already in about 13,000 homes
and will be installed in the remainder of the portfolio throughout this year.
Banczak says more technology solutions are being
developed.
“You will see us continue to move down that road of
combining local operations with the most advanced home package to emerge as a
unique player in this space,” he says.
“It’s everything from guest and owner apps and improving them
and making them more user-friendly and useful to taking a more holistic look at
the home and saying what can we do to make an owner feel like we are managing
it better, taking better care of it. ... Over the coming months and years I think
you will see some pretty cool stuff come out of our team.”