VRBO

VRBO is an online vacation rental marketplace founded in 1995^[1] by David and Lynn Clouse to help rent their ski condo.^[2] VRBO is an acronym standing for Vacation Rental by Owner, reflecting the purpose of the web-site to facilitate short-term rental of properties by their owner.

VRBO was acquired by HomeAway on November 13, 2006^[3] with 65,000 active listings^[4] and has since grown to have over 540,000 active listings^[5] and 12 million visits per month.^[6]

The rental by owner industry is one of the fastest growing markets with many families looking to get more bang for their buck. While VRBO was not the first to build a rental by owner web site they certainly have become one of the fastest growing and one of the largest. These days you will find several rental by owner web sites that allow you to rent directly from the owners rather than going thru a property managers who takes a high percentage each time they rent your home or condo out for you. The rental by owner industry started in the mid 90's with many web sites popping up with hundreds of homes, condo's and cottages to choose from. That numbers has exploded now where all of those web sites that started at that time now have thousands of rental listings to choose from. Today the rental by owner industry is a very real threat to the hotel industry with some of the rental by owner sites being worth as much as "ten billion dollars".

References