Vacasa founder Eric Breon — who resigned as CEO in 2020 and stepped down from the board in 2023 — is reentering the travel industry with a new startup, Fairly, where he will serve as CEO. The new vacation rental management company has come out of stealth mode with $10.1 million in pre-seed funding that the company said comes from internal investors.
"My reentry to the space was driven by my frustration as a vacation rental guest and owner," Breon said in an email to PhocusWire.
"Scale in the vacation rental industry has brought huge benefits in terms of yield management, home automation, and overall revenue performance, but large companies struggle to deliver exceptional guest and owner experiences."
Breon co-founded Vacasa in 2009 and the company went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in December 2021 with a $4.4 billion valuation. Since then, the company has struggled with homeowners pulling their properties from the company, two rounds of layoffs this year and revenue in the third quarter this year down 17% year over year.
Breon, who has a background in analytics and venture capital, said the existing vacation rental management model is “broken." Along with frustrations as a vacation rental owner and guest, Breon cited a PhocusWire article regarding differences in short-term rental reviews based on whether a property is individually- or professionally-managed as some of his motivation to launch Fairly.
"That's when things clicked: we needed to combine the hyperlocal care of individual caretakers with the benefits of large managers like yield management, multi-channel distribution, electronic access control and the like," Breon said.
While property managers generate more revenue, they often fail at delivering exceptional experiences, he said, noting that the average five-star rating for third-party managers on Airbnb sits around 4.62 - below the median review score.
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"At Fairly, we’re empowering homeowners and caretakers to deliver individualized care while we automate the back-office tasks. We’re retaining what’s great about individual caretakers, and we’re pairing that with a tech-stack that out-competes the big companies,” he said.
Homeowners working with Fairly receive support from a two person team of a caretaker — to help with operations and communications — and an advisor — who can share market knowledge and other expertise points to help owners navigate regulations.
“Running and maintaining a vacation home rental today can be extremely complicated: you either give up all control and pay high fees with a traditional property management company or try and do it yourself by piece-mealing together a few different tools. It doesn’t have to be this hard,” said Subechya Person, co-founder and chief product officer at Fairly, who formerly served as the vice president of product and design at Vacasa.
And the intended benefits extend beyond vacation rental owners and managers.
“We partner with exceptional housekeepers by giving them the tools they need to step into the caretaker role, expand their services and build their businesses,” Person said. “Real estate agents benefit from a new stream of income by partnering with Fairly to ensure owner satisfaction and property success."
Fairly's third co-founder is the former chief technology officer at Vacasa, Jeff Flitton.